“The Fate of Woman At Its Root”: Elizabeth Barrett’s A Drama of Exile and Jean Ingelow’s A Story of Doom

Abstract

From the moment she began writing A Drama of Exile, Elizabeth Barrett planned for her two-volume Poems to begin with that long dramatic poem. With the poem barely completed, she wrote to R. H. Horne on 20 December 1843: “it must take a first place in the book. … The object is the development of the peculiar anguish of Eve—the fate of woman at its root.” Eight months later, the book was in print and winning her praise in letters from Thomas Carlyle and Harriet Martineau. Clear evidence shows, however, that she knew the poem would not be liked widely, and its daunting presence as the first poem in the two-volume Poems—a placement on which she insisted—had nothing to do with calculations of popular success. On 1 October 1844, three months after the book appeared, she writes to Cornelius Matthews: “I am glad that I gave the name of ‘Poems’ to the work instead of admitting the ‘Drama of Exile’ into the title-page and increasing its responsibility; for one person who likes the Drama, ten like the other poems.”1