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Barrett Browning's Stories

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Dorothy Mermin
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Extract

Reviewing her career as a professional poet, Aurora Leigh describes her dubiously successful beginnings:

My ballads prospered; but the ballad's race

Is rapid for a poet who bears weights

Of thought and golden image ….

Barrett Browning's ballads had prospered too, and like Aurora she did not find their success particularly creditable, a judgment that has been emphatically shared by twentieth-century critics. But when Robert Browning told her in his first letter that he loved her poems, these were the ones he meant. The ballads are almost the only works of hers that he mentions in their correspondence, and he mentions them often. Gracious Lady Geraldine, bold and selfimmolating Duchess May, the lady disguised as a page who dies defending her husband from the Saracens - such heroines charmed a large and diverse company of Victorian admirers, including Mary Russell Mitford, Edgar Allan Poe, Harriet Martineau, Thomas Carlyle, and most of Elizabeth Barrett's friends and reviewers, in the years before her marriage when her reputation was made.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 13 , Spring 1985 , pp. 99 - 112
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1985

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References

NOTES

1. Leigh, Aurora, v. 84–86. Barrett Browning's poetry is quoted from The Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. Porter, Charlotte and Clarke, Helen A., 6 vols. (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1900).Google Scholar

2. See e.g. Mitford, Mary Russell, Recollections of a Literary Life; and Selections Jrom My Favorite Poets and Prose Writers (London: 1883), pp. 158–59;Google ScholarL'Estrange, A.G., The Life of Mary Russell Mitford, Related in a Selection from Her Letters to Her Friends, 3 vols. (London: 1870), in, 63–64;Google ScholarPoe, Edgar Allan, “The Drama of Exile and Other Poems,” The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, 17 vols., ed. Harrison, James A. (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1902), xii, 15–16;Google ScholarThe Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. Kenyon, Frederic G., 4th ed., 2 vols. (London: 1898), I, 199. Discussion of the contemporary reception of these poems as well as examples of the modern critical revulsion can be found in Gardner B. Taplin, The Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), pp. 61–64, 127–31, and Alethea Hayter, Mrs. Browning: A Poet's Work and its Setting (London: Faber & Faber, 1962), pp. 80–86. “It is almost impossible now,” Hayter says, “not to dislike these poems very much indeed” (p. 79).Google Scholar

3. Kenyon, , 1, 247; Elizabeth Barrett to Mr. Boyd: Unpublished Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Hugh Stuart Boyd, ed. McCarthy, Barbara P. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955), p. 263; L'Estrange, III, 63; Kenyon, 1, 247Google Scholar

4. Preface to Poems, 1838 (Porter, and Clarke, , I, 168).Google Scholar

5. L'Estrange, , III, 76–77Google Scholar. For a later volume, the artist altered the picture to accommodate her poem; see The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Mary Russell Mitford 1836–1854, ed. Raymond, Meredith B. and Sullivan, Mary Rose, 3 vols. (Winfield, Kansas: Armstrong Browning Library, The Browning Institute, Wedgestone Press and Wellesley College, 1983), II, 382.Google Scholar

6. Raymond, and Sullivan, , II, 7.Google Scholar

7. Kenyon, , 1, 61; L'Estrange, III, 63.Google Scholar

8. Raymond, and Sullivan, , 1, 100, n. 13, n. 16; 1, 166, n. 8.Google Scholar

9. See The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett 1845–1846, ed. Kintner, Elvan, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969), 1, 11, 143, 261, 364; 11, 651, 1043.Google Scholar

10. “Poems by Barrett, Elizabeth B.,” Blackwood's Magazine, 56 (November 1844), 625.Google Scholar

11. See Hayter, , pp. 85–86. It was the favorite of Carlyle and Harriet Martineau (Kenyon, 1, 199) and of Mary Russell Mitford (Recollections, p. 158), and praised by Poe (Works, XII, 16).Google Scholar

12. Kintner, , 1, 252; 11, 629.Google Scholar

13. Kintner, , 1, 135.Google Scholar

14. Kintner, , 1, 247.Google Scholar

15. On the emergence of this kind of poetry in the twentieth century see Ostriker, Alicia, “The Thieves of Language: Women Poets and Revisionist Mythmaking,” Signs, 8 (Autumn 1982), 68–90.Google Scholar

16. For the history of Pan in English literature, see Merivale, Patricia, Pan the Goat-God: His Myth in Modern Times (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17. See Merivale, p. 82.Google Scholar

18. Browning, Robert, The Poems, ed. Pettigrew, John and Collins, Thomas J., 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 11; lines 81–84.Google Scholar