Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Taylor, Beverly

Once again a new volume of The Brownings' Correspondence (Winfield, KS: Wedgestone Press, 2014) sets the highwater mark as the year's most exciting contribution to studies of the Brownings. Volume 21, edited by Philip Kelley, Scott Lewis, Joseph Phelan, Edward Hagan, and Rhian Williams, includes letters written by and to the Brownings from November 1854 to November 1855. These letters touch on matters public and private, demonstrating how fully the Brownings--both despite and because of living in Italy--were immersed in the international events of their time and the web of literary and cultural relationships connecting England, Europe, and the U.S. With EBB writing most of the letters, and as usual the longest and most detailed, the documents express the Brownings' reactions to

the Crimean War; EBB's views of Louis Napoleon and judgment that the French government was the most democratic in Europe, despite its "despotic element" (112); her preoccupation with the spiritualist movement sweeping America and England; and their absorption in the Italian independence movement. Her letters reiterate her unease in England and her sense that (like her five-year-old son Pen) "'I'm an Italian'" (13), that "my particular star shines best ... in Italy" (332). She painfully remarks her father's continued estrangement, even when he sees her young son Pen playing at Wimpole Street (230), and she mourns his disowning her brother Alfred upon his marriage (making Alfred "the third exile from Wimpole Street--the course of true love running remarkably rough in our house," 225). These letters record the Brownings' busy social life during their second visit to London since they married and left for Italy in September 1846: they are "taken in a black cobweb, like flies!!" (217), for "People want to see if Italy has cut off our noses ... or what!" (225). The letters also relate their removal to Paris for the winter before returning to London the next summer, an interlude when she can scarcely enjoy the city because of her ill health and their inadequate accommodations.

The volume affords perspective on the Brownings' disagreements over spiritualism. While EBB reiterates RB's skepticism and admonishes correspondents not to spark domestic controversy by writing to them about spiritualism, she also records his interest in hearing of their friends' encounters with the spirit world. Writing to their friend Elizabeth Kinney in July 1855, RB in an uncharacteristically long letter recounts the well-known seance conducted by the celebrated American medium Daniel Douglas Home at which ostensible spirit hands set a wreath on EBB's head (211-15). Three months later, EBB reports, when Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton called on them in Paris, RB prodded her to "Speak of the spirits" and agreed they should all visit a medium the next day. With Bulwer Lytton RB evinced a receptiveness to hearing the opinions of a believer in spiritualism whom he deemed rational. Although EBB praises RB for his "magnanimous" capacity to change his mind when he has been wrong (324), she contrasts his inability to tolerate her views with her own more generous capacity "to tolerate the differing opinions of one another" (268), and she remained reluctant "to take up a cudgel conjugally," a "somewhat difficult and delicate" matter (332).

With regard to the Crimea, EBB admires Florence Nightingale but also insists that celebrating women as hospital nurses ("'angelical she's'" "carrying lint") undermines progress on "the woman's question," undercutting women's stature as thinkers and artists. She jests ironically to her friend, art historian Anna Jameson, "For the future I hope you will know your place & keep clear of Raffaelle & criticism: & I shall expect to hear of you as an organisor [sic] of the gruel-department in the [naval] hospital at Greenwich" (84-85). More seriously, she contrasts preoccupation with the war to society's neglect of "forty thousand wretched women" in London: "The silent writhing of them is to me more appalling than the roar of the cannons" (311). She attributes the "despair & horror" of the Crimean war to the "incessant self-glorification" that traps English statesmen in "our close, stifling, corrupt system [which) gives no air nor scope for healthy & effective organization" and allows "individual interests" to impede "the general prosperity" (85). On a more personal level, she also frets about her military brother-in-law, Surtees Cook, recognizing that a posting to the war zone represents his best opportunity for advancement while worrying about his safety.

In letters to her friends EBB frankly acknowledges the Brownings' financial constraints, lamenting that they are "at the end of our purse" and cannot travel, even to see her sister Henrietta (225). Remarking the expense of maintaining Casa Guidi while traveling to Paris and London, she laments that "Poverty grinds us down from half our aspirations" (203). She indulges in gossip about failed marriages, including the Ruskins' separation, one man's marriage to an Italian beauty ill fitted to provide intellectual companionship, and the American painter William Page's desertion by his wife for another man. She recurs often to the pregnancy, marriage, and temporary absence of her maid Elizabeth Wilson (dubbed Lily by their son Pen). The Brownings' protracted efforts to arrange Wilson's civil and Roman Catholic marriage ceremonies testify to their concern for her happiness and security, especially with regard to custody of her future children, undercutting the impression conveyed by Margaret Forster's novel Lady's Maid (1990) that EBB was entirely selfish and callous in her relationship with Wilson.

In terms of literary events, the letters describe visits from Alfred Tennyson, his reading poetry "in a voice like an organ ... rather music than speech" (311), and D. G. Rossetti's sketching the Laureate reading Maud. EBB praises RB's collection Men and Women as he prepares the monologues for the press and they send review copies to friends and family. The volume's letters also include many of her observations on other artworks, including paintings by the Pre-Raphaelites and sculptures by Hiram Powers and Harriet Hosmer.

Letters in this volume include revealing assessments of both Brownings' poetry. Replying to John Ruskin, who had criticized her using the word nympholepsy, EBB defends herself against recurring charges of obscurity and invention, attributing "a good deal of what is called in me careless & awkward expression" to "the desire of speaking or spluttering the real truth out broadly" and to her refusal to address a more general audience ("the 'stupidest person of my acquaintance'"). Instead, she writes for the few readers who will "understand, appreciate, & distribuate [sic] to the multitude below." "To say a thing faintly, because saying it strongly sounds odd or obscure, or unattractive for some reason," she asserts, "does appear to me bad policy as well as bad art" (167). To John Kenyon she describes Aurora Leigh, then about half written: "An autobiography of a poetess--(not me) ... opposing the practical & the ideal life, & showing how the practical & real (so called) is but the external evolution of the ideal & spiritual--that it is from inner to outer, ... whether in life, morals, or art. A good deal, in this relation, upon the social question, & against the socialists--A good deal, in fact, about everything in the word & beyond ... taken from the times, 'hot and hot'" (111). EBB praises RB's collection Men and Women, then being prepared for the printer, as "magnificent" (148). She writes Anna Jameson that the poems represent an "extraordinary variety of life, in situation & character" and that their "improved clearness of expression" make her "full of hope" and "belief in the power displayed" throughout the collection (267). Sending a presentation copy of Men and Women to John Ruskin (who had praised RB's "brilliant ... colour" and "boundless ... imagination" but criticized his "odd or idle little cramps & blots which keep him from being read by thousands," 329), EBB declares she is "ready to die at the stake for my faith in these last" works, which represent "an advance upon his former poems" (345), a point she reiterates to Henrietta when she reports "good news of the promise of success, 'the trade' ... having made large orders--so that the expenses were covered after three days. Robert will stand higher than ever through these poems," which their friend, French critic Joseph Milsand described as "'superhuman'" (351), "'colossal'" (268).

In addition to the bountifully annotated letters, this volume of the collected correspondence includes a richly detailed biographical sketch of Elizabeth Clementine Kinney, the American poet and journalist who became close to the Brownings for several years in Florence, where in 1854 the Kinneys frequently took the Brownings out for evening carriage drives and with them pursued a plan--aborted at the last minute--to see paintings in a nearby monastery that prohibited female visitors by disguising the women (including Harriet Hosmer) as male art students (360-61; see also BC 20:296-97). The volume's section of "Supporting Documents" provides passages from letters and journals about the Brownings, including a number of excerpts from Mrs. Kinney's letters and from those of Mary Russell Mitford to other acquaintances.

The volume's last letter leaves the Brownings in Paris on 15 November 1855, with EBB relieved to be away from England, where her father's unrelenting hardness against her sorely depresses her, but craving letters from her sisters and Isa Blagden to break what she calls the "epidemic silence in England" (352)--and leaves us craving further news of EBB to be revealed in the next volume of The Brownings' Correspondence.

Another important research tool was published earlier this year. Representing a revival of the Critical Heritage series, Elizabeth Barrett Browning: The Critical Heritage (2 vols.; Abingdon and NY: Routledge, 2014), edited by Clara Dawson, documents EBB's reception from 1826 to 1940 by reprinting contemporary reviews of her collections and some of her contributions to annuals, as well as posthumous assessments of her oeuvre including Virginia Woolf's now famous appreciation of Aurora Leigh (1932). While having these reviews collected in one place is immensely useful, this Critical Heritage set will likely achieve limited availability. Its exorbitant price ($795 for 535 pages, divided into two volumes) will largely restrict the work to research libraries--and given escalating costs of books, shrinking budgets, and the availability of electronic resources that are changing libraries' approaches to building their collections, will most likely restrict it to a limited number of research libraries at best.

The value of this Critical Heritage work to students and researchers is mixed. The pluses are conspicuous: It very efficiently collects an extensive sampling of contemporary reviews in one place, including some critical commentary culled from letters. It separates British and American reviews into different sections, facilitating comparison of the critical reception in the two nations providing EBB's principal readerships, while including a small number of reviews in French, Italian, and German. Dawson's compilation also includes a handful of reviews not previously readily available: four reviews of EBB's 1826 volume not collected in The Brownings' Correspondence, which did not begin including "all reviews whose publication we have traced" (BC 3: 337) until vol. 3, covering 1832-1837. This Critical Heritage compilation is also valuable for its chronological scope, for it includes many reviews not yet available in the twenty-one volumes of BC published to date (through November 1855), and it reprints assessments up to 1940, decades after RB's 1889 death, which will presumably mark the end of the BC collection. The large scope of years covered in this compilation is enabled partly by Dawson's decision to delete the extensive quotations characteristic of Victorian reviews, while citing line numbers to enable her readers to locate the omitted passages. This editorial decision allows readers to focus on the critical assessments offered by reviewers and eliminates unnecessary echoing of the reviewers' favorite passages.

The downside to omitting quoted passages is that readers who do not turn promptly to their EBB edition to see the excised lines will be less likely to note passages that recur in the reviews, a repetition that affords insight into Victorian thought and taste. While Dawson's editing enables her to distill a great deal of material, moreover, it also silently eliminates much that her readers might find important and immensely useful. For example, from a review of The Seraphim and Other Poems (1838) in The Examiner of 24 June 1838 (Dawson, 1:33), after the opening sentence Dawson silently omits the reviewer's extended quotation of EBB's prefatory remarks justifying her daringly innovative treatment of Biblical material, including her association of Christ with Prometheus and her distinction between them ("the celestial '1 can forgive!"' contrasting with "the Titanic 'I can revenge'"). Without any notation indicating that Dawson has at this point omitted material from the review--not even ellipses--and without any reference to EBB's prefatory remarks, which are available in the 2010 Pickering and Chatto Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (WEBB 4:289-94), or to the full review available in The Brownings' Correspondence (4:373-74), readers of this Critical Heritage would have no clue that they should turn to EBB's prose preface, which has prompted a great deal of critical attention to the poet's treatment of religion, Romantic Prometheanism, gendered expectations for Victorian writers, and other compelling topics. (As WEBB coeditors Marjorie Stone and I have observed, "EBB's prefatory articulation of her poetic intent in 'The Seraphim' was cited at length" in reviews of the 1838 collection, "attracting as much interest as the poem itself' (WEBB 1:76). Yet Dawson consistently eliminates the numerous discussions of EBB's preface in the 1838 reviews, thereby silently suppressing one of the topics that recurs most persistently in contemporary notices of the collection, even though Dawson's own interesting and able introduction surveying EBB's reception highlights the controversies aroused by "The Seraphim" and "A Drama of Exile" as long, ambitious religious poetry widely judged to be inappropriate material for a woman writer (see Dawson, 5-6, 11). Dawson's practice of noting where quotations of poetry have been omitted from the reviews habituates her readers to expect notice that she has excluded material, making such unremarked omissions particularly misleading and unhelpful. It is also troubling to realize that her selections give no sense of the length of material she omits, so that a very lengthy review of EBB's three early collections An Essay on Mind, Prometheus Bound, and The Seraphim, which extended across five issues of The Sunbeam (for 1, 8, and 22 September, and 6 and 13 October 1838) is represented in less than two and a half pages, with material drawn from the conclusion of the 13 October section not distinguished from the piece for 1 September (the only date mentioned by Dawson). This treatment gives no sense of the heft of the full review (nearly 14 pages of double columns in small font in BC) and the importance of EBB's work implied by the reviewer's extended attention to her poetry.

Doubtless in the interest of packing as many reviews and commentaries into the two Critical Heritage volumes as possible, the work eschews any notes. While students might not miss notes, scholars would want to know what evidence enabled Dawson to reattribute to John Gibson Lockhart a review credited to H. N. Coleridge in Sandra Donaldson's Elizabeth Barrett Browning: An Annotated Bibliography of the Commentary and Criticism, 1826-1990 (NY: GK Hall, 1993, 17) and left anonymous in The Brownings' Correspondence (4:413-16), for example. Scholars would also want to know that this assessment of EBB's work appeared in a review entitled "Modern English Poetesses," and would want the names of the eight other women discussed, details that Dawson declines to note.

While I cannot help missing what is not available in Dawson's new collection of reviews and assessments, it remains a helpful distillation of EBB's reception history. Finally joining the major male Victorian poets accorded Critical Heritage volumes in the 1970s and 1980s (Tennyson, Robert Browning, Arnold, Clough, and Hopkins), EBB is well served by this rich assemblage of selections from contemporary reviews and posthumous assessments of her work. For a scholar seriously interested in her contemporary reception, however, nothing can replace the complete reviews printed in the volumes of The Brownings' Correspondence to date and the Victorian periodicals themselves catalogued in Sandra Donaldson's bibliographic work.

Aurora Leigh's centrality in Victorian studies for both experienced scholars and neophytes is acknowledged by a recent book aimed at students. Published in the Texts and Contexts series by Bloomsbury Press, which intends to provide "the literary, critical, historical context for texts and authors ... in a way that introduces a range of work in the field and enables further independent study and reading," Rosie Miles's Victorian Poetry in Context (London, 2013) identifies Aurora Leigh as a key text (along with Tennyson's In Memoriam, Robert Browning's monologues, and Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market") for beginning students of Victorian poetry, providing sound synopses of the poem and of EBB's biography. Too basic for scholarly ends, the volume might be employed usefully in classes that would also profit from its attention to literary, critical, and social and cultural contexts.

In "'Frosty Cliffs,' Frosty Aunt, and Sandy Beaches: Teaching Aurora Leigh in Oman," Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, 43.4 (2013): 123-45, Marielle Risse meditates on the challenges of teaching the poem in a different cultural context--different from Victorian England not only in time and place hut also in readers' cultural traditions and values. Rehearsing her experience teaching the poem to a class of university students in Oman, she describes ways she had to adjust her pedagogy to address a readership for whom the poem's cultural context was thoroughly foreign. Walking us through her students' reactions to lines from the opening book of the poem vividly conveys features of EBB's irony, vocabulary, and characterization that are mystifying, perhaps inexplicable, in a culture that values self-control over self-fulfillment and family over romantic love. Omani social conventions make Aurora's English aunt a sympathetic figure, "a woman cruelly injured by a thoughtless brother" (138) who failed to organize a good marriage for her. Rather than an oppressor, Aurora's aunt in the Omani classroom became a good, religious woman sadly unappreciated for feeding, clothing, and educating Aurora. Recognizing the essential differences between Omani and English perspectives on the poem's situation, Risse addresses the question of whether she should "try to change my students' opinion of the aunt: what should my goal be in teaching English literature to Middle Eastern students?" (139). Drawing on Stanley Fish, she argues that it is not her job "to bring my students into a Western interpretive community," but to delineate her "Western perspective as an alternative view" (140) and to help them "understand how the same event can be seen differently in different cultures" (142). Her students have not misread Aurora Leigh, she judges, but have experienced it "according to their understanding," for "the meaning of a piece of literature is always and intimately tied to the place where the meaning is worked out" (142). Risse's conclusions may be meaningful in varying degrees for all teachers whose students represent cultures different from EBB's. Interestingly, Risse's conclusions and the interpretations of her students resonate powerfully with adolescent Aurora's culture shock when she moves to England and with Marian Erie's experiences with characters and mores of the middle classes.

In "Refiguring the Subversive in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh and Christina Rossetti's 'Goblin Market'" (Neohelicon [http://link.springer.com/ article/10.1007%2Fs11059-014-0233-1#page-1; published online 10 April 20141) Michael Tosin Gbogi challenges what he sees as a continuing tendency to view Aurora Leigh only in relation to the male poetic tradition--thereby reinscribing the "patriarchal hegemony" that EBB's poem would undermine. To redirect attention to relationships between Aurora Leigh and women-authored texts, he relates EBB's aesthetic practices to Rossetti's in "Goblin Market." Through their parallel attacks on religion, capitalism, and conventional poetic forms, he argues, EBB and Rossetti reveal shared feminist attitudes and strategies. Gbogi challenges critics to undertake extensive comparative analyses of works by women poets across the nineteenth century in order to illuminate the feminist tradition of which EBB is an important part, despite her claim that she looked in vain for literary "Grandmothers," finding only "grandfathers" aplenty (see BC 10:14).

Approaching Aurora Leigh through its innovations in genre, Natasha Moore in "Epic and Novel: The Encyclopedic Impulse in Victorian Poetry" (Nineteenth-Century Literature, 68.3 [December 2013]: 396-422) uses the poem to demonstrate how Victorian poets conveyed the multitudinousness of their age--its rapid changes, heterogeneity, and sense of fragmentation--through hybridized genre, blending practices associated with the epic and the novel in a poem. This hybrid genre attempted to answer mid-century critics' demands "for a kind of 'Poem of the Age'" that would both address a modern theme and in a sense sum up the period as a whole (398), and Aurora Leigh was "probably the most ambitious, most direct, and most successful attempt of the period to forge a poetic vessel as expansive and as heterogeneous as the age itself' (402). Referring to Aurora's insistence in the poem's central Book V that the modern world is as fit for epic treatment as any earlier age, and that the middle-class drawing room is the site of modern epic (405), Moore examines several Victorian reinterpretations of classical epic machinery in the poem. Her assertion that EBB's "satirical inventory of the content of her fine-lady's education" is a "counterpart of the description of the Greek fleet on its way to Troy in the Iliad" is less persuasive than her linking Aurora's ventures into the slums of London and poorer parts of Paris to Odysseus's descent into the underworld. Moore's essay compellingly assesses EBB's epic similes (often criticized by Victorian reviewers) as sophisticated, multivalent expressions of her purposeful "feminization and domestication of the epic" (406-7). Equally compelling is Moore's discussion of the fusion of epic and novel (requiring both "the domestication of the epic" and "the elevation of the realist novel"), which "must not be too successful," for the complete novelization of epic would deplete epic's effectiveness in "dignifying modern everyday life" (410). Moore argues that Aurora Leigh deftly foregrounds the incongruous "jarring" of its novelistic and epic elements to prompt readers to reexamine their understanding of both the present and the past. Further, Moore illuminates the differing but ultimately complementary effects of the encyclopedic impulse in both epic and novel. Whereas epics convey the sense that they are "all-encompassing" and achieve "a summation of a whole and undivided social unity" (416), novels through a "microscopic lens" portray "the chaotic and intractable material of contemporary life." In its length Aurora Leigh, like other Victorian hybrid epic verse-novels, would seem "to neutralize 'the world's multitudinousness'" and claim the possibility of "a new cultural unity for the modern age" (419) by employing both "the microscopic, cumulative detail of the novel and the [macroscopic] big-picture sweep of the epic," not only to convey the complexity and fragmentation of the age but also to "restore order and meaning to the disjointed experience of modernity" (422).

Stefanie Markovits also analyzes the genre of the Victorian verse-novel in "Adulterated Form: Violet Fane and the Victorian Verse-Novel" (ELH 81 [2014]: 635-61). Although Aurora Leigh figures only briefly in Markovits's discussion of the "potentially subversive novelistic aspects" of the genre as she concentrates on Fane's 1875 work, references to EBB's poem reaffirm its centrality and influence in the development of the verse-novel later in the nineteenth century.

Charles LaPorte also examines Aurora Leigh in terms of genre, turning his attention to poetic autobiography. In "Aurora Leigh, A Life-Drama, and Victorian Poetic Autobiography" (Studies in English Literature, 53.4 [Autumn 2013]: 829-51) LaPorte posits that Aurora Leigh is "the period's supreme example of how to navigate the perils of poetic autobiography" (829), perils complicated by expectations for vatic grandeur and assurance established by Wordsworth, on the one hand, and expectations for modesty in women poets, on the other. LaPorte traces EBB's "best strategies for circumventing the dilemmas inherent to poetic autobiography" to the example of the immensely popular work A Life-Drama (1852-53) by Scottish working-class poet Alexander Smith, adding it to Madame DeStael's Corinne and Wordsworth's Prelude as key models for "her semiautobiographical self-representation" (830-31). LaPorte aligns EBB's work with Smith's through her expressed interest in A Life-Drama, through parallels in their plots and themes, and through Pierre Bourdieu's notion of "the cultural game of 'loser wins'" (830, 831-32), arguing that the "authenticity" of both poems derives from the poets' outsider status, with EBB alienated from cultural power by her sex and Smith by his class standing. While EBB avidly followed Smith's success and praised "the poet's stuff' and "noble stuff' in his work (836), she also found much to criticize in his artistry. Moreover, the treatment of sexual material in the two poems differs significantly, Smith's more aggressive than Victorian novelists would have found possible, and EBB's more subtle. Despite these differences, two key parallels link the works: in both, the poet-protagonist accomplishes great literary success, publishing an extremely well-received epic-length poem, and in both, the protagonist values the widespread acclaim less than the admiration of a beloved, plot points that simultaneously affirm the protagonists' literary accomplishment and preserve their humility. Despite these important similarities, LaPorte suggests that EBB's work is more deftly subversive, in that it conscripts the privileged male Romney Leigh to affirm Aurora's poetic achievement, in effect using his masculine power to endorse the achievement of a woman poet who challenges masculine power. In sum, Smith's poem provided EBB a model in which "a poet constrained by identity might instruct the public on how to imagine the celebration of a poet constrained by identity" (847).

Like the several treatments of Aurora Leigh that have concentrated on matters of genre, Alison Milbank's "Eavesdropping from Casa Guidi Windows: Dantesque Overhearing in Victorian Poetry" (Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 35.4 [2013]: 385-97), attends to EBB's work for its uses of strategies of eavesdropping or overhearing important to Victorian dramatic monologues. Tracing this recurring device from Dante through Walter Savage Landor's Imaginary Conversations and the dramatic monologues of Tennyson and Robert Browning, Milbank delineates the reader's role as "an act of overhearing by which the lyric utterance is not allowed to remain in that charmed circle of lyric but is over-determined by being read contextually" (388). In RB's dramatic monologues, for example, "the argument or defence is never addressed directly to us"; tellingly, readers "are free to explore the ambiguities" of the poems "from a critical distance" (389). As Milbank's title implicitly promises, Casa Guidi Windows becomes a focal point in her argument. Beginning "with an actual act of overhearing" a Florentine child singing "bella liberta," the poem's speaker presents herself as an eavesdropper viewing events of the Risorgimento through a window, becoming a "witness" to historical events (391). EBB, through her "eavesdropping position," maintains "her hermeneutic poise" as she invites English readers to support the Risorgimento (392). Aurora Leigh also figures in Milbank's discussion, especially in terms of the impress of Dante on EBB's work. The essay concludes that the "eavesdropping position ... opens a way in which to politicize lyric energies so that ... even when self-addressed, poetry is never merely talking to itself, but is always overheard," thereby enabling "a mode of social reconnection" (395).

In an ambitious essay "Sideways!: Navigating the Material(ity) of Print Culture" (Victorian Periodicals Review, 47.1 [Spring 2014): 1-30), Linda K. Hughes urges us to restore Victorian literature to its web of social connections by reading periodical pieces in the fuller context of a journals' contents, not just "data mining" with keyword searches, and by appreciating them as voices in ongoing conversations. She extends her model of reading "sideways" to include juxtaposing works across genre boundaries. In doing so, Hughes briefly calls attention to underappreciated connections between Aurora Leigh and George Eliot's Adam Bede. Invoking Eliot's enthusiasm for Aurora Leigh, for example, she convincingly argues that Eliot's depiction of the relationship between Dinah Morris and Adam Bede was significantly influenced by "the profound impression" made by EBB's poem (6-7). This line of inquiry expands significantly from the more familiar association of the two works as unconventional treatments of the "Fallen Woman" in Aurora Leigh's Marian Erie and A dam Bede's Hetty Sorrel. Hughes's reading "sideways" draws attention to the two works' "complex depiction of gender, vocation, and romantic courtship" and the "impress" made on the novelist by the poem's delineation of "the validity of a gifted woman's vocation, by precept and practice" (7).

Richard Bonfiglio's "Liberal Cosmopolitanism and the Politics of the Heart(h): Mazzini, Gladstone, and Barrett Browning's Domestication of the Italian Risorgimento" (Modern Philology, 111.2 [November 2013]: 281-307) in effect reads "sideways" by setting aside the constraints of genre to examine EBB's poetic support of the Risorgimento through the "humanitarian rhetoric" of "liberal cosmopolitanism that sought to situate the radical politics" of the movement "within a broader understanding of Europe as a family of nations," "reconciling the threat of revolutionary violence with a love for law, order, and national sovereignty" (281). In quite different writings, the three figures he studies here employed two "domestic tropes" to promote liberal cosmopolitanism: "a politics of the heart" that encouraged readers "to think and feel beyond national boundaries" and "a politics of the hearth" that imagined "home as a microcosm of national and international politics" (282). Bonfiglio remarks that recent analyses of Casa Guidi Windows that have "focused on the speaker's physical orientation" at the window, situating herself within a feminized domestic space that borders the "'masculinized' public/political space," have overlooked "the pervasive violence permeating the imagined domestic space in the poem" (301). His close reading of tropes of violence throughout the poem considerably complicate now standard interpretations of Casa Guidi Windows. Focusing on passages in which EBB desires revolutionary violence in Italy, scorning "Peace that sits / Beside a hearth in self-commended mood," he argues that the poem "uses the figure of the heart to emphasize conflict rather than sympathy" (302). Calling for the kind of revolutionary violence that the English feared, and in effect admitting it into domestic interiors, EBB unflinchingly anticipates the tensions between "the ideal of republican motherhood" and the "masochistic logic" of a "revolutionary political program" that she dramatizes so effectively in "Mother and Poet" (306). Bonfiglio's line of argument ironizes the conclusion of Casa Guidi Windows in which EBB "sentimentally supplements" the "real ending of the poem" (which he locates in 2.426-29) with "the hopeful image of her son as future Anglo-Italian citizen" (305). Bonfiglio's essay provocatively and persuasively assesses how Mazzini's, Gladstone's, and EBB's rhetoric of political affect confronts "the limitations of applying Victorian domestic tropes to foreign political interests" while attempting "to universalize the scope of ... sympathies beyond European borders" (307).

While such sophisticated analysis of the aesthetic strategies and cultural implications of EBB's poetry continues to enrich our appreciation of her work, publications that recirculate sentimental celebrations of the Brownings' famous love story also continue to appear, as exemplified by a new trade book edition of The Love Letters of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning (NY: Skyhorse, 2013) and a play by Florence Gibson entitled How Do I Love Thee? (Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2013). A scholarly work tangentially interesting to EBB scholars, David Herman's "Modernist Life Writing and Nonhuman Lives: Ecologies of Experience in Virginia Woolf's Flush" (Modern Fiction Studies, 59.3 [Fall 2013]: 547-68), remarks that such non-scholarly interest in the Brownings' story accounts for the immense popularity of Woolf's work. He, on the other hand, incisively examines the book's modernist experimentation with the genre of life writing and its representation of "nonhuman ways of experiencing the world" (557). As a sophisticated, insightful reader of Flush, Herman indirectly reminds us that EBB found a very insightful reader in Virginia Woolf, thereby inviting further attention to EBB's poems centered on her spaniel as both innovative life writing and anticipations of Woolf's modeling "transspecies ecologies of mind" (562).

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 help in identifying materials for this review.