Elizabeth Barrett Browning

by Marjorie Stone

Drawing on previously neglected manuscripts, this new study deconstructs the gender and genre ideologies obscuring the achievement of England's first major woman poet. Marjorie Stone resituates Elizabeth Barrett Browning in her cultural context, demonstrating her prominence in nineteenth-century literary history and Victorian feminist discourse. Close readings reveal the allusive intertextuality of Barrett Browning's works, her revisions of the Romantics, her innovations in a range of genres and her creation of emancipatory strategies for the woman writer.

268 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1995

Reviews

[Sheryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is not a biography so much as an analysis of Barrett Browning's works, primarily Aurora Leigh, while placing them in a historic context that has been much muddled and deliberately falsified. Elizabeth Barrett Browning was candidate for Poet Laureate in 1850 and in her own day considered a superior poet to her husband. Her untimely death was at the time privately celebrated by male poets determined to believe that women could not write poetry; within a few decades that celebration was public. By the turn of the century, and despite the fact that she achieved earlier and greater success than he did, Barrett Browning was well on her way to being reduced to a footnote in her husband's biography.

Stone provides the evidence for the idea that Barrett Browning was considered the better poet and also traces how various authors deliberately and publicly changed her history, while mentioning (and, in the case of GK Chesterton, extensively quoting) the few who bucked that trend. When I read the book quoted, I'd thought Chesterton gave Barrett Browning rather short shrift, myself; seeing his comments in the context of the time reconciles me to GKC's apparent slight somewhat.

Speaking as someone who adores Aurora Leigh, who was never a big fan of Sonnets from the Portuguese, and who read this book hoping for a deeper understanding of the former, I loved it. I suspect any fan of Barrett Browning's poetry who prefers Aurora to Sonnets probably will enjoy it (or at least parts of it) as well, unless they pick it up wanting a straight-up biography or something else it isn't. Not sure what huge fans of Sonnets, and of the romantic story of Elizabeth and Robert's romance (at least as often told) will think of it.