Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jkksz Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T08:48:49.787Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Combating an Alien Tyranny: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Evolution as a Feminist Poet

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Deborah Byrd
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The drama of woman lies in this conflict between the fundamental aspirations of every subject (ego) – who always regards the self as the essential – and the compulsions of a situation in which she is the inessential. (Simone de Beauvoir xxxiv)

The name [of poet]

Is royal, and to sign it like a queen

Is what I dare not, – though some royal blood

Would seem to tingle in me now and then,

With sense of power and ache.

Aurora Leigh I. (934–38)

'Tis Antidote to turn –

To Tomes of solid Witchraft –

(Emily Dickinson, #593)

“Speed and energy, forthrightness and complete self-confidence – these are the qualities that hold us enthralled” as we read Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, wrote Virginia Woolf in 1932 (1.212). As Woolf points out, these qualities emanate not so much from Aurora as from her creator, whose strong and lively presence so pervades the poem that “Again and again … Aurora the fictitious seems to be throwing light upon Elizabeth the actual. … [making it] impossible for the most austere of critics not sometimes to touch the flesh when his [sic] eyes should be fixed upon the page” (212). And as Woolf observes, the “flesh” the critic touches is that of a woman who knows that the royal blood of poets flows through her veins. “Elizabeth the actual” is a subject, speaking boldly of the world as she perceives and experiences it.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 15 , Spring 1987 , pp. 23 - 41
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1987

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

WORKS CITED

Cooper, Helen. “Working Into Light: Elizabeth Barrett Browning.” Shakespeare's Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets. Ed. Gilbert, Sandra and Gubar, Susan. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1979. 65–81.Google Scholar
Cooper, Helen Margaret. “Elizabeth Barrett Browning: A Theory of Women's Poetry.” Diss. Rutgers U, 1982.Google Scholar
de Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. Ed. and trans. Parshley, H. M.. New York: Random House, 1952.Google Scholar
Dickinson, Emily. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ed. Johnson, Thomas H.. Boston: Little, Brown, 1960.Google Scholar
Diehl, Joanne Feit. “‘Come Slowly – Eden’: An Exploration of Women Poets and Their Muse.” Signs 3 (1978): 572–87.Google Scholar
Donaldson, Sandra M. “Elizabeth Barrett's Two Sonnets to George Sand.” SBHC 5 (1977): 19–22.Google Scholar
Fetterley, Judith. The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1978.Google Scholar
Flynn, Elizabeth A., and Schweickart, Patrocinio P., eds. Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1986.Google Scholar
Gilbert, Sandra, and Gubar, Susan. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.Google Scholar
Hawthorne, Mark D.Doubt and Dogma in Maria Edgeworth. U of Florida Monographs, The Humanities, 25. Gainesville: U of Florida p, 1967.Google Scholar
Hayter, Alethea. “‘These Men Over-Nice’: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's ‘Lord Walter's Wife’.” BSN 8 (1978): 5–7.Google Scholar
Heydon, Peter N., and Kelley, Philip, eds. Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Letters to Mrs. David Ogilvy 1849–1861. New York: Quadrangle and The Browning Institute, 1973.Google Scholar
Hickok, Kathleen. Representations of Women: Nineteenth-Century British Women's Poetry. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1984.Google Scholar
Hickok, Kathleen K. “‘New Yet Orthodox’: The Female Characters in Aurora Leigh.” International Journal of Women's Studies 3 (1980): 479–47.Google Scholar
Holloway, Julia Bolton. “Aurora Leigh and Jane Eyre.” Brontë Society Transactions 17 (1977): 126–32.Google Scholar
Homans, Margaret. Women Writers and Poetic Identity: Dorothy Wordsworth, Emily Bronte, and Emily Dickinson. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980.Google Scholar
Kaplan, Cora. Introduction. Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Her Novel in Verse Aurora Leigh with Other Poems. London: The Women's p, 1978.Google Scholar
Kelley, Philip, and Hudson, Ronald, eds. The Brownings' Correspondence. 4 vols. Winfield, KS: Wedgestone Press, 1984.Google Scholar
Kelley, Philip, and Hudson, RonaldThe Unpublished Diary of Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, 1831–1832. Athens: Ohio UP, 1969.Google Scholar
Kenyon, Frederic G., ed. The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. 2 vols. New York: Macmillan, 1899.Google Scholar
Kintner, Elvan, ed. The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett 1845–1846. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1969.Google Scholar
Mermin, Dorothy. “The Female Poet and the Embarrassed Reader: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese.” ELH 48 (1981): 351–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Miller, Ruth. The Poetry of Emily Dickinson. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1968.Google Scholar
Moser, Kay. “Elizabeth Barrett's Youthful Feminism: Fragment of ‘An Essay on Woman’.” SIB 12 (1984): 13–26.Google Scholar
Porter, Charlotte, and Clarke, Helen A., eds. The Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. 6 vols. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1900.Google Scholar
Pratt, Annis, and others. Archetypal Patterns in Women's Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1981.Google Scholar
Raymond, Meredith B., and Sullivan, Mary Rose, eds. The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Mary Russell Mitford 1836–1854. 3 vols. Winfield, KS: Armstrong Browning Library of Baylor University, The Browning Institute, Wedgestone Press, and Wellesley College, 1983.Google Scholar
Rosenblum, Dolores. “Face to Face: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh and Nineteenth-Century Poetry.” VS 26 (1983): 321–38.Google Scholar
Showalter, Elaine. “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness.” The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory. New York: Pantheon, 1985.Google Scholar
Thomson, Patricia. George Sand and the Victorians: Her Influence and Reputation in Nineteenth-century England. New York: Columbia UP, 1977.Google Scholar
Trollope, Frances. The Mother's Manual: or, Illustrations of Matrimonial Economy. An Essay in Verse. London: Treuttel and Würtz, 1833.Google Scholar
Woolf, Virginia. “Aurora Leigh.” Collected Essays of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Woolf, Leonard. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1953.Google Scholar
Wordsworth, William. The Poetical Works of Wordsworth. Ed. Sheats, Paul D.. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982.Google Scholar
Zimmerman, Susan. “Sonnets from the Portuguese: A Negative and a Positive Context.” Mary Wollstonecraft Newsletter 2 (1973): I–II.Google Scholar