Elizabeth Barrett Browning Research Articles

Victorian Soul-Talk: Poetry, Democracy, and the Body Politic. Julia F. Saville. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Pp. xii+307.

<i>Victorian Soul-Talk: Poetry, Democracy, and the Body Politic</i>. Julia F. Saville. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Pp. xii+307.

Преодолевая границы : своеобразие проблематики и жанровой формы повести В. Вулф «Флаш»

The article considers the story of the English writer Virginia Woolf “Flush” (1933) as a kind of modernist experimental biography in which the conventions of traditional biography are parodied. The main attention is paid to the unusual choice of the hero of the biography, the Spaniel Flush, the beloved dog of Elizabeth Barrett-Browning, who gave Woolf the opportunity to ironize over “serious” biographies. It is reported that significant events in the life of the famous English poetess are shown through the eyes of her dog, on the one hand, limited by the biological characteristics of perception, on the other hand, free in its judgments. Attention is paid not only to the creative polemic of Woolf with limitations of the biographical genre, but also to how the problems of the position of women in society, also surrounded by a number of restrictions and prohibitions, are revealed in the story. An analysis of the episodes and the role of female characters demonstrates the writer’s attitude to the issue of a woman gaining freedom in society and in her own work. Two main lines of the story, related to overcoming the boundaries of both the biography genre and the restrictions that fetter a woman writer trying to realize her creative and life potential are revealed.

"The Dramatic Poet and the Unpoetic Multitudes": Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Allegorized Theatrical Commentary in Book IV of Aurora Leigh

"The Dramatic Poet and the Unpoetic Multitudes":Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Allegorized Theatrical Commentary in Book IV of Aurora Leigh Anna Williams (bio) In an introductory note to the published papers of Manchester University's 1970 Victorian theater symposium, editors Kenneth Richards and Peter Thomson encapsulate the current state of this critical field and accurately predict its future, stating, "It is still fairly respectable to know nothing about the nineteenth-century theatre, but it seems unlikely that it will be so for long."1 As they foresaw, the coming decades witnessed a resurgence of interest in the performances of the nineteenth-century stage—a justified reprisal that has invited the Victorians' own theatrical commentary back into the critical spotlight. In one such contemporary moment of theatrical criticism, Elizabeth Barrett (EBB) remarks on the current state of the "translation" of dramatic works for the Victorian stage in an 1842 letter to her confidante, the dramatist and fellow poet Mary Russell Mitford: In regard to the drama, I have been to the theatre—I have seen Shakespeare in London—but it was when I was a young child: and I admit to you willingly that in reading & taking pleasure from the written Drama, my ideas of it never enter the theatre from first to last. I have a notion,—that the theatre interprets between the dramatic poet and the unpoetic multitude,—& always where the poetry is high, desecrates it in translation.2 EBB's letter corroborates the commonly held critical belief—both contemporary and modern—that the early-to mid-nineteenth century was a dark age for the British theater. Implicit in this widely held opinion is an elitist hand-wringing over the inferiority of public taste that, as Michael Booth and others have noted, [End Page 309] was becoming increasingly democratized as Victorian playhouses selected and adapted works to please the growing numbers of lower-middle- and working-class theatergoers.3 Indeed, in this letter to Mitford and many others, EBB seems to argue against the very idea of the popular theater itself, stating that she has formed a notion that the "poetry" of written drama can never be fully realized in performance for the "unpoetic multitudes" and that "high" dramatic art is always lost in translation. EBB's letters between 1842 and Aurora Leigh's publication in 1856 reveal not only her friendships with dramatists such as Mitford, Richard Hengist Horne, and George Sand but also that she followed the London theater closely even after moving to Florence, both through this correspondence and through her following of the London newspapers.4 As she expressed in some of her earliest letters to husband-to-be and sometimes-playwright Robert Browning, she held the dramatic genre in very high regard. For example, she states on February 17, 1845, that she "look[s] to our old dramatists as to our Kings & princes in poetry."5 In this letter, as in the one to Mitford three years prior, EBB expresses both her familiarity with and adulation for the "old dramatists"—whom she notably does not call "playwrights" (as this term would allude to the staging of their works)—including chiefly Shakespeare. In this early correspondence, EBB also expresses in no uncertain terms her disdain for popular theater, admonishing Browning (albeit playfully) for "bearing to trust [his] noble works into the great mill of the 'rank, popular' playhouse, to be ground between the teeth of vulgar actors & actresses" (Barrett to Browning, 27 February 1845). In her next letter, from February 27, 1845, she clarifies that she does not mean to "blaspheme the Drama"—just that the contemporary theater "vulgarizes" the work of noble dramatists such as himself, as it has "no altar" and "the thymele . . . is replaced by the caprice of a popular actor." 6 Here again EBB alludes to and valorizes a bygone era of the stage (this time it is ancient Greece, which will prove significant in my argument) in order to condemn the contemporary theater and elevate written over performed drama. Significantly, later in this same note, she also shares with Browning that her "chief intention just now is in the writing of a sort of novel-poem"; it seems that at...

Transatlantic Abolitionist Discourse and the Body of Christ in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point”

Despite renewed interest in roles played by Christianity in the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (EBB), few scholars have discussed her treatment of the body of Christ—understood as both the figure of Christ and his body of followers—in her antislavery poem, “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point”. This article argues that “The Runaway Slave” reworks portrayals of the body of Christ in transatlantic abolitionist print culture. It examines the poem in its original context of publication in the 1848 issue of The Liberty Bell, the Boston-based antislavery annual. As EBB would have known from earlier issues of the annual that she received before writing her poem, its contributors—primarily though not exclusively privileged northern whites—represented themselves as messianic martyrs whose Christ-like suffering would liberate slaves. EBB’s poem challenges this self-glorifying rhetoric, in part by making a refrain out of words from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s well-known poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. This refrain indicates that the symbols used by Liberty Bell authors to portray themselves as messianic martyrs might, to those they labor to liberate, seem perversely bound up in slavery and the color binary used to justify it. “Runaway Slave” further suggests that the Liberty Bell’s messianic rhetoric, like the slave system itself, parodies Christ’s sacrifice of himself for the good of others. In both cases, wittingly or not, whites seek to turn the bodily agony of blacks to their benefit, whether ethical or economic. Stressing that such parodies of the crucifixion only perpetuate racial violence, the poem pursues what we might call a post-secular vision of Christ’s body, suggesting that people can through love act as members of Christ outside of any official church body. EBB’s poem nevertheless risks trading in the abuses it critiques—a risk, the material history of her poem indicates, of which she might have been aware.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Elizabeth Barrett Browning Beverly Taylor (bio) In volume 23, the latest in The Brownings’ Correspondence (Winfield, KS: Wedgestone Press, 2016), editors Philip Kelley, Scott Lewis, Edward Hagan, Joseph Phelan, and Rhian Williams have again produced an indispensable research tool with impeccable texts and rich explanatory notes, excerpts from related correspondence collected as Supporting Documents, extensive biographical sketches of correspondents Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Ruskin, and a treasure trove of reviews of works by both Brownings. Volume 23 includes letters written by and to the Brownings from July 1856 to January 1857, during which the principal literary event was the publication of Aurora Leigh. As usual, the collected letters read like an absorbing biography or novel. This volume begins with the Brownings in London, ensconced in John Kenyon’s home at 39 Devonshire Place in his absence, “rather afraid of moving our elbows for fear of breaking something” (p. 5). While worrying about Mr. Kenyon’s deteriorating health, her own father’s health, and storing books and furniture for Robert’s father and sister after their move to Paris, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (EBB) remains mostly preoccupied with finishing the manuscript of Aurora Leigh for the printers, editing the fourth edition of Poems (1856), and managing the multitude of invitations (many declined) asking the Brownings to meet writers, artists, and other prominent figures in London. The reception of Aurora Leigh commands greatest interest in the volume. EBB jokingly boasts that her brother George anticipates the poem will be more offensive than even Don Juan (p. 83), unfit for any girl to read, and she anticipates it will sell well, “all the more perhaps, for being so naughty” (p. 89). Anticipating a harsh review from Coventry Patmore, she refers to his “infamous doctrines” about women that make her, with Bessie Parkes and “the rest of us militant, foam with rage” (pp. 103–104). She speaks of serious concern with social issues such as workhouses, physical abuse of women, and the married woman’s property petition (p. 34) and expresses her high aspirations that Aurora Leigh, with its narration of Marian’s rape and illegitimate child, will “raise the spiritual above the natural” for readers (pp. 74–75). Expecting other negative reviews in the journals, she is initially surprised by the many positive assessments. To Robert’s sister Sarianna, EBB pertly observes that he says she is “delighted” when her work is “abused. And really things said on the other side whether in print or M.S. are too much sometimes for even one’s vanity! Such absurd extravagances!” (p. 219). Still, the “extravagances” expressed in [End Page 337] letters from friends and acquaintances were deeply gratifying: Ruskin (“the greatest poem in the English language,” p. 138), B. W. Procter (“a fine manly & original poem,—deep thoughted too,” p. 137), Robert Bulwer Lytton (“the solitary Epic of this age, … also a noble Epic,” p. 147), Dinah Mulock (“the completest Poem, if not one of the grandest books, that any woman ever wrote,” p. 159), Leigh Hunt (“a unique, wonderful, and immortal poem; astonishing for its combination of masculine power with feminine tenderness,” “the production of the greatest poetess the world ever saw,” p. 176). Fortified by such praise, EBB remained stoic and poised as she read the carping in some reviews, which criticized the poem for farfetched events, thin plot, “grossness,” overly frequent references to God, and inordinate length. As with other volumes in The Brownings’ Correspondence, inclusion of reviews of works by both Brownings is a major asset, and this volume reproduces more than a hundred pages of reviews of Aurora Leigh alone. Completing her work on Aurora Leigh in England in the autumn, EBB’s letters refer to the harmful effects of English weather on her health, fog that “seized [her] by the throat,” fostering a bad cough that keeps her from sleeping (pp. 96, 90). She also reports an episode of physical distress (being “out of sorts”) caused by a chemist’s mixing “my indispensable morphine … weaker than usual,” until her former chemist sent her “the right proportions, & I am myself & comfortable” now (p. 4). Letters written during her time in England manifest her deep pleasure in seeing her sisters...

An Unknown Exegete: Uncovering the Biblical Scholarship of Elizabeth Barrett Browning

The present essay provides a survey of a previously unexplored, formative period in the life of the famed Victorian English poet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (EBB). Her personal Bibles (Hebrew, LXX, and Greek New Testament), held in the Burke Library at Union Theological Seminary/Columbia University, have been discovered to contain Barrett’s own extensive handwritten notes. These notes demonstrate that EBB read extensively among the biblical exegetes and scholars of the day, many of whom influenced her reading of the text. This essay considers the life circumstances in which she devoted herself to these studies, an overview of her marginalia in these volumes, and some suggestions on how Browning’s biblical studies may have influenced her later poetic works.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Coventry Patmore, and Alfred Tennyson on Napoleon III: The Hero-Poet and Carlylean Heroics

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Coventry Patmore, and Alfred Tennyson on Napoleon III: The Hero-Poet and Carlylean Heroics Elizabeth Woodworth The Hero can be Poet, Prophet, King, Priest or what you will, according to the world he finds himself born into. I confess, I have no notion of a truly great man that could not be all sorts of men. The Poet who could merely sit on a chair, and compose stanzas, would never make a stanza worth much. He could not sing the Heroic Warrior, unless he himself were at least a Heroic warrior too. I fancy there is in him the Politician, the Thinker, Legislator, Philosopher;—in one or the other degree, he could have been, he is all these.1 Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes and Hero Worship and the Heroic in History Like the Hero-Poet that Carlyle describes, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (EBB) undertakes a heroic mission in the last volume of poems published in her lifetime, Poems before Congress (PBC),2 a volume supporting the Italian Risorgimento. In authoring these poems, knowing they would be controversial,3 she assumes the persona of a Hero-Poet and "Heroic warrior," who is also a "Politician … Thinker, Legislator, Philosopher." When PBC was published in 1860, EBB was at the height of her fame and unafraid of conflict, or of courting the ire of her readers, in the pursuit of justice and liberty, fervently supporting the cause she believed in. Carlyle had described Napoleon I in this way: "Napoleon had a sincerity. . . . [I]n Practice: he, as every man that can be great, or have victory in this world, sees, through all entanglements, the practical heart of the matter; drives straight towards that" (p. 303). Committed to staying informed on European politics, EBB regularly read periodicals and newspapers,4 and when it seemed time for her to act, she saw and drove straight toward the practical heart of the matter: she wrote poems not only in support of the Risorgimento, but also of Napoleon III's intervention in Italy. In writing the heroic warrior, she became one as well. [End Page 543] PBC begins with "Napoleon III in Italy," an ode to the French Emperor, a figure held in contempt and feared by many in England from the time of his coup d'état in 1852, and through (and beyond) his intervention in Italian affairs in 1859. Because the first poem in PBC is, at quick glance, a vigorous ode to the French Emperor, EBB was accused of hero worship (in this case and many others). While she was given to bold, blatant, even blind worship of heroes, it is crucial to remember that her motivation as a poet, and a person, was informed by her lifelong commitment to principles of liberty. From her early years until her death, she worshipped good causes, and she became a hero worshipper as part of the process of commitment.5 Whoever lent himself to the right cause might become worthy of her praise—despite other personal, professional, or political misdeeds. In this essay I want to reframe her political and poetical conflation of heroes and causes—the right causes with the heroes who enabled those causes to succeed—by reconsidering the longstanding critical vilification of her hero-worship within the context of Carlyle's notions of the heroic.6 Carlylean concepts of the hero had great importance in the Victorian period and, as I point out below, at least one of EBB's correspondents, Robert Bulwer Lytton, used Carlyle's principles both to praise and to criticize what she attempted in the 1860 volume. Comparing EBB's treatment of Napoleon III to that of Alfred Tennyson, the other most widely recognized poet in England at this time and Poet Laureate since 1850, provides another illuminating context for her work. Tennyson reacted to Napoleon III's coup in 1852 (as did Coventry Patmore—another prominent figure of the time) and to his intervention in Italy...

Prostitute rescue, rape, and poetic inspiration in elizabeth barrett browning's aurora leigh

Prostitute rescue, rape, and poetic inspiration in elizabeth barrett browning's aurora leigh

"Hardly Shall I Tell My Joys and Sorrows": Robert Browning's Engagement With Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Poetics

In 1845, when Robert Browning began his correspondence with Elizabeth Barrett (EBB), he was writing plays and dramatic monologues. He had at last developed his own, original style. However, the path he had taken was diametrically opposed to contemporary taste, which expected a lyrical poem to be the expression of the poet's personal emotions and thoughts. EBB wrote in this tradition, and in the preface to her critically acclaimed Poems of 1844, she had stressed her increasing commitment to the self-expressive mode.1 It was to voice his admiration for this collection that Browning wrote his first letter to her. While the courtship correspondence has long been recognized as the private locus for the couple's dialogue on their respective poetic styles, critics have failed to discern the pursuit by Browning of the same "dialogue" within a number of his own poems. The exception to this rule is his first publication after the marriage in 1846, Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day (1850), which is read as influenced by EBB's religious views.2 Attention to this text has tended to eclipse the relation between her poetry and Browning's next publication, Men and Women (1855). The purpose of this article is to consider three poems from this collection which are informed by the confrontation between Browning's commitment to impersonal poetry and EBB's self-expressive lyric: "One Word More," which is dedicated to her, and two other poems in Browning's own voice, "The Guardian-Angel" and "Old Pictures in Florence."3 By analyzing these poems in the light of exchanges from the correspondence, I will seek to show how Browning experiments with EBB's poetics, embedding indications for the alert reader of an ongoing review of his own poetic style and, ultimately, a refusal to adopt a mode that is uncongenial to his artistic genius. This refusal is paradoxically characterized by the effacement of the poet's self from the text even in poems in propria persona.4 It is my contention that in these poems Browning displays a greater awareness than in the correspondence of the problems which the concept of self-expressive art poses for him. [End Page 75] As Daniel Karlin remarks, it is clear from Browning's very first letter, with its equation of poet and poem in the phrase "I do, as I say, love these Books with all my heart—and I love you too," that he appreciated EBB's poems less as works of art than as pure expressions of personality.5 In his second letter, he defined her in terms which anticipate his concept of the self-expressive "subjective poet" in the 1852 "Essay on Shelley," whereas he described himself as an inferior, dramatic "objective poet" eager to emulate her example: For you do what I always wanted, hoped to do, and only seem now likely to do for the first time—you speak out, you,—I only make men & women speak,—give you truth broken into prismatic hues, and fear the pure white light, even if it is in me: but I am going to try. (January 13, 1845; Correspondence, 10:22) Browning assumes here that poetry can, at least in EBB's case, act as a quasi-transparent means of self-expression, while he considers himself as yet unable to reveal his self in his poetry: What I have printed gives no knowledge of me—it evidences abilities of various kinds, if you will,—and a dramatic sympathy with certain modifications of passion .. that I think: but I never have begun, even, what I hope I was born to begin and end, — "R.B. a poem." (February 11, 1845; Correspondence,10:69) He makes again the simplifying equation of poet and poem. This contrasts with the more complex notion of language as an obstacle to the articulation...

“In our own blood drenched the pen”: italy and sensibility in elizabeth barrett browning's last poems (1862)

“In our own blood drenched the pen”: italy and sensibility in elizabeth barrett browning's last poems (1862)

Traditions of Victorian Women's Autobiography: The Poetics and Politics of Life Writing by Linda H. Peterson (review)

in the limitationsof language, and his recognition that 'only through tryingto state the truth do we realize the impossibilityof doing so' (p. 39). The problem of the nature of language indeed is in many ways central, both in relation to Coleridge's prose style, his preference for winding sentences and obscurities,and in relation to his quest to 'isolate the pre-linguisticessence of subjectiveconsciousness' (p. I42). In his prose he seeksto evoke a sense of the sublime, but 'what he pursuesis in fact the verbalization of an intuition which is always beyond the grasp of language' (p. I65). His anxieties about language are reflected in his sustained interest in desynonymizing termsoften treatedas equivalent, and he has much to say about a number of these, includingenthusiasmand fanaticism,positivenessas distinguished from certainty, thinkingversus thought, and spontaneity, happiness, and pleasure. He also considers Coleridge's wrestlingswith topics such as mysticism, optimism, evolution, and individuality, and writes discriminatinglyon his negotiations with the ideas of Hartley, Priestley,Berkeley,and Schelling. The argumentof the book is entirelyabstract,but, if Coleridgepersistentlyvalues 'thinkingover thoughts', this is, in part at least, related to his continuing concern with practical issues. The book does not touch on such matters. Yet Coleridge's concern with religion begins in his I795 Lectures by discussingthe problem of evil and sin, and he was troubledby hisvivid senseof man as a 'viciousand discontented Animal'(The Collected Works of SamuelTaylorColeridge, Vol. 2. TheWatchman, ed. by Lewis Patton (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, I970), p. I32) in the context of the horrors of war, such as occurred in the barbarities of the suppression of the Royalist uprising in the Vendee, and of the slave trade. His reflections on the theories of evolution and on the possibility of the progression of human nature turned on his desire to establish a fundamental distinction between humans and animals, and this led him to attempt to constructa theory of life. Vallinsdeals with Coleridge'stheoriesin isolationfromthepracticalconcernsthatcontinuallyaffected his thinking, and thus tends to substantiate an image of the poet as a cloudy metaphysician,pursuingintuitionsbeyond the graspof language. UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, Los ANGELES R. A. FOAKES Traditions of Victorian Ifomen's Autobiography. ThePoetics andPoliticsofLifeWriting.By LINDAH. PETERSON. (Victorian Literature and Culture) Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia. I999. xiii + 256 pp. $38.50. It is apt indeed that Linda H. Peterson, in this cogent and lucidly written study, should quote Elizabeth BarrettBrowning's famous phrase, 'I look everywhere for grandmothersand see none', since her own book is so cruciallyconcerned with the searchfor literaryancestry.Appropriately,Petersonbegins by paying tributeto the pioneering work of the feminist critics who, over the last twenty years, have establishedlife writing by women as a new and vibrant field of study, while at the same time taking issue with Mary G. Mason's categorical statement, in 'Other Voice: Autobiographies of Women Writers'in Autobiography. EssaysTheoretical and Critical, ed. byJames Olney (Princeton,NJ:PrincetonUniversity Press, I980), that 'Nowhere in women's autobiographies do we find the patterns establishedby the two prototypicalmale autobiographers,Augustineand Rousseau'. Augustine'suse of a dramaticstructureof conversion,where the 'selfis presentedas the stage for a battle of opposing forces and where a climactic victory for one force - spiritdefeating flesh- completes the dramaof the self,'is, accordingto Mason, essentiallyalien to women's self-conception; so, too, is Rousseau's 'unfolding self-discoverywhere the characters and events are little more than aspects of the author's evolving consciousness.' (p. 5). in the limitationsof language, and his recognition that 'only through tryingto state the truth do we realize the impossibilityof doing so' (p. 39). The problem of the nature of language indeed is in many ways central, both in relation to Coleridge's prose style, his preference for winding sentences and obscurities,and in relation to his quest to 'isolate the pre-linguisticessence of subjectiveconsciousness' (p. I42). In his prose he seeksto evoke a sense of the sublime, but 'what he pursuesis in fact the verbalization of an intuition which is always beyond the grasp of language' (p. I65). His anxieties about language are reflected in his sustained interest in desynonymizing termsoften treatedas equivalent, and he has much to say about a number of these, includingenthusiasmand fanaticism,positivenessas distinguished from certainty, thinkingversus thought, and...

"In Silence Like to Death": Elizabeth Barrett's Sonnet Turn

And then there was, suddenly entire; she held in her hands, beautiful and reasonable, clear and complete, the essence sucked out of and held rounded here-- the sonnet. --Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1) ALTHOUGH ELIZABETH BARRETT BEGAN PUBLISHING POETRY AS EARLY AS 1820 she did not print her first three sonnets until 1838. Her 1844 collection, on the other hand, included 28 sonnets, and in 1850 she printed 50 sonnets. As will demonstrate, progressive turn toward the sonnet--a highly compressed, constrained form-reflects Barrett's growing investment in both as inhibitor and sustainer of her art. Devastated by speechlessness after her brother drowned in 1840, convinced that this long silence, embracing the most afflictive time of [her] whole life could be neither poetically verbalized nor transcended, she began to question the redemptive model of lyric poetry to which she had previously subscribed. (2) The sonnet's brevity and reticence lent slow arm of sweet compression to Barrett's work, providing her with a formal metaphor for and (3) With her turn to the sonnet in 1844, Barrett addressed both her unspeakable sadness and also the absence of women's voices in the British lyric tradition. To do so, she responded to the sonnet tradition primarily in the context of two approaches: the amatory model according to which poets drew from the absence or unattainability of a beloved addressee a source of lyrical potency, and, alternatively, the Wordsworthian version (itself a recasting of Milton), whereby the unresponsiveness of nature or of a contemplated other is converted into the mind 's encounter with the sublime. (4) Becoming for her, as did for almost every major poet of the nineteenth century, a synecdoche for lyric poetry in general, the sonnet thus put Barrett into dialogue with her most prolific Romantic precursor in the field--a man who, perhaps not uncoincidentally, had lost his own brother to drowning. (5) The result was a collision between poetic modes. Rather than adopting Wordsworth's revisionary sonnet poetics as a means of resolving her preoccupation with an unutterable grief, Barrett put forth a competing model that re-evaluated the Wordsworthian sublime. Unlike Wordsworth, Barrett enlisted a non-recuperative version of negativity as a framework for her sonnets, and as a key to her understanding of lyric poetry in general. (6) By critiquing Wordsworth, Barrett wrote herself into the male lyric tradition; in so doing, she confronted the silence of [her] womanhood--a ultimately interchangeable, will argue, both with her feminized grief and with the generative limits of poetry itself (Sonnet XIII , 1. 9). After the death of Barrett's brother, her view of lyric poetry was radically called into question. (7) Her letters from period chart, as Angela Leighton has remarked, how heavy a burden of feeling the idea of carries. (8) Eleven years after the incident, Barrett wrote, There is only event in my which never loses its bitterness; which comes back on me like a retreating wave, going and coming again, which was and is my grief. (9) Explaining that one stroke ended [her] youth, Barrett entreated her correspondents to say no more, to avoid speaking of her grief: Do not speak of that, dear Mr. Home; and for the rest, you see that there is nothing to say. 'It is a blank, my lord.' (10) Barrett's remarkable inability to verbalize her grief (she wrote to Mary Russell Mitford, I cannot write of these things--you see cannot--I cannot write or speak--I never have spoken--not word--not to Papa--never named that name anymore) creates a that appears to be, in Leighton's words, imaginatively unredeemable. (11) Leighton speculates, It is perhaps a characteristic of the female imagination to desire that which is an abdication of all poetic power, rather than a culmination of it (p. …

Enlarging the Heart: L. E. L.'s “The Improvisatrice,” Hemans's “Properzia Rossi,” and Barrett Browning'sAurora Leigh

Elizabeth barrett browning's relation to her female predecessors was complex, conflicted, and rewarding. InAurora Leighwe see both the heroine and her creator grow from poets who attempt to prove themselves in traditionally masculine terms, into poets who engage with a feminine tradition of sentimental verse which they resist and criticize but nevertheless find of essential value. Only by viewing the poem against the backdrop of the sentimental tradition can we fully appreciate Barrett Browning's challenge to the cult of privacy and the doctrine of separate spheres, her dual emphasis on poetry as at once a job requiring doggedness and a vocation requiring wide social and religious vision, and, finally, her sense of the connection between herself and her female predecessors. Such poets as Felicia Hemans and L. E. L. (Letitia Elizabeth Landon) stand in a relation to Barrett Browning which resembles the unsentimental aunt's relation to Aurora in Book 1 ofAurora Leigh: there is more conflict than sympathy in the relationship; the older woman represents a version of femininity which the younger must at all costs resist; and yet the older woman leaves the younger a legacy which is both narrow and enabling, an essential basis for the young poet's future achievement.