Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Taylor, Beverly

In the latest volume of The Brownings' Correspondence, volume 22 (Winfield, KS: Wedgestone Press, 2015), editors Philip Kelley, Scott Lewis, Edward Hagan, Joseph Phelan, and Rhian Williams again set the benchmark for scholarly editions, providing impeccable texts and rich explanatory notes, selections from related correspondence as Supporting Documents, and an indispensable collection of book reviews of works by both Brownings. Volume 22 includes letters written by and to the Brownings from November 1855 to June 1856, when they resided in Paris between two summer trips to London. The principal cultural topics in EBB's letters include spiritualists and seances experienced by their friends and acquaintances, and the qualities and effects of the French government of Louis Napoleon, who retained the presidency by coup d'etat and then through a plebiscite became Emperor Napoleon III. In personal terms, much of this correspondence initially dwells on their misery in a disastrously cold set of rooms which a friend had leased for them in Paris--a habitation where EBB spent weeks coughing and spitting blood--and their subsequent liberation, when their rental agreement expired in December 1855, to an exceedingly comfortable, light, and warm apartment which they praised to many of their correspondents for reviving EBB and enabling her to work.

For literary scholars the chief interest in this volume of the correspondence lies in the multiple references to major poems by both EBB and RB which preoccupy critics today: her Aurora Leigh, which EBB was rushing to finish before they returned to England in order to see the poem through the press; and his 1855 collection Men and Women, published on 10 November, which EBB believed would firmly establish his contemporary eminence and his enduring fame. As we know, her hopes were fulfilled better in the long range than the short term. While she writes proudly, for example, that John Ruskin has remarked RB's poems at length and is going to include admiring notice of "The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church" in the next volume of Modern Painters, Ruskin's letter to RB must both amuse and pain readers, for Ruskin details his own failure to understand many details in RB's poems (see pp. 13-14, for example, for Ruskin's excruciating account of his perplexities in reading "Popularity"). Ruskin encapsulates his difficulties in interpreting RB in two witty metaphors so charming that they almost compensate for his poetic obtuseness: "I cannot write in enthusiastic praise--because I look at you every day as a monkey does at a cocoanut--having great faith in the milk--hearing it rattle indeed--inside--but quite beside myself for the Fibres"; and "You are worse than the worst Alpine Glacier I ever crossed. Bright--& deep enough truly--but so full of Clefts that half the journey has to be done with ladder & hatchet" (p. 15). Carlyle, too, commended RB's genius but lamented his "unintelligibility" (p. 195). (These critiques by intelligent contemporary readers may make us more attentive to providing our students tools with which to crack open RB's coconuts and traverse his glaciers.)

As with previous volumes of The Brownings' Correspondence, volume 22 generously collects in one place the many contemporary reviews of Men and Women from the period covered. Juxtaposing them against EBB's recurring celebration of RB's poems accentuates her tact in reporting the mixed reviews, which must have been painfully disappointing after the initially cheering report of sales. She proudly remarks that people praise RB's "power & originality" even as they "complain of obscurity" (p. 22) and observes that the poems "prosper" while eliciting both "claps of hands, & barkings of dogs" (p. 42). She confidently predicts that the book "will stand," even though "the people pelt mud ever so" (p. 81). RB, in contrast, on the same day complains to their editor Edward Chapman that the reviews are "mostly stupid & spiteful, self-contradicting & contradictory of each other," and he worries about how the "rot" will affect "the reading public" (p. 79).

The letters' multiple references to Aurora Leigh underscore EBB's haste and incessant labor in making final transcriptions of Books 1 through 6 and then completing what she initially projected as two final books, which in the process grew to three. The letters also emphasize that RB read each book as it was transcribed and underscore how much EBB valued his praise and encouragement to complete what he judged to be her best work yet (p. 98). Reporting that RB does not find Aurora Leigh "too indecent" (p. 154), EBB anticipated that her very religious unmarried sister Arabella may find some passages of the poem shocking and her married sister Henrietta "will be scandalized by certain parts" but may perhaps like others (p. 174).

Like volume 21 of the Correspondence, this one affords a more balanced perspective on the Brownings' disagreements over spiritualism than some biographers and commentators have fostered. EBB inquires into her distant friends' judgments of the American medium Daniel Dunglas Home and the validity of ostensible spirit manifestations they have witnessed. She also reports that from the beginning of her acquaintance with Home, she found him a "commonplace, weak, & affected" man (p. 137), though a gifted medium. She reports that while Robert does not believe in spiritualism, "he is ready to speak reason & hear it," and she more jocularly expects him to become a medium some day, "for he has taken to rain fire out of his hair!," producing sparks when he combs his hair in the dark (p. 169). A bit more seriously, she observes that she could almost give up the spirits for him--but that he declares he would not want her to: "If you could, I should not like it. I like you best as you are, & believing as you believe" (p. 188).

EBB also describes greater consonance in their views of Napoleon III than biographers and critics have suggested: "He & I never fight now about Louis Napoleon," because of all the good for the people being achieved by the current French government--"in everything done, thought is taken for the people" (p. 204). Though RB began by hating Napoleon's government, she reports, "he does not shut his eyes to all that is noble & admirable going on, on all sides" and has grown "sick of the opposition" (p. 209). She characterizes the current French system as "a most peculiar government"--"a democracy with an absolute Head--socialism under a monarchy--a great experiment in the fortunes of the world." On this great experiment she withholds final judgment: "We shall see how it ends--" (p. 198).

The volume of letters ends with the Brownings about to return to London, worrying about money again and about where they will stay, for their beloved friend John Kenyon has had to retract his offer for them to occupy his London home while he seeks restored health on the Isle of Wight. Even more than finding lodging, EBB frets over Kenyon's illness. The letters here collected remind us of how fully connected the Brownings remained to London's literati and other artists, to the publishing establishment, to sages such as Ruskin and Carlyle, to Anna Jameson and the proponents of the Married Women's Property petition, which EBB signed. Though EBB avers that "Country has died out of me, & I have come to hate the notion of England apart from what I love in it" (p. 222), these letters attest that the Brownings remained tied to a vital English network throughout their extended life in Italy.

Reviews of EBB's Poems published in England in 1853 (and the U.S. in 1854) that are collected in an appendix of Volume 22 of The Browning's Correspondence remind us that although she was usually acknowledged not only as the greatest woman poet in the present but also in "past generations" (p. 283), she was frequently criticized for "abominable" and "villainously bad" rhymes but also praised for "her perfect mastery over melody" (p. 285). Donald S. Hair's latest book, Fresh Strange Music: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Language (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's Univ. Press, 2015), examines the interconnection between her rhyming practices and her prosody, explaining her art as music that through carefully chosen technical strategies elucidates her social and political views on "gender, exploitation of women and children, slavery, her support for Napoleon III and for the Risorgimento in Italy" (p. 3). Hair's work is the first book-length, thoroughgoing analysis of her daring imperfect rhymes (including sight-rhymes, double rhymes, slant rhymes) and other forms of technical experimentation, including "freeing English poetry to exploit the natural rhythm of the language" (p. 19). His study emphasizes EBB's preoccupation with "cadence" and "harmony" and her intentional connection of rhyme, rhythm, and meter. Coming to this subject after writing books on both Tennyson's and Robert Browning's language, Hair is incomparably well prepared to study EBB's poetic techniques, and his close attention to her ideas about English and classical meter, her handling of the pause as a unit of meaning, and her recurring metaphors for rhythm (such as the pulse and the heartbeat), undergird some dazzling interpretations of poems across EBB's career, from "An Essay on Mind," "The Seraphim" and "A Drama of Exile," through "A Vision of Poets" and "The Dead Pan," "Lady Geraldine's Courtship," Casa Guidi Windows, and Aurora Leigh, to "A Curse for a Nation" and "A Musical Instrument," as well as numerous shorter poems. As the first thorough, ambitious, and detailed investigation of her poetic theory and practice across her career, this book is an extremely valuable contribution to EBB studies and also to the broader topic of Victorian poetics.

Attention to poems from across EBB's poetic career is also a signal strength of a recent selected edition of her work in the 21st-Century Oxford Authors Series (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2014). To represent EBB's early work, co-editors Josie Billington and Philip Davis have included selections from her privately printed epic The Battle of Marathon (1820) and a handful of poems from her collections of 1826 and 1833, as well as autobiographical materials she did not publish--a prose essay on her early life (1820) and selections from her diary of 1831-32. In keeping with the Oxford series policy, the editors represent poems as they were first published in collections, offering what they call "an ongoing view of the growth of the poet in the felt immediacy of her expressive development" (p. xxvi). In printing the earliest versions collected in book form, this edition can most tellingly reveal EBB's development if readers juxtapose these early versions against the revised versions of her 1856 collected Poems, the versions printed in volumes 1 and 2 of the complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (2010), edited by Marjorie Stone and Beverly Taylor, with Sandra Donaldson as the five-volume WEBB's General Editor. While this complete WEBB includes all variants recorded over a poem's publishing history, comparing the early versions included by Billington and Davis with the last versions seen through the press by the poet herself vividly demonstrates how she developed poems from their first through their final incarnations. Whereas space limitations force the editors to include only selections from some of EBB's longer works, ranging from The Battle of Marathon to her 1833 translation of Prometheus Bound, to Casa Guidi Windows, they include the entirety of the first published version of Aurora Leigh (1856) and make a strong case for representing this work in the form that first excited readers such as Ruskin, George Eliot, and Swinburne. This collection also includes a few selections from EBB's correspondence, most notably a group of some twenty pages of the courtship correspondence that nicely complements the following Sonnets from the Portuguese (the 43 sonnets originally published in 1850). The poems in this volume are rather lightly annotated, with endnotes sometimes recycling erroneous details that more recent scholarship has corrected. In sum, the volume provides a solid selection of poems for the classroom and for scholars who wish to study poems as they were initially published.

Reconstructing Victorians' reading experiences takes another form in K. E. Attar's "Victorian Readers and Their Library Records Today," chapter seven in Reading and the Victorians, ed. Matthew Bradley and Juliet John (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015). In this essay Attar partially surveys Thomas Carlyle's 59 markings and annotations in his niece's copy of the first edition of Aurora Leigh. Carlyle's notes convey a generally dismissive attitude toward the poem: "Twaddle"; "fine spun, very--cobweb"; "Watery but pretty"; "A very beautiful tempest in a teapot. What a gift of utterance this high child has,--and how very weak and child-like all it has to say" (p. 107). While Attar records these comments and observes that Carlyle generally judged poetry to be inferior to prose, she writes as a rare books librarian focused on the challenges libraries face in trying to recapture such annotations. For a more literary consideration of Carlyle's response to Aurora Leigh, one should see Brent Kinser's "'A Very Beautiful Tempest in a Teapot': Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Thomas Carlyle, and the Annotation of Aurora Leigh," Browning Society Notes 33 (2008): 21-39 (discussed by Marjorie Stone in the Year's Work, VP [2009]: 552-53.)

My brief essay "Carlyle, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and the Hero as Victorian Poet," included in a recent edition of On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2013), pp. 235-46, pursues the literary connections between EBB and Carlyle. Inspired by his celebration of the poet as vates, she adored Carlyle because "he has done more to raise poetry to the throne of its rightful inheritance than any writer of the day" (Brownings' Correspondence 5: 281). Her "Carlyleship" (Brownings' Correspondence 6: 6) spurred her to become an increasingly activist hero-poet even as Carlyle himself voiced skepticism about poets' importance. Carlyle's Heroes helped convert her longstanding attachment to literary tradition and aesthetics into a commitment to treat contemporary political topics such as abolition and Italian unification and independence. But even as she embraced his gospel of work, Carlyle adopted the view that poetry was not the serious pursuit needed in an age of crisis, a point she refuted in the central Book 5 of Aurora Leigh (11. 155-59), where she invoked Carlyle as her authority for making contemporary life the subject of her ambitious poem. Despite Carlyle's later admonitions that the engaged intellectual should address the needs of his day in prose, the activist poet imagined in Heroes still spoke powerfully in EBB's verse--in an emphatically female voice.

This concern with modernity resonates in Natasha Moore's essay "The Realism of The Angel in the House: Coventry Patmore's Poem Reconsidered," Victorian Literature and Culture 43 (2015): 41-61. Throughout the essay EBB's novel-in-verse serves as a yardstick against which Moore measures The Angel in the House to support her argument that Patmore's poem was less conservative than we normally judge. Instead of pressing an idealization of woman as "the angel in the house," she maintains, Patmore advanced the more radical idea that ordinary daily life is "appropriate subject matter for poetry" (p. 42). While strangely silent on the role played by Wordsworth's preface to the 1802 edition of Lyrical Ballads in establishing that everyday life provides abundant material fit for poetry, Moore quite rightly identifies this concept as a foundational principle for EBB's Aurora Leigh, which the poet had projected to be a work "completely modern ... running into the midst of our conventions, & rushing into drawing rooms & the like ... & so, meeting face to face & without mask, the Elumanity of the age" (Brownings' Correspondence 10: 102-103).

Another essay on Aurora Leigh also explores EBB's preoccupation with contemporary social issues. Elizabeth Erbeznik's "City-Craft as Poetic Process in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh," Victorian Poetry 52 (2014): 619-636, argues that the novel-in-verse anticipates a new kind of city to be created by new relations between women of differing social classes. Recurring to metaphors of sewing and related handwork, EBB "examines the place of female labor in the city," positing "a poetic (rather than philanthropic) view of urban workers" and proposing "a vision of the metropolis composed, not of distinct female types with prescribed roles ... but, rather, of workers who have joined together to carve out a new urban space founded on a common humanity" (p. 619). Examining metaphors of sight and blindness and connecting the principal women characters much as critics have linked seamstresses with affluent ladies through the ball gown that one group fashions for the other, Erbeznik posits that the poem "rewrites urban social relations" and imagines metropolitan spaces as balancing "men and women, rich and poor, art and philanthropy" (p. 620). The city anticipated at the poem's end, she suggests, is less the idealized city of a New Jerusalem than a new kind of urban center, created by the poet, which transcends the "cliched urban typologies constructed by popular print culture" such as the familiar icon of the seamstress purveyed in Thomas Hood's "The Song of the Shirt" or in Richard Redgrave's painting The Sempstress. Instead, EBB predicts an unnarrated and perhaps unnarratable city to come. Although Erbeznik confines herself to interesting close reading of the poem, she might have discovered support for her argument in EBB's numerous letters admiring the happy and unselfconscious mingling of classes at religious festivals and civic celebrations in Italian cities.

John MacNeill Miller's "Slavish Poses: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Aesthetics of Abolition," Victorian Poetry 52 (2014): 637-659, closely resonates with EBB's "Carlyleship" by assessing how her abolitionist poems address the great socio-political challenges--not just the ordinary events--of the day. Miller persuasively argues that EBB draws on "the forms of conventionality" in her three abolitionist poems "to denounce slavery from her complex cultural position as a white, British, woman poet" (p. 637). Miller traces a trajectory from "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point" (1845) through "Hiram Powers' 'Greek Slave'" (1850) to "A Curse for a Nation" (1860), a trajectory throughout which EBB invoked traditional and therefore essentially conservative conceptions of women in order to ground her radical attack on chattel slavery. In "The Runaway Slave," for example, the slave woman avoids endorsing "cyclical violence" by enacting the example of Christ and the conventional stereotype of female spirituality and passivity: instead of continuing to urge "violent revolution" to end slavery, she practices forgiveness and leaves the slave owners "curse-free" (pp. 642-643). Miller similarly discerns a complex tension between conservative and radical perspectives in EBB's sonnet on Hiram Powers' sculpture, as her imagery "enlists" the eroticism of the female figure "in the service of abolition by presenting bondage as a problematic frustration to, rather than enabler of, sexual satisfaction" (p. 646). Similarly, in "A Curse for a Nation" EBB represents the speaker "as a sort of unwilling virgin greeted with the angelic annunciation that she has been chosen as the vessel of divine intervention into a corrupt world" (p. 651). Though Miller's argument is too nuanced and complex to be effectively condensed here, his persuasive analysis suggests that critics who have seen any of these three poems as essentially conservative or essentially progressive have overlooked EBB's clever appropriation of conservative views of women to advance progressive political ends. The essay may require multiple readings to appreciate fully Miller's thesis that EBB creates "conventional images strategically" for the purpose of articulating radical political action (p. 655). The sustained attention will prove worthwhile.

A new book advertised by Oxford University Press for publication this summer has been deferred for a third time. That leaves us still anticipating Alison Chapman's Networking the Nation: British and American Women's Poetry and Italy, 1840-1870.

I thank Cynthia Burgess of the Armstrong Browning Library, Baylor University; Thomas J. Nixon of Davis Library at the University of North Carolina--Chapel Hill; and Professor Marjorie Stone of Dalhousie University for their generous assistance in identifying materials for this review.