Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
-
Standard Name: Browning, Elizabeth Barrett
Birth Name: Elizabeth Barrett Moulton Barrett
Nickname: Ba
Pseudonym: EBB
Married Name: Elizabeth Barrett Moulton Browning
Used Form: E. B. Barrett
Used Form: Elizabeth B. Barrett
Used Form: Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
Used Form: E.B.B.
Used Form: E. B. B.
EBB
was recognized in her lifetime as one of the most important poets of mid-Victorian Britain. She wrote a significant corpus of poetry which ranges from the lyric through the closet drama or dramatic lyric and the dramatic monologue to the epic, as well as letters and criticism. For much of the twentieth century, interest in her focused on her romantic life-story, her letters, and Sonnets from the Portuguese. Late in the century, critical interest in her epic female künstlerroman or verse novel Aurora Leigh and her other political poetry—in which she took up the causes of working-class children, the abolition of slavery, women's issues, and the Italian Risorgimento—revived. She is again considered one of the leading and most influential voices of her day.
Maria Jane Jewsbury
had already begun the idealisation of FH
in 1830 with her portrait of Egeria in The History of a Nonchalant: a muse, a grace, a variable child, a dependent woman—the Italy...
Literary responses
Jean Ingelow
Arthur Munby
, meeting JI
in early 1864, pronounced what became a commonly-held view, that she was second only to Mrs Browning
as a poetess. An unsuccessful poet himself, he was relieved of the...
Literary responses
Una Marson
A review in the Jamaica Times described UM
as a fine talent
qtd. in
Jarrett-Macauley, Delia. The Life of Una Marson, 1905-65. Manchester University Press, 1998.
41
and likened one of her sonnets, Vows, to those of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
.
Jarrett-Macauley, Delia. The Life of Una Marson, 1905-65. Manchester University Press, 1998.
41
Literary responses
Camilla Crosland
CC
enjoyed moderate success during her life. Her writings earned her a modest income (in the 1840s it was about fifty pounds a year) and the critics were generally complimentary.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
A review in the Morning...
Literary responses
Frances Trollope
Response to Michael Armstrong was strong, both among readers who accepted FT
's representation of child labour and among those who rejected her descriptions as too explicit. Among the series of Factory Acts passed this...
Literary responses
Felicia Hemans
FH
remained continuously in print throughout the Victorian period, but her critical reputation and popularity waned before its close and died with modernism. She lingered on in popular memory as the author of popular recitation...
Literary responses
Elizabeth Gaskell
Around the time of Ruth's appearance, Swedish novelist and feminist Fredrika Bremer
(who was probably introduced to EG
by William
and Mary Howitt
) wrote: Dear Elizabeth, dear sister in spirit, if I may...
Literary responses
Fanny Kemble
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
thought that Kemble's poetry was inelastic . . . unpliant to her age.
qtd. in
Adey, Lionel, editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 32. Gale Research, 1984.
The Athenæum pronounced in fairly sympathetic tones that this volume bore a pathetic and direct reference upon the position and fortunes of its writer, alluding to the bereavements enforced by inexorable laws that denied Norton...
Literary responses
Emily Brontë
This bowdlerized version of EB
's novel and her poetry circulated widely and received many reviews. H. F. Chorley
in the Athenæum pronounced the re-publication of the two novels an illustration of English female genius...
Literary responses
Harriet Martineau
Mary Russell Mitford
wrote disapprovingly of HM
's claims: I see no good in these experiments.
Mitford, Mary Russell. The Life of Mary Russell Mitford: Told by Herself in Letters To Her Friends. Editor L’Estrange, Alfred Guy Kingham, Harper and Brothers, 1870, 2 vols.
2: 281
Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna
's pamphlet Mesmerism: A Letter to Miss Martineau, argued that if the account...
Literary responses
Augusta Webster
Reviews were in general not very good; at least one reviewer liked Lota best..
Rigg, Patricia. Julia Augusta Webster: Victorian Aestheticism and the Woman Writer. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009.
102, 119
A Saturday Review critic praised Webster's analytic power of sufficient originality,
Webster, Augusta. “Appendix B: Contemporary Reviews”. Portraits and Other Poems, edited by Christine Sutphin, Broadview, 2000, pp. 403-23.
410
while the Leader (beginning a trend) praised...
Literary responses
Harriet Hamilton King
Eric Robertson
in English Poetesses, 1883, suggested that HHK
's writings excelled those of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
on the same topic in their truth and spontaneity.
Thesing, William B., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 199. Gale Research, 1999.
The Athenæum reviewer predicted a career of continued success for DG
: her present is full of promise, her future full of hope. . . . Let her only get more experience into fewer words...
