Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861)
Author of Sonnets from the Portuguese
About the Author
Elizabeth Barrett was born in Coxhoe Hall, Durham, England, in 1806. Most of her childhood was spent on her father's estate, reading the classics and writing poetry. An injury to her spine when she was fifteen, the shock of her brother's death by drowning in 1840 and an ogre-like father made her show more life dark. But she read and wrote, and no little volume of verse ever produced a richer return than her Poems of 1844. Robert Browning read the poems, liked them, and came to her rescue like Prince Charming in the fairy story. Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning were married on September 12, 1846. Barrett Browning's enduring fame has rested on two works-Poems (1850), containing Sonnets from the Portuguese, and Aurora Leigh (1857). The former is a celebration of woman as man's other half and the latter is a celebration of woman's potential to stand on her own. During the Edwardian and later periods, it was Sonnets from the Portuguese that embodied Barrett Browning. Since the rise of feminism, it has been Aurora Leigh. More recently, a third side of Barrett Browning has been revealed: the incisive critical and political commentator, seen in her letters. Elizabeth Barrett Browning died in Florence, Italy, in 1861. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Disambiguation Notice:
Officially, her given names were "Elizabeth Barrett", and her family name "Moulton Barrett", but the Moulton part was rarely used. Before her marriage (Sept. 1846) she published as "Elizabeth Barrett Barrett; subsequently as "Elizabeth Barrett Browning".
Image credit: Courtesy of the NYPL Digital Gallery (image use requires permission from the New York Public Library)
Series
Works by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
The Collected Poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Wordsworth Poetry Library) (2015) 69 copies, 1 review
Sonnets from the Portuguese and other treasured poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1967) — Author — 66 copies, 1 review
The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barret Barrett 1845-1846 vol I (1899) (2005) — Author; Author — 49 copies
Mrs. Browning Poems: The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barret Browning Complete in One Volume from the 12th London Edition (1900) 43 copies
How Do I Love Thee? the Love Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett (1969) 16 copies, 1 review
Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Letters to Mrs. David Ogilvy, 1849-1861, with recollections by Mrs. Ogilvy (1973) 14 copies, 1 review
The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, 1845-1846, with Portraits and Facsimiles, in Two Volumes, Volume II (2005) — Author; Author — 14 copies, 1 review
Life, letters and essays of Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Volume 1. Letters of Elizabeth Barret Browning addressed to Richard Hengist Horne (1999) 10 copies
Twenty-two unpublished letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning addressed to Henrietta and Arabella Moulton-Barrett (1971) 7 copies
Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Selected Writings (21st-Century Oxford Authors) (2018) — Author — 6 copies
Invisible Friends: The Correspondence of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Benjamin Robert Haydon, 1842-1845 (Rollins Fund) (1972) 6 copies
ELIZABETH BARRETT TO MISS MITFORD: LETTERS OF ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING TO MARY RUSSELL MITFORD. (1954) 6 copies
Women of letters : selected letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning & Mary Russell Mitford (1987) 5 copies
A selection from Mrs. Browning's poems; (Macmillan's pocket American and English classics) (2011) 5 copies
Sonnets 4 copies
Last poems 4 copies
Poetical Works (5 vols.) 3 copies
Poems, by E.B. Barrett 3 copies
Browning — Author — 3 copies
Poems by E B Browning 2 copies
Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Complete) from the Twelfth London Edition (1883) 2 copies
The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Complete in One Volume from the Last London Edition (Florence Edition) (1870) 2 copies
poems 2 copies
Sonnet 43 2 copies
Poetical Works of Mrs. Browning 2 copies
The poetical works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, complete Volume 1; With a memoir ... (2012) 1 copy
Let Me Count The Ways — Author — 1 copy
To George Sand (Desire) 1 copy
Poetical Works, The 1 copy
Poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Selected with an introduction by Samuel J. Looker (Crown Classics.) (1948) 1 copy
Rhyme Of The Duchess May. 1 copy
Mrs. Browning 1 copy
Mrs. Browning's Poems, Vol 3 1 copy
Mrs. Browning's Poems, Vol 2 1 copy
Mrs. Browning's Poems, Vol 1 1 copy
Mrs. browning's poems vol IV 1 copy
Lady Geraldine's Courtship and Other Poems [The Masterpiece Library] The Penny Poets VIII (1900) 1 copy
Poems - Volume IV 1 copy
Sonetti Dal Portochese 1 copy
The Cry of the Children 1 copy
The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, with Prefatory Memoir, including "Aurora Leigh" (1903) 1 copy
Poems of E. Browning — Author — 1 copy
John Brown's Body 1 copy
Browning poetry 1 copy
Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning Complete (From the Twelfth London Edition) (1889) 1 copy
50 Greatest Poems 1 copy
EBB ( PORT ) 1 copy
Poems by Mrs. Browning 1 copy
The poetical works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning complete in one volume by Browning, Elizabeth Barrett (1879) 1 copy
Florentine friends : the letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning to Isa Blagden, 1850-1861 (2009) 1 copy
Sonnets From The Portguese 1 copy
A Musical Instrument 1 copy
Poems by E. B. Browning and Selections from the Poetical Works of Robert Browning. Two Volume Set. (1896) — Author — 1 copy
The Lady's Yes 1 copy
Mrs. Brownings's Poems 1 copy
Aurora Leigh Book 5-9 1 copy
Aurora Leigh Book 1-4 1 copy
Associated Works
The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms (2000) — Contributor — 1,464 copies, 9 reviews
The Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer Through Robert Frost (2004) — Contributor — 1,242 copies, 3 reviews
Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama (1995) — Contributor, some editions — 1,011 copies, 7 reviews
The Assassin's Cloak: An Anthology of the World's Greatest Diarists (2000) — Contributor, some editions — 623 copies, 9 reviews
The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 4th Edition, Volume 2 (1979) — Contributor — 269 copies, 1 review
Wise Women: Over Two Thousand Years of Spiritual Writing by Women (1996) — Contributor — 228 copies, 1 review
Poems Between Women: Four Centuries of Love, Romantic Friendship, and Desire (1997) — Contributor — 96 copies, 1 review
Gentlemen, Scholars and Scoundrels: A Treasury of the Best of Harper's Magazine from 1850 to the Present (1972) — Contributor — 62 copies
Out of the Best Books: An Anthology of Literature, Vol. 2: Love, Marriage, and the Family (1966) — Contributor — 36 copies
Out of the Best Books: An Anthology of Literature, Vol. 3: Intelligent Family Living (1967) — Contributor — 34 copies
Edexcel Poetry Anthology for Advanced subsidiary and advanced GCE examinations in English Literature (2000) — Contributor, some editions — 6 copies
Love & Marriage — Contributor — 3 copies
The Brownings for the young — Contributor — 2 copies
BBC Proms 2019 : Prom 39 : Elgar, Errollyn Wallen, Mendelssohn and Mussorgsky [sound recording] (2019) — Text — 1 copy
BBC Proms 2019 : Prom 39 : Elgar, Errollyn Wallen, Mendelssohn and Mussorgsky [programme] (2019) — Text — 1 copy
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Legal name
- Browning, Elizabeth Barrett
- Other names
- Barrett, Elizabeth Barrett
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett - Birthdate
- 1806-03-06
- Date of death
- 1861-06-29
- Gender
- female
- Occupations
- poet
writer
reviewer
translator - Relationships
- Browning, Robert (husband)
Browning, Robert Wiedemann Barrett (son)
Mitford, Mary Russell (friend)
Moulton Barrett, Edward (father) - Short biography
- The love story of Elizabeth Barrett, one of the most prominent poets of the Victorian era from a young age, and the poet and playwright Robert Browning, has itself inspired many works of fiction and biography. Their courtship had to be conducted in secret as her domineering father did not want his children to marry. After much planning, in 1846 the couple married in a private ceremony in London and then eloped to Paris. They went on to Italy, which became their home almost continuously until Elizabeth's death. In 1849, at the age of 43, between four miscarriages, she gave birth to a son, Robert Wiedemann Barrett Browning, whom they called Pen.
- Nationality
- UK
- Birthplace
- Coxhoe Hall, County Durham, England
- Places of residence
- Great Malvern, Worcestershire, England, UK
Durham, England, UK (Coxhoe Hall ∙ birth)
Florence, Italy
Sidmouth, England, UK
London, England, UK
Torquay, Devon, England, UK - Place of death
- Florence, Italy
- Burial location
- English Cemetery, Florence, Italy
- Map Location
- England, UK
- Disambiguation notice
- Officially, her given names were "Elizabeth Barrett", and her family name "Moulton Barrett", but the Moulton part was rarely used. Before her marriage (Sept. 1846) she published as "Elizabeth Barrett Barrett; subsequently as "Elizabeth Barrett Browning".
Members
Reviews
I had not expected this collection of love poems to be so melancholic. Although a degree of self-doubt and uncertainty goes along with any lover's thoughts, the tone here is of such low self-esteem, such self-recrimination that it strikes me that the poet was suffering from depression. But through the darkness, there are sparks of hope, that maybe love will come, will be true and will rescue.
In the end, the poet is redeemed and transformed by love, but it seems to have been a close-run show more thing.
There's such beautiful imagery in every poem that it's almost impossible to select one out above the others, but I particularly like Sonnet V:
I lift my heavy heart up solemnly,
As one Electra her sepulchral urn,
And, looking in thine eyes, I overturn
The ashes at thy feet. Behold and see
What a great heap of grief lay hid in me,
And how the red wild sparkles dimly burn
Through the ashen greyness. If thy foot in scorn
Could tread them out to darkness utterly,
It might be well perhaps. But if instead
Thou wait beside me for the wind to blow
The grey dust up,...those laurels on thine head,
O my Belovëd, will not shield thee so,
That none of all the fires shall scorch and shred
The hair beneath. Stand further off then! go! show less
In the end, the poet is redeemed and transformed by love, but it seems to have been a close-run show more thing.
There's such beautiful imagery in every poem that it's almost impossible to select one out above the others, but I particularly like Sonnet V:
I lift my heavy heart up solemnly,
As one Electra her sepulchral urn,
And, looking in thine eyes, I overturn
The ashes at thy feet. Behold and see
What a great heap of grief lay hid in me,
And how the red wild sparkles dimly burn
Through the ashen greyness. If thy foot in scorn
Could tread them out to darkness utterly,
It might be well perhaps. But if instead
Thou wait beside me for the wind to blow
The grey dust up,...those laurels on thine head,
O my Belovëd, will not shield thee so,
That none of all the fires shall scorch and shred
The hair beneath. Stand further off then! go! show less
one of, if not the sole, best poetry collections i’ve ever read. ms. barrett browning poured her soul into each one of these sonnets and i listened like a child captivated by an encapsulating bedtime story from their parents. every word she wrote had my heart in shambles.
painfully relatable and heartbreakingly honest, she tells her lover of her feelings for him, and of her feelings for his feelings for her. does that make sense?
easiest 5 star read of the year so far. easiest 5 stars pretty show more much ever. from the first sonnet i KNEW this collection deserved 5 shiny stars because it touched my heart and my soul unlike nearly anything i’ve ever read. ms. barrett browning was a genius. a goddess among men. show less
painfully relatable and heartbreakingly honest, she tells her lover of her feelings for him, and of her feelings for his feelings for her. does that make sense?
easiest 5 star read of the year so far. easiest 5 stars pretty show more much ever. from the first sonnet i KNEW this collection deserved 5 shiny stars because it touched my heart and my soul unlike nearly anything i’ve ever read. ms. barrett browning was a genius. a goddess among men. show less
This is one of those cases where it really does pay to go back to the primary source. As Cole Porter put it, in a rather different context, "Let the poets talk of love". Forget The Barretts of Wimpole Street; put Possession, Flush: a biography and Lady's Maid on one side for the moment, and enjoy what is in essence a real-life epistolary novel. Unlike most collections of letters, there is a clear storyline here: a classic narrative arc of romantic comedy starting with first contact in show more January 1845, passing from friendship to love through the overcoming of difficulties, and ending 20 months later with — well, you know how it ends, but someone will probably shoot me if I actually say it...
The TV version of The Barretts of Wimpole Street put me off having anything to do with Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning for about 20 years: you might expect these letters to reinforce the idea of RB and EBB as a romantic cliché, but they don't: this isn't about two star-struck young lovers, nor is it about a sofa-bound princess being rescued by a fearless hero from the dragon guarding her W1 ivory tower. It's an engaging, vivid, and surprisingly often funny correspondence between superb letter-writers.
It is a bit of an epic: over the 20 months they wrote about 300 letters each, comfortably filling two 500-page volumes. The split between the volumes is in March 1846, giving some idea of how much the correspondence hotted up in the last few months. They also met at 50 Wimpole Street 91 times (RB kept score): we don't know what was said or done on those occasions, except for a few subsequent references in the letters (notably the famous one where Flush barked and had to be put out of the room).
The core of the correspondence reveals two mature, articulate, highly-intelligent and well-educated people, both happily single and with the best of reasons for remaining so, expressing their puzzlement, joy and dismay at the unexpected shared discovery that they want to spend the rest of their lives together, and debating about what it all means. The raw material that would be refined and distilled into the "Sonnets from the Portuguese". But there's also a very interesting surface level of everyday literary gossip: RB was a friend of the (poetry-hating) Carlyles, and was forever being charmed out of his rustic seclusion in the depths of the Surrey countryside (New Cross!) to go and dine with people like Dickens, Thackeray and Tennyson; EBB was in correspondence with people like Mary Russell Mitford, Harriet Martineau and Edgar Allan Poe, and remained surprisingly in touch with the London scene for someone who had scarcely left her room in five years. And there's a constant strain of professional discussion and collaboration: they are forever exchanging manuscripts, proofs, books, reviews, etc. EBB is the most active partner in this: while keeping rather quiet about her own work-in-progress, she advises RB on the plays he is working on ("Luria" and "A Soul's Tragedy") and corrects the proofs for him; she lobbies with her US correspondents to promote RB's work there.
There's perhaps a bit less than we might have liked about everyday domestic life. EBB is keen to tell RB about her little excursions as an index of her improving health. In 1845 it's still a red-letter day when she has herself carried down to the drawing room for half an hour, but by the summer of 1846 she's regularly walking to the post-office, going out for drives in the carriage with her sisters, and even paying little visits to her old Creole nanny and to her mentor in Greek studies, H.S. Boyd. But we don't hear very much about the inner life of 50 Wimpole Street. The dog Flush gets mentioned two or three times as often as her brothers and sisters, and maybe ten times as often as her maid Wilson — Virginia Woolf evidently did well to get in ahead of Margaret Forster. RB tells EBB almost nothing about his home life: we only know about his parents and sister because EBB asks after them, and even his beloved garden only gets very occasional mentions. Again, we mostly hear about it because EBB asks about it or thanks him for the lovely flowers.
There's a similar pattern with their pasts: EBB quite often uses incidents from her early life to illustrate a point about her current emotional state. In one letter she tells RB about her feelings on the the death of her brother Edward ("Bro") in a boating accident in 1840, something she says she hasn't felt able to talk about with anyone before. RB generally talks about his emotions and feelings in the abstract, or illustrates them with little fables: as in his poetry, he seems to have a problem with speaking directly in his own voice. It almost feels as though "R the lover of Ba" is another of his literary personae, which will start to crumble if it's connected too closely with the historical Robert Browning. It's notable that he starts calling EBB by her pet name Ba quite early on (and explicitly distinguishes Ba from "Miss Barrett the poet"), but EBB only starts to call him Robert in the summer of 1846. Characteristically, he never had a pet name at home. Also characteristic is that he knows nothing about his own father's Caribbean plantation background until about the same time.
As far as the actual "story" goes, there are essentially two "obstacles": firstly EBB's health and secondly Mr Barrett's unreasonable, implacable and indiscriminate opposition to any of his children marrying — even if "a prince of Eldorado should come, with a pedigree of lineal descent from some signory in the moon in one hand, and a ticket of good-behaviour from the nearest Independent chapel in the other"...
Books have been written on the question of what precisely was wrong with EBB, and it's not worth going into here. All that matters is that the friendship with RB started at a point where EBB had effectively withdrawn from the world to the extent that it was commonly reported that she was a permanent invalid. RB is astonished on one of his first visits to see her get up and walk across the room to get a book. After meeting RB, her health and/or her readiness to face the world get steadily stronger, and marriage no longer seems totally out of the question.
EBB was nearly 40 and had enough money of her own (an inheritance from a favourite uncle) to be able to defy her father if necessary, but her concern not to put her less-independent siblings in a difficult position meant that it was necessary to keep the friendship with RB quiet as long as possible. Both of them were obviously also a bit reluctant to pressure the other into taking a decisive step, so they carry on for a frustratingly long time consulting steamer timetables and agonising about which of EBB's friends and acquaintances might have caught on, constantly rescheduling meetings to avoid anyone working out how often they see each other. Of course, everyone at Wimpole Street except the master of the house must have known what was going on, but no-one was directly told that there was an engagement. Obviously, all the servants were too scared of Mr Barrett, and all the siblings too concerned for their own prospects of clandestine romance, for anyone to spill the beans. All the same, for the last couple of months the reader is likely to be sitting there screaming at them to get on with it and sign up for a marriage licence.
This perhaps isn't a book to recommend to a teenage romantic: the passion is certainly there, but might be rather too abstract and cerebral for anyone under thirty. On the other hand, if you're addicted to all things Victorian, this is what you should have on your bedside table — next to your copy of Sonnets from the Portuguese.
(Note: I read volume 1 in the Project Gutenberg text; volume 2 hasn't been Gutenberged yet, so I downloaded the PDF facsimile from archive.org and read it on an Ipad.) show less
The TV version of The Barretts of Wimpole Street put me off having anything to do with Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning for about 20 years: you might expect these letters to reinforce the idea of RB and EBB as a romantic cliché, but they don't: this isn't about two star-struck young lovers, nor is it about a sofa-bound princess being rescued by a fearless hero from the dragon guarding her W1 ivory tower. It's an engaging, vivid, and surprisingly often funny correspondence between superb letter-writers.
It is a bit of an epic: over the 20 months they wrote about 300 letters each, comfortably filling two 500-page volumes. The split between the volumes is in March 1846, giving some idea of how much the correspondence hotted up in the last few months. They also met at 50 Wimpole Street 91 times (RB kept score): we don't know what was said or done on those occasions, except for a few subsequent references in the letters (notably the famous one where Flush barked and had to be put out of the room).
The core of the correspondence reveals two mature, articulate, highly-intelligent and well-educated people, both happily single and with the best of reasons for remaining so, expressing their puzzlement, joy and dismay at the unexpected shared discovery that they want to spend the rest of their lives together, and debating about what it all means. The raw material that would be refined and distilled into the "Sonnets from the Portuguese". But there's also a very interesting surface level of everyday literary gossip: RB was a friend of the (poetry-hating) Carlyles, and was forever being charmed out of his rustic seclusion in the depths of the Surrey countryside (New Cross!) to go and dine with people like Dickens, Thackeray and Tennyson; EBB was in correspondence with people like Mary Russell Mitford, Harriet Martineau and Edgar Allan Poe, and remained surprisingly in touch with the London scene for someone who had scarcely left her room in five years. And there's a constant strain of professional discussion and collaboration: they are forever exchanging manuscripts, proofs, books, reviews, etc. EBB is the most active partner in this: while keeping rather quiet about her own work-in-progress, she advises RB on the plays he is working on ("Luria" and "A Soul's Tragedy") and corrects the proofs for him; she lobbies with her US correspondents to promote RB's work there.
There's perhaps a bit less than we might have liked about everyday domestic life. EBB is keen to tell RB about her little excursions as an index of her improving health. In 1845 it's still a red-letter day when she has herself carried down to the drawing room for half an hour, but by the summer of 1846 she's regularly walking to the post-office, going out for drives in the carriage with her sisters, and even paying little visits to her old Creole nanny and to her mentor in Greek studies, H.S. Boyd. But we don't hear very much about the inner life of 50 Wimpole Street. The dog Flush gets mentioned two or three times as often as her brothers and sisters, and maybe ten times as often as her maid Wilson — Virginia Woolf evidently did well to get in ahead of Margaret Forster. RB tells EBB almost nothing about his home life: we only know about his parents and sister because EBB asks after them, and even his beloved garden only gets very occasional mentions. Again, we mostly hear about it because EBB asks about it or thanks him for the lovely flowers.
There's a similar pattern with their pasts: EBB quite often uses incidents from her early life to illustrate a point about her current emotional state. In one letter she tells RB about her feelings on the the death of her brother Edward ("Bro") in a boating accident in 1840, something she says she hasn't felt able to talk about with anyone before. RB generally talks about his emotions and feelings in the abstract, or illustrates them with little fables: as in his poetry, he seems to have a problem with speaking directly in his own voice. It almost feels as though "R the lover of Ba" is another of his literary personae, which will start to crumble if it's connected too closely with the historical Robert Browning. It's notable that he starts calling EBB by her pet name Ba quite early on (and explicitly distinguishes Ba from "Miss Barrett the poet"), but EBB only starts to call him Robert in the summer of 1846. Characteristically, he never had a pet name at home. Also characteristic is that he knows nothing about his own father's Caribbean plantation background until about the same time.
As far as the actual "story" goes, there are essentially two "obstacles": firstly EBB's health and secondly Mr Barrett's unreasonable, implacable and indiscriminate opposition to any of his children marrying — even if "a prince of Eldorado should come, with a pedigree of lineal descent from some signory in the moon in one hand, and a ticket of good-behaviour from the nearest Independent chapel in the other"...
Books have been written on the question of what precisely was wrong with EBB, and it's not worth going into here. All that matters is that the friendship with RB started at a point where EBB had effectively withdrawn from the world to the extent that it was commonly reported that she was a permanent invalid. RB is astonished on one of his first visits to see her get up and walk across the room to get a book. After meeting RB, her health and/or her readiness to face the world get steadily stronger, and marriage no longer seems totally out of the question.
EBB was nearly 40 and had enough money of her own (an inheritance from a favourite uncle) to be able to defy her father if necessary, but her concern not to put her less-independent siblings in a difficult position meant that it was necessary to keep the friendship with RB quiet as long as possible. Both of them were obviously also a bit reluctant to pressure the other into taking a decisive step, so they carry on for a frustratingly long time consulting steamer timetables and agonising about which of EBB's friends and acquaintances might have caught on, constantly rescheduling meetings to avoid anyone working out how often they see each other. Of course, everyone at Wimpole Street except the master of the house must have known what was going on, but no-one was directly told that there was an engagement. Obviously, all the servants were too scared of Mr Barrett, and all the siblings too concerned for their own prospects of clandestine romance, for anyone to spill the beans. All the same, for the last couple of months the reader is likely to be sitting there screaming at them to get on with it and sign up for a marriage licence.
This perhaps isn't a book to recommend to a teenage romantic: the passion is certainly there, but might be rather too abstract and cerebral for anyone under thirty. On the other hand, if you're addicted to all things Victorian, this is what you should have on your bedside table — next to your copy of Sonnets from the Portuguese.
(Note: I read volume 1 in the Project Gutenberg text; volume 2 hasn't been Gutenberged yet, so I downloaded the PDF facsimile from archive.org and read it on an Ipad.) show less
Elizabeth Barrett Browning is another of those writers cursed with an interesting biography. We all know of her from countless films and historical novels: the classic Victorian invalid, who left her Wimpole Street sofa only to elope to Florence with Robert Browning. But most of us would be hard put to name anything she actually wrote, other than the sonnet that starts "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways!". (I came up with three other poems, one of which turned out to be by Christina show more Rossetti...)
This Penguin Classics collection makes it clear how few concessions EBB makes to modern readers. Most of her earlier poems are dense in classical and theological allusions; her later work is very tied up in political causes of the time (slavery, child-labour, the Italian Risorgimento). Mostly stuff you read in order to write essays about it, and even then it's slim pickings, because her formidable display of classical learning and fondness for "masculine" subject-matter make her hard to slot into traditional feminist notions about nineteenth-century culture.
There are a few lyrics in this collection that allow even philistine modern readers to get a glimpse of how good a poet EBB was, however. "Wine of Cyprus" is an affectionate and funny tribute to the classicist H.S. Boyd, her tutor and mentor for many years. The beautiful, complex "Caterina to Camoëns" is something very special indeed: the speaker is the poet's dying lover, who mocks a trite image he has used; at the same time her passion for him surges out in all directions from her tightly-structured stanzas. "Lady Geraldine's Courtship" is a modern-dress romp that looks at first sight with its long lines and double-rhymes like a Tennyson pastiche, but turns out to be something quite different. According to one of her letters, it was dashed off in a couple of days when the printers complained that volume 1 of her 1844 Poems would be too short: sometimes that's the way the best poems get written! The passing reference to Browning in this poem was the trigger for Browning to write his first letter to EBB, the start of their famous epistolary courtship.
Undoubtedly the best-loved work in this collection are the "Sonnets from the Portuguese", written as a private, personal commentary on her courtship with Browning. They are probably the second-greatest sequence of love sonnets in English: simple and direct in language, enormously complex and sophisticated in emotional content. Publishing them as though they were translations was an attempt to disguise their autobiographical nature: there is of course nothing Portuguese about them.
The editor's suggestion to read the sonnets side-by-side with the Barrett-Browning letters is a good one: a lot of images and ideas from the letters come back in a more sophisticated, condensed form in the sonnets, and it's fascinating to watch the creative process at work.
Which leaves Aurora Leigh, of course. The positive response to "Geraldine" gave EBB the idea of a more substantial work with a contemporary setting: it's often discussed in the letters with Browning, but the project didn't come to anything until about ten years later. What she came up with is not so much an epic poem as a verse novel. Despite her formidable intellectual reputation, EBB was a huge, unapologetic fan of romantic novels, especially of French writers like George Sand and Mme de Staël. The verse-novel form allowed her to combine her own poetic gifts with the big narrative structures typical of romance fiction, although she does keep to a fairly tight structure with only four or five main characters. There are ideas about social and gender roles, the double-standard, women's education, and so on, but the central idea is an exploration of the relationship between creative art and political action: the book seems to be arguing that we can only change the world for the better if we bring both these strands together, moderated by human love and the love of Christ.
The result is a sort of literary grand opera: gloriously overwrought in every sense — except for the blank verse itself, which is always light and delicate. The plot is a sucession of melodramatic clichés (up to and including an ending inadvertently lifted from the Brontës). The characters, except for Aurora herself, are idealised and implausible: the depiction of Marian Erle, the noble and dignified "wronged woman" from the underclass, is a reminder that EBB had probably never spoken to a working-class person who wasn't a member of her own domestic staff. The book is over the top even by the standards of an era where everything was over the top, but in an odd way, as Virginia Woolf pointed out, it's so absurd that it actually becomes compulsively absorbing. You have to connect with it the way you connect with Wagner or Verdi. If you can suspend disbelief for long enough, something clicks and you're in there, just absorbing the language at a purely emotional level. There are plenty of allusions to literature, contemporary politics, theology, and all the rest, but they don't intrude themselves the way they do in some of EBB's rather Miltonic early works: if you want to track the references down, Penguin have provided some pedantic notes, but there's no need to look at them, really. With the minor limitation that you probably won't be able to listen to music whilst reading it, it's no more threatening to the modern reader than any other Victorian novel, and at 300 pages it's a good deal shorter than most. show less
This Penguin Classics collection makes it clear how few concessions EBB makes to modern readers. Most of her earlier poems are dense in classical and theological allusions; her later work is very tied up in political causes of the time (slavery, child-labour, the Italian Risorgimento). Mostly stuff you read in order to write essays about it, and even then it's slim pickings, because her formidable display of classical learning and fondness for "masculine" subject-matter make her hard to slot into traditional feminist notions about nineteenth-century culture.
There are a few lyrics in this collection that allow even philistine modern readers to get a glimpse of how good a poet EBB was, however. "Wine of Cyprus" is an affectionate and funny tribute to the classicist H.S. Boyd, her tutor and mentor for many years. The beautiful, complex "Caterina to Camoëns" is something very special indeed: the speaker is the poet's dying lover, who mocks a trite image he has used; at the same time her passion for him surges out in all directions from her tightly-structured stanzas. "Lady Geraldine's Courtship" is a modern-dress romp that looks at first sight with its long lines and double-rhymes like a Tennyson pastiche, but turns out to be something quite different. According to one of her letters, it was dashed off in a couple of days when the printers complained that volume 1 of her 1844 Poems would be too short: sometimes that's the way the best poems get written! The passing reference to Browning in this poem was the trigger for Browning to write his first letter to EBB, the start of their famous epistolary courtship.
Undoubtedly the best-loved work in this collection are the "Sonnets from the Portuguese", written as a private, personal commentary on her courtship with Browning. They are probably the second-greatest sequence of love sonnets in English: simple and direct in language, enormously complex and sophisticated in emotional content. Publishing them as though they were translations was an attempt to disguise their autobiographical nature: there is of course nothing Portuguese about them.
The editor's suggestion to read the sonnets side-by-side with the Barrett-Browning letters is a good one: a lot of images and ideas from the letters come back in a more sophisticated, condensed form in the sonnets, and it's fascinating to watch the creative process at work.
Which leaves Aurora Leigh, of course. The positive response to "Geraldine" gave EBB the idea of a more substantial work with a contemporary setting: it's often discussed in the letters with Browning, but the project didn't come to anything until about ten years later. What she came up with is not so much an epic poem as a verse novel. Despite her formidable intellectual reputation, EBB was a huge, unapologetic fan of romantic novels, especially of French writers like George Sand and Mme de Staël. The verse-novel form allowed her to combine her own poetic gifts with the big narrative structures typical of romance fiction, although she does keep to a fairly tight structure with only four or five main characters. There are ideas about social and gender roles, the double-standard, women's education, and so on, but the central idea is an exploration of the relationship between creative art and political action: the book seems to be arguing that we can only change the world for the better if we bring both these strands together, moderated by human love and the love of Christ.
The result is a sort of literary grand opera: gloriously overwrought in every sense — except for the blank verse itself, which is always light and delicate. The plot is a sucession of melodramatic clichés (up to and including an ending inadvertently lifted from the Brontës). The characters, except for Aurora herself, are idealised and implausible: the depiction of Marian Erle, the noble and dignified "wronged woman" from the underclass, is a reminder that EBB had probably never spoken to a working-class person who wasn't a member of her own domestic staff. The book is over the top even by the standards of an era where everything was over the top, but in an odd way, as Virginia Woolf pointed out, it's so absurd that it actually becomes compulsively absorbing. You have to connect with it the way you connect with Wagner or Verdi. If you can suspend disbelief for long enough, something clicks and you're in there, just absorbing the language at a purely emotional level. There are plenty of allusions to literature, contemporary politics, theology, and all the rest, but they don't intrude themselves the way they do in some of EBB's rather Miltonic early works: if you want to track the references down, Penguin have provided some pedantic notes, but there's no need to look at them, really. With the minor limitation that you probably won't be able to listen to music whilst reading it, it's no more threatening to the modern reader than any other Victorian novel, and at 300 pages it's a good deal shorter than most. show less
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