Read complete books and articles on: Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett - 1806–61, English poet, b. Durham. A delicate and precocious child, she spent a great part of her early life in a state of semi-invalidism. She read voraciously—philosophy, history, literature—and she wrote verse. In 1838 the Barrett family moved to 50 Wimpole St., London. Six years later Elizabeth published Poems, which brought her immediate fame. The volume was a favorite of the poet Robert Browning, and he began to correspond with her. The two fell in love, but their courtship was secret because of the opposition of Elizabeth's tyrannical father. They married in 1846 and traveled to Italy, where most of their married life was spent and where their one son was born. Mrs. Browning threw herself into the cause of Italian liberation from Austria. "Casa Guidi," their home in Florence, is preserved as a memorial. Happy in her marriage, Mrs. Browning recovered her health in Italy, and her work as a poet gained in strength and significance. Her greatest poetry, Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850), was inspired by her own love story. Casa Guidi Windows (1851), on Italian liberty, and Aurora Leigh (1857), a novel in verse, followed. During her lifetime Mrs. Browning was considered a better poet than her husband. Today her life and personality excite more interest than her work. Although as a poet she has been criticized for diffuseness, pedantry, and sentimentality, she reveals in such poems as "The Cry of the Children" and some of the Sonnets from the Portuguese a highly individual gift for lyric poetry.

Bibliography

See The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1845–46 (1899, new ed. 1930); R. Besier, The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1930), the most popular dramatization of the Brownings' love story; biographies by G. B. Taplin (1957), I. C. Clarke (1929, repr. 1970), and M. Forster (1989); The Courtship of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning (1985) by D. Karlin; studies by H. Cooper (1988) and G. Stephenson (1989); bibliography by W. Barnes (1967).

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16 of the Best Books and Articles on: Elizabeth Barrett Browning

as selected by Questia librarians

1.

Aurora Leigh » Read Now
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Kerry McSweeney. 416 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

Aurora Leigh, now available in the first critically edited and fully annotated edition for almost a century, is the foremost example of the mid-nineteenth century poem of contemporary life. It is an amazing verse novel which provides a panoramic view of the early Victorian age in London. The...
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Aurora Leigh, now available in the first critically edited and fully annotated edition for almost a century, is the foremost example of the mid-nineteenth century poem of contemporary life. It is an amazing verse novel which provides a panoramic view of the early Victorian age in London. The dominant presence in the work however, is the narrator Aurora Leigh, as she develops her ideas on art, love, God, the "Woman Question", and society.
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2.

Sonnets from the Portuguese » Read Now
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. 85 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
3.

The Poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning » Read Now
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. 554 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...THE POEMS OF ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING MORRISON AND GIBB, PRINTERS, EDINBURGH THE POEMS OF ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING WITH MEMOIR, ETC...PREFACE. THE poems of Elizabeth...
4.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1930) » Read Now
by Louise Schutz Boas. 216 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO. 55 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK...COURT HOUSE STREET, CALCUTTA 167 MOUNT ROAD, MADRAS ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING ELIZABETH...
5.

The Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning » Read Now
by Gardner B. Taplin. 488 pgs.

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...THE LIFE OF ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING Elizabeth Barrett Browning THE LIFE OF Elizabeth Barrett Browning BY GARDNER B. TAPLIN New Haven: YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1957...
6.

Barrett Browning's Poetic Vocation: Crying, Singing, Breathing, in Victorian Poetry » Read Now
by Steve Dillon. 25 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
7.

Love Lost and Found: The Lives of Elizabeth and Robert Browning, in World and I » Read Now
by Michael Timko. 12 pgs.

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8.

"In Silence like to Death": Elizabeth Barrett's Sonnet Turn, in Victorian Poetry » Read Now
by Amy Billone. 19 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Psychology, Entire Library
9.

Aurora Leigh as Paradigm of Domestic-Professional Fiction, in Philological Quarterly » Read Now
by Sueann Schatz. 27 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
10.

Women's Poetry and Religion in Victorian England: Jewish Identity and Christian Culture (Chap. 3 "Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the 'Hebraic Monster'") » Read Now
by Cynthia Scheinberg. 275 pgs.

Collections: Religious Studies, Literature, Entire Library

Victorian women poets lived in a time when religion was a vital aspect of their identities. Cynthia Scheinberg examines Anglo-Jewish (Grace Aguilar and Amy Levy) and Christian (Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti) women poets, and argues that there are important connections between the...
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Victorian women poets lived in a time when religion was a vital aspect of their identities. Cynthia Scheinberg examines Anglo-Jewish (Grace Aguilar and Amy Levy) and Christian (Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti) women poets, and argues that there are important connections between the discourses of nineteenth-century poetry, gender and religious identity. Broadly interdisciplinary, the book's methodology relates to studies in poetics, religious studies, feminist literary criticism, and little-known Anglo-Jewish primary sources.
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11.

Desiring Voices: Women Sonneteers and Petrarchism (Chap. 7 "Indeterminacy and the Economy of Love in Sonnets from the Portuguese") » Read Now
by Mary B. Moore. 298 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

"How do I love thee? Let me mount the ways", wrote Elizabeth Barrett Browning in her Sonnets from the Portuguese. Desiring Voices: Women Sonneteers and Petrarchism proposes that we attend to the ways that women poets from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries have both echoed and transformed...
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"How do I love thee? Let me mount the ways", wrote Elizabeth Barrett Browning in her Sonnets from the Portuguese. Desiring Voices: Women Sonneteers and Petrarchism proposes that we attend to the ways that women poets from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries have both echoed and transformed the literary and erotic conventions that strongly influenced their fates as women, wives, and lovers.
Mary B. Moore analyzes and provides context for love sonnet sequences by Italian, French, English, and American women poets in the light of current knowledge concerning attitudes women at the time they wrote. Through close readings of the poems combined with theory and criticism about constructs of women, historical events, and biographical contexts, Moore reveals patterns of revision among women poets that shed further light on the poets themselves, on Petrarchism as a convention, and on ideas about women. She focuses on Petrarchan sonnet sequences by women because the poems serve both as works of art and as documents that illuminate the range and limitations of female roles as erotic subjects (agents of speech, action, knowledge, and desire) as well as their more usual roles as erotic objects.
Combining theory with close reading, Moore enhances the value of many generally neglected poems by women. After a thorough discussion of the Petrachan sonnet tradition, she analyzes the work of Gaspara Stampa, Louise Labe, Lady Mary Wroth, Charlotte Smith, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Edna St. Vincent Millay.
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12.

The Foreign Woman in British Literature: Exotics, Aliens, and Outsiders (Chap. 6 "Challenging Traditionalist Gender Roles: The Exotic Woman as Critical Observer in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh") » Read Now
by Marilyn Demarest Button, Toni Reed. 201 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

While England has been strengthened by a proud isolationism, she has simultaneously been enriched by the economic, social, and political complexities that have emerged as people of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds have moved within her borders, or when her own citizens have emigrated among...
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While England has been strengthened by a proud isolationism, she has simultaneously been enriched by the economic, social, and political complexities that have emerged as people of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds have moved within her borders, or when her own citizens have emigrated among those foreigners to live or rule. This book explores the foreign element in English culture and the attempt by English writers from the early 19th to the mid 20th century to portray their complex and often ambiguous responses to that doubly foreign element among them: the foreign woman. While being foreign may begin with national or ethnic difference, the contributors to this book expand it to include other forms of alienation from a dominant culture, resulting from gender, race, class, ideology, or temperament.
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13.

The Family of the Barrett: A Colonial Romance » Read Now
by Jeannette Marks. 709 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...Goodin, the great uncle of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who in his will referred...Leonard Huxley Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to her Sister . In the...Whiting 586...
14.

The Brownings » Read Now
by Osbert Burdett. 350 pgs.

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...memories into words than Elizabeth Barrett Browning. She was an eager, fluent...coincidence that associates the Browning and the Barrett families long before the...
15.

The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Vol. 1 » Read Now
by Frederic G. Kenyon. 480 pgs.

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...ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING , From a Photographer of a Marble Bust by W. W...possession of R. Barrett Browning THE LETTERS OF ELIZABETH BARRETT...
16.

The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Vol. 2 » Read Now
by Frederic G. Kenyon. 468 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING VOL. II. -ii- ROBERT BROWNING...W. Fisher. THE LETTERS OF ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING EDITED WITH BIOGRAPHICAL...face p. 262 THE LETTERS OF...