Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Stone, Marjorie

Aurora Leigh is even more prominent than usual in EBB criticism this year, with a new "Reading Guide" and several articles or book chapters treating it from various angles (portraiture, religion, gift-giving, and parallels with Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, revision of Wordsworth's Prelude, the discourse of sensibility). EBB's "new poem" (p. 12), as she describes it on March 15, 1853, is also central to Volume 19 of The Brownings' Correspondence, edited by Philip Kelley, Scott Lewis, and Edward Hagan (Wedgestone Press, 2012), covering the period from March 1853 to November 1853. Other works discussed this year include "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point," "The Cry of the Children," "The Seraphim" and two other poems from the same 1838 volume ("Sounds" and "Earth and Her Praisers"), EBB's poems on pictures, and her poems on Felicia Hemans and Letitia Landon. There are also treatments of some spirited writing from her girlhood, her manipulation of meter, the nature of the illness she suffered from, her "elopement" and "honeymoon" narratives (as compared to Mary Shelley's and George Eliot's), and the dissemination of her works among German women writers.

Volume 19, The Brownings' Correspondence and Aurora Leigh

EBB seldom explicitly discusses work on Aurora Leigh in this new volume of The Brownings' Correspondence, after describing it to Mary Mitford in April, 1853, as "the novel or romance I have been hankering after so long--written in blank verse,.. in the autobiographical form,.. the heroine an artist-woman[-] not a painter": a work "intensely modern" and "crammed from the times" (p. 46). Nevertheless, the volume is filled with letters that reveal the contexts shaping her most ambitious work, interspersed with comments on revisions for and revenue from her 1853 collected Poems. As usual, there are many previously unpublished or only partially published letters, or misattributed ones like the letter to Mitford cited above, first published in part in Frederic G. Kenyon's Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1897) as addressed to Anna Jameson. EBB expected that Mitford might not like her plan for Aurora Leigh and the Supporting Documents to this volume reveal the older woman writing to others that the "plan seems to [her] bad because so many trashy novels have taken the same line" (p. 366).

One is struck, first of all, in these letters by EBB's repeated descriptions of her happiness and health, an indication that embarking on the work she had first conceived in the mid-1840s was facilitated by a period of relative vitality and fulfillment. Again and again, she speaks of the "quiet happy life" filled with "poetry" and love (p. 31) in Casa Guidi the previous winter, when she was "very happy and well" again after the "English climate had invalided" her during their London visit in 1852 (pp. 158-159). The winter was followed by a summer and fall in Florence and Bagni de Lucca "round[ing]" out "seven years with so much happiness everywhere!" (p. 283). Both of the Brownings were at work, writing in companionable artistic solitudes--RB on the "volume of lyrics" that would become Men and Women (1855),.. EBB delighted in the fact that Robert had a room "'all to himself'" even in Bagni di Lucca (p. 175) and remarked: "We, neither of us, show our work to one another until it is finished--An artist must, I fancy, either find or make a solitude to work in .. if it is to be good work at all" (p. 213). Pen was flourishing, provoking countless anecdotes of his lisping sayings and childhood joys; meanwhile the aging Flush, seldom mentioned, was going bald, "'in transmigration into a pig,'" a friend quipped (p. 157). Pen also provokes EBB's observations on her "system" of not educating children against their will (p. 263),or her "non-education theory" as she elsewhere describes it (p. 281)--a theory embodied in Aurora's education by her loving father in Book I of her novel-poem.

In Florence, EBB especially enjoyed an "agreeable sort of bachelor society" with RB, Robert Lytton (son of Bulwer Lytton, the novelist), Frederick Tennyson (brother of Alfred), and others, possibly shaping the conventionally masculine role Aurora has as the working intellectual in her cohabitation with Marian in the same city. Sometimes EBB was "the only tea-making animal present" in this society, as on an evening with RB, Lytton, Tennyson, and the American sculptor Hiram Powers on the terrace of Lytton's "Bellosguardo villa" between "fire flies & the stars ... city & mountains dissolving gloriously together" (p. 182), much as they do on the evening of Romney's arrival in Florence in Aurora Leigh. A detailed biographical sketch of Lytton, later an eminent diplomat, in Appendix I provides an invaluable gloss on his life, syphilis, and deteriorating relationship with the Brownings after this initial period in which he was a "favorite" considered not to have "the vices & defects of young men" (p. 284). In the "Baths of Lucca," where the Brownings went to escape the heat and evaded "the watering-place humanities" (p. 180), EBB experienced a "happy liberty" like "a Maenad of old" (p. 276), with picnics and donkey-excursions to mountain-tops. She described to Anna Jameson riding to view "such mountains, such ravines, such chesnut forests and apocalyptic sunsets!" and quipped, "you must represent me mythically, centauresqely, half donkey half woman, when you do "outlines" upon the age" (p. 239). To Sarianna Browning, in another newly published letter, she similarly joked that she was "thinking of appearing in the frontispiece to some new edition, centauresquely, half ass, half woman" (p. 260), reflecting the increasing interest in controlling her public image noted by Michele Martinez (below). The dramatic contrasts between the English and Italian landscape in Aurora Leigh also recur in these letters. "You in England dont know what nature is in her grand & wild aspects," she told her sister Henrietta (p. 265); to the English author Thomas Westwood, she observes of Italian versus English "nature": "You could as soon guess at a tiger from the cat at the hearthstone" (p. 278).

Among literary influences on Aurora Leigh, letters published for the first time in Volume 19 underscore EBB's admiration, as a "thick & thin novel-reader" (p. 162), for Charlotte Bronte's Villette and Elizabeth Gaskell's Ruth in 1853: works she usually mentions in conjunction and accompanied by comparisons to Uncle Tom's Cabin and to Harriet Beecher Stowe as "as an artist and woman of genius," who is not to be named with Miss Bronte--and scarcely with Mrs. Gaskell" (p. 124). While she applauded the political impact of Stowe's novel--the "great bassoon" in contemporary literature (p. 156)--she found it artistically inferior to Villette, "a strong book" (p. 277), and to Ruth, which she described to Anna Jameson as "powerful in parts, & penetrating everywhere," though adding she would rather "have had Ruth not die" (p. 136). She takes this last point up directly with Gaskell herself in a letter expressing gratitude "as a woman" for the novelist's treating a subject "scarcely ever boldly treated of except when taken up by unclean hands," but asking "Was it quite impossible but that your Ruth should die?" (p. 162). She would go on to ensure that her own "fallen woman" figure in Aurora Leigh, Marian Erle, lived on, rather than conventionally dying (or being shipped out to Australia, like little Emily in Charles Dickens's David Copperfield). Recurrent discussions of the 1853 Haymarket production of RB's play Colombe's Birthday, especially in newly published letters between the Brownings and the French critic Joseph Milsand (drawing on a trove of letters now at the Armstrong Browning Library) closely relate to the interiorized dramatic perspective of Aurora Leigh, the critique of stage-drama in Book 5, 11. 267-343, and especially Aurora's call for representing the "worthier stage" of the "soul itself" (1. 340). Commenting on differences between theater in France and the "coarser outline and color" required to draw an audience in England, EBB observed to Milsand of RB's work, "I want him to write dramatic poems for the world, and not dramas for the players" (p. 129).

Discussing other English poets, she comments on the "wonderful strokes of improvement" in Alfred Tennyson's "new edition of the Ode on the Duke of Wellington" (p. 13); on Coventry Patmore's Tamerton Church-Tower, and Other Poems, after reading the title poem "in M.S." (p. 277); and on the spasmodic poet Alexander Smith, "so applauded everywhere" (p. 46). The Brownings read Smith chiefly in "copious extracts in reviews, & by some M.S." sent "by friends & readers" and EBB found "opulence of imagery" but "no unity & holding them together" in his works (p. 277): a revealing judgment, given interpretations of Aurora Leigh emphasizing its spasmodic features, but less often considering her own response to poets now categorized as members of the school. She comments too on the man who would become their parodist: William Edmounstoune Aytoun, the conservative reviewer whose critique of Aurora Leigh would later be cited (inaccurately) as representative of general critical response to the poem. In 1853, she describes Aytoun as a "clever rhymer ... not even the cleverest of rhymers," a man rewarded as "a representative of the Blackwood interest," and a "bad" critic (pp. 183-184).

Another previously unpublished letter indicates that she was awaiting new "romances" by George Sand to make their way to Italy, reflecting another long recognized influence on Aurora Leigh. The same letter reveals that the Brownings were reading "Newman & Froude," pointing to ways in which her novel-poem engages with current religious controversies. She found James Anthony Froude (probably The Nemesis of Faith, 1849) "weak"-though she read him through (whereas "Robert could'nt get through Froude"). As for the celebrated Catholic convert John Henry Newman, she found him "unequally strong--that is, weak at intervals" (pp. 136-137). Especially significant in relation to political and religious thought in Aurora Leigh, she was also reading "French socialists (who are romantic besides)" and "German metaphysicians" (p. 156). "Louis Blanc & Proudhon" (p. 15) were among the "socialists" as well as Charles Fourier, although of Pierre Joseph Proudhon she said "he is neither Constitu[t]ionalist, Revolutionist, Communist, nor what I conceive to be a Socialist" (p. 275). She also read with interest reports of the English socialist Robert Owen's 1853 pamphlet Manifesto, responding to the period's spiritual manifestations (see below), noting the "disbelief in future existence ... mixed up with his whole famous system" (p. 71). She remained an ardent reader of Balzac, who convinced her "that the French language was malleable into poetry" (p. 277). And, of course, by 1853, she was reading Emmanuel Swedenborg, the Swedish mystic so important to William Blake who enjoyed a vogue in the mid-nineteenth century among artists and thinkers such as Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, and Schopenhauer, as Charles LaPorte points out (p. 48, see below). To the Brownings' close friend, Isa Blagden, she comments, "As we believe in Balzac together, so may we in the Swedish seer.... [O]f all makers of systems & dreamers of ideal philosophies, from Plato to Fourier, he stands first" (p. 243). On the one hand, she questioned "points in his theology" which did not "in [her] mind, harmonize with scriptures," but on the other, she remarked that Swedenborg "respects the letter of Scripture ... to a degree beyond what I have been accustomed to think rational" (pp. 243, 71). Swedenborg was especially important to her as "the only thinker who throws any light on" the "so-called spiritual manifestations" (p. 243), referred to initially by EBB as an "extraordinary movement in America" (p. 62).

This volume provides a window on the mid-century wave of speculations about rapping, table-turning, mediums, and testimonies about spiritual communications from upwards of "30,000 people" by 1853, according to Lytton (p. 274). EBB was far from alone among the "company of believers" (p. 165) that included Lytton, Frederick Tennyson, and Powers in her immediate Florentine circle. The "overworld" appeared to be "running" into the "rustling world" in this period (p. 156), mixed in with reports of movements of the Russian Czar that would precipitate the Crimean War. "Will the Czar venture it against us all?" EBB asked, glad that "France and England should stand together on such high ground" (p. 130). It is the new "ghost-stories" (p. 165) that dominate her correspondence, though: stories from America, England, France, Italy, Vienna, and Greece, where in Athens "nothing" was "talked or" "except 'table-moving & spiritual manifestations,'" according to the wife of an American diplomat (p. 115). In Paris, "Louis Napoleon gets oracles from the spirits" and there were "seances for Lamartine" described by Thomas Appleton (Longfellow's brother-in-law, "said to be an able man") at which the American politician Henry Clay "said 'J'aime Lamartine,'" creating a "'conundrum'" (p. 244). With so many stories, even Robert believed "every other day, with intervals of profound skepticism," according to EBB (p. 165; see also p. 271). She acknowledged the "trivial" nature of most communications (p. 269), noted that "writing by hands" was "more susceptible of abuse" and "unconscious will-influence" (p. 245), and flatly rejected certain verses as communicated by "Shelley's spirit" (p. 277). But as someone with "strong convictions of an existence of a spiritual world" (p. 277), she was intensely interested in investigations of manifestations that might confirm the transcendentalist vision underlying Aurora Leigh. So with others she denounced Michael Faraday's letter in The Times on 30 June dismissing table-turning as the result of "quasi involuntary muscular action," as opposed to "electricity" (cited, p. 160n), saying it did not address the evidence of various testimonies; she similarly debated "Baron Humbolt's observation that "'there are epidemics of the mind as of the body'" (cited p. 167). She noted the differing "degree of receptiveness in the physical organizations of men & women" (p. 267), and exclaimed at the conversion of the socialist "Owen of Lanark yielding up his infidelity to a future state, at the bidding of the 'Rappings'" (p. 100). She also looked forward to a visit to Italy by Henry Spicer, the American author of Sights and Sounds (1853), a history of the "American 'Spirit' Manifestations" that cited her own 1844 poem, "Human Life's Mystery" (pp. 14n., 283). And she laughed until she cried over "Dickens's very uncandid but most irresistible account of the spirit-manifestations, in Household Words" (p. 258).

Given current scholarly interest in celebrity culture in the nineteenth century and EBB's own depiction of it in Aurora Leigh, as Eric Eisner has demonstrated in Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Literary Celebrity (2009), the "Supporting Documents" to Volume 19 of The Brownings's Correspondence are also noteworthy for their glimpses of how EBB was viewed by her readers and fans. Sara Jane Clarke, for example, gushes in a journal entry over "the two noble poet-souls, whose union is a poem" after spending an evening with the Brownings (p. 367). In contrast, Ellen Twistleton, after a similar meeting, remarks upon how EBB differed from the "person, half saint, half sibyl" one might expect based on much of her earlier poetry. Twistleton noted her "perfect enthusiasm for George Sand, & and active contrariety to England & the English," the readiness in such a moral poet "to excuse anything for the sake of mental gifts," the "animation & freshness" of her conversation, and her eyes-"the happiest eyes almost ever looked into" (pp. 369-370). The SD also reveal Dante Gabriel Rossetti making what may be the first use of "Barrett Browning" in criticizing an expression in a work by William Bell Scott as "decidedly 'Barrettt-Browningian' & ... feminine in the abstract" (p. 371), as he moved away from his earlier high enthusiasm for her poetry.

Aurora Leigh and Other Works: Critical Studies

This year's most extended work of criticism, Michele Martinez's Aurora Leigh: A Reading Guide (Edinburgh Univ. Press, 2012, Reading Guides to Long Poems), begins with a chapter that succinctly positions EBB's "novel-poem" within the long poem tradition. Martinez references the Odyssey--often evoked in a work "awash in metaphors of swimming," shipwreck, and "homecoming," as she perceptively notes (p. 12), Wordsworth's The Prelude, Byron's Don Juan with its "freewheeling ... switching the gears" between "philosophical and imaginative thought" and "satirical observation" (p. 14), and Tennyson's The Princess, in which she finds a parallel "ideal of male-female partnership in love" despite its differences from Aurora Leigh (p. 15). A "Biographical Account" places Aurora Leigh in EBB's writing career, although with some minor slips, such as the date of 1844 for the periodical publication of "The Cry of the Children" and the description of "Shelly, Keats, Clough and Landor" buried with EBB in the Protestant cemetery in Florence--when Shelley and Keats are buried in Rome (pp. 6-7). Chapter 1 concludes with a "Summary" of the poem and "Aurora Leigh at a Glance." Chapter 2, "Interpreting Aurora Leigh: Text, Commentary, Analysis," frames extracts from all nine books with some original analysis and suitably adapted annotation. The annotation draws on both criticism and scholarly or annotated editions, especially Margaret Reynolds' award-winning Ohio scholarly edition (1992), her Norton Critical Edition (1996), and the updated materials in volume 3 of The Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Pickering and Chatto, 2010, General Editor, Sandra Donaldson, hereafter WEBB). The extracts Martinez chooses combine often-anthologized sections with others less often discussed. Thus, in Book I, she emphasizes not only Aurora's relationships with her mother, father, and aunt and her "poetic vision" (p. 33), but also EBB's use of landscape and portraiture conventions-the last the subject of a scholarly article by Martinez as well this year (see below). Extracts from Books II focus on the key garden scene and debate between Aurora and Romney. Suggestively, Martinez uses extracts from Books III and IV to highlight EBB's use of "epistolary fiction" conventions (p. 61). For Book V, she excerpts not only Aurora's central presentation of her epic "ars poetica" (p. 77), but also a passage from the description of Lord Howe's party, featuring EBB's Byronic satire of socialist reformers "such as Robert Owen and Charles Fourier" (p. 82), and the "young man with the German student's look" (1. 628). The identification of the "young man" as "a long-haired undergraduate sensitive to female beauty" (p. 81) captures his bold gaze at Lady Waldemar's "aspectable" (5.627) breasts in terms student readers might appreciate, but passes over the use of this character (or rather Byronic caricature) to address German "higher criticism" of the Bible, a subject illumined by Charles LaPorte this year. Extracts and commentary on Books VI and VII focus on the depiction of "motherhood and sexual transgression" in Aurora's relationship with Marian Erie (p. 87); a final section on "Poetry and Prophecy" (p. 95) treats the Swedenborgian dimensions and Miltonic echoes in Books 8 and 9.

Chapter 3, "Contexts for Reading Aurora Leigh," similarly excerpts and comments upon both materials whose relevance to Aurora Leigh is well recognized (such as Sarah Stickney Ellis' The Women of England--among the "score of books on womanhood" [1.427] which Aurora's aunt makes her read) and materials that speak to Martinez's scholarly innovation. Thus Ellis is combined with extracts from Anna Jameson's less well known "The Milliners," published in 1842 in The Athenaeum. As contexts for her analysis of Wordsworthian echoes and landscape conventions in Aurora Leigh, Martinez couples excerpts from John Ruskin's Modern Painters with extracts from EBB's little-known co-authored essay on Wordsworth and Leigh Hunt for A New Spirit of the Age (1843). Excerpts from Carlyle's Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850) usefully contextualize the "condition of England" discourse and "oozing" metaphors pervading Aurora's early, class-bound perception of the poor in Book 4. Carlyle is paired with an extracts from an 1849 publication by the socialist Robert Owen that underscore EBB's anti-socialist bias. Chapter 4 of this "Reading Guide" presents thoughtful strategies for "Teaching Aurora Leigh" (such as course unit focused on portraiture), while Chapter 5 usefully lists some selected "Print and Internet Resources"--although her bibliography mistakenly identifies Donaldson as the solo editor, not the General Editor, of the collaborative WEBB edition.

Martinez's comprehensive, concise, and original "Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Perils of Portraiture" (Victorian Review 37, no. 1 (Spring, 2011): 62-91, rightly notes that EBB's "engagement with the visual arts, particularly portraiture," remains one of the most "neglected features" of her "poetry and life writing" (p. 62)-even though the celebrity poet who "sat for approximately forty-six likenesses" and was the first "Victorian woman writer" to be featured in the National Portrait Gallery "knew the perils of portraiture" (p. 62). In an article accompanied by sixteen reproductions, Martinez analyzes EBB's "life-long interest in portrait transactions" (p. 62), portrait poems such as "On a Picture of Riego's Widow" (1826), likenesses of EBB herself, and portraiture in Aurora Leigh. The likenesses (or non-likenesses) include the four-year old winged angel (painted on a snuff-box lid) favored by her father; the Eliza Cliffe portrait she described in her 1831-32 diary as creditable to the amateur artist but "not the picture of me" (cited, p. 67); and family portraits and sketches of her, along with the 1841 Matilda Carter miniature (1841) "liked" (in Facebook terms) by some members of EBB's family, but emphatically disliked by others. Martinez also discusses the 1858 chalk portrait by Eliza Fox Bridell representing the aging poet, as if (the creator of Marian Erie privately and snobbily said), she were "'young & coarse like a milkmaid'" (cited, p. 80). She gives particular atention to the principal later portraits of the poet now endlessly reproduced in digitized and sometimes distorted forms. These include the 1858 oil portrait by Michele Gordigiani, in which EBB said she appeared as a "'large, buxom, radiant matron'"; the idealized 1859 chalk portrait by Field Talfourd in the National Portrait Gallery, which she recognized as a "transfiguration," not a "literal likeness," but capturing her "'spiritual face'" (cited, pp. 80-81); and the frontispiece engraving to the 1859 4th edition of Aurora Leigh, based on a studio photograph subtly altered by Thomas Oldham Barlow following Dante Gabriel Rossetti's instructions (pp. 77-78). Describing DGR as a "fan" of EBB (p. 79), Martinez does not mention his unflattering remarks on EBB's plainness in letters to male contemporaries. Although the 1859 engraving is now widely known, prior to Reynolds's use of it in her 1992 Ohio edition it was not (based on my own recollections). As Martinez notes, however, it was the only authorized one that readers "would have known" until 1871 (p. 81), when the Talfourd portrait entered the NPG, following the rule of including figures only "ten years after death" (p. 77). The rule was established during the animated discussion of forming such a "'Pantheon,'" to use Carlyle's terms, during the 1850s: a discourse that influenced EBB's shift from viewing "portraiture primarily as an art of memorializing" within private, domestic contexts to exerting increasing control over the "portrait production" central to sustaining a "mass readership" and % place of eminence in English literary history (pp. 75-76). The Aurora Leigh frontispiece portrays the poet as a working professional, her body facing a "writing table" and her head turned towards the viewer, in a "three-quarter-length format" and pose "typical of self-portraits by painters" (p. 78). Martinez concludes by discussing portrait metaphors, actual portraits (the posthumous portrait of Aurora's mother, the Leigh Hall family portraits), portrait-narratives, and artists and models in Aurora Leigh.

Aurora Leigh also figures prominently in Charles LaPorte's "'Mrs. Browning's Gospel' and the Art of Revelation," Chapter 1 of his Victorian Poets and the Changing Bible (2011, Univ. of Virginia Press). LaPorte draws on wide knowledge of the "Victorian experience" of the "higher criticism" to challenge "well-trodden literary histories of secularization" that assume "religion was actually dying in mid-century Britain" when, in fact, "biblical scholarship at this cultural moment had a wider circulation than ever before" (pp. 2, 6). "If Victorian literature is really about the disappearance of God, then a work like Aurora Leigh (1856) becomes a quaint throwback," he observes, "whereas if it is about the diversity of religious and secular experience, then Aurora Leigh becomes a pragmatic thought experiment in what might be anything but a post-religious world" (p. 3). LaPorte provides the first detailed analysis of the "young man with the German student's look" (1. 628), stocked with "philosophy" from G6ttingen (1. 756) in Book 5 of the poem, persuasively demonstrating that this figure is modeled less on David Friedrich Strauss, author of Life of Jesus (1846), than on a "conservative perception of him" that "propagates common misperceptions about critical scholarship" (p. 59). LaPorte also analyzes Swedenborgian strains contributing, along with its caricature of Straussian views, to the reception of Aurora Leigh as "Mrs Browning's gospel," in one American reader's words. Despite EBB's relatively superficial knowledge of Strauss, he finds that she "cuts to the heart of the higher critical debate" in poetry "that purports to subvert it," influencing both RB and George Eliot (p. 66).

The first half of LaPorte's substantial chapter on EBB (equivalent to two scholarly articles) analyzes the "tension" between her "devotional reverence for the traditional scriptures" and a "high Romantic devotion to the poet as vates" (p.25). In this case, he focuses on "The Seraphim" and two other hitherto neglected works from the same 1838 collection, "Sounds" and "Earth and Her Praisers" (both works Beverly Taylor and I found challenging to annotate as volume editors for WEBB). Here again, LaPorte is groundbreaking in analyzing "The Seraphim" in relation to Franc[s]ois Rene Auguste de Chateaubriand's "articulation of Christianity as a fundamentally poetic religion" (pp. 37-38) in Le Genie du Christianisme (The Genius of Christianity, 1802). He casts EBB as a disciple of Chateaubriand, later "wean[ed]" from "the celestial aesthetic of the early poetry" by Swedenborg (p. 48), describing the two as her "intellectual heroes" (p. 65)-passing by the Byronic political liberalism and Prometheanism of her earlier works and the Carlylean strands of Aurora Leigh, among other influences. LaPorte also stresses that she "adored Wordsworth (whom she had not met)" (p. 35). As other work published this year indicates, however--both Martinez, above, and Kobayashi, below--EBB was not uncritical of Wordsworth. She also did meet him, in 1836, as both her correspondence and her account of her conversation with Wordsworth, published in volume 5 of WEBB, indicate. LaPorte's first mention of EBB as a "devout evangelical" (p. 2) and his emphasis on her religious conservatism and "lifelong faithfulness to some form of evangelical Christianity" (p. 24) is usefully balanced by Linda Lewis' Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Spiritual Progress (1998), emphasizing EBB's evolution in religious thought and adaptation of female Wisdom figures; Cynthia Scheinberg's Women's Poetry and Religion in Victorian England: Jewish Identity and Christian Culture (2002), treating EBB's knowledge of Hebraic tradition and the influence of figures such as Miriam on Aurora Leigh; and articles by Karen Dielmann exploring the independence of thought fostered by EBB's Congregationalist roots. The poet's detailed explanations of her beliefs to her most religiously minded sister in Scott's Lewis' edition of The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Her Sister Arabella (2002) also suggest less conservatism than LaPorte at points suggests. LaPorte is persuasive in arguing that a reference in "Earth and Her Praisers" to the Earth's age of "Is]ix thousand winters" (cited, p. 31) places EBB among "conservative Bible readers" who affirmed "even the much disputed-creation account of Genesis" (p. 24) and Bishop Ussher's "hopelessly embattled" position on the age of the earth in the 1830s (p. 31). By the 1850s, however, the "biblical literalism" (p. 55) and evangelicalism that LaPorte stresses was much less pronounced. EBB's letters to Arabella, some of them reprinted in The Brownings' Correspondence, volume 19, reveal strong opposition to the formalism of churches and creeds, and to conservative evangelicals and advocates of the "Second Coming" such as John Cumming (see, e.g., p. 41). While she held "fast by the scriptures," by 1853, when she described Swedenborg as more "literal" than herself (above), she was untroubled by "Geological science" contradicting "the common interpretation of the first chapter of Genesis" or by "the new fact, established by geology, that death was in the world before Adam" (BC, 19: 71, 55, 120).

Emily V. Epstein Kobayashi's "Feeling Intellect in Aurora Leigh and The Prelude," SEL 51, no. 4 (2011): 823-848, among this year's most original and well researched articles, turns on subtle distinctions between "intrasubjective" and "intersubjective love" in the two long poems. Kobayashi focuses on EBB's "finally ironic" transformations of Wordsworth's "introspective poetic vision" as epitomized in the encounter with the "blind Beggar" in Book VII of The Prelude, arguing that Aurora, in contrast, is shown "engaging intersubjectively" with revisions of this figure as well as with the urban environment that challenges the limits of Wordsworth's love (pp. 823-824). Kobayashi tracks EBB's increasing emphasis on Wordsworth's "deficiencies, both poetic and personal" (p. 824) in her 1842 review of his The Borderers volume, in her correspondence, and (like Martinez) in her co-authored essay on Wordsworth and Hunt for A New Spirit of the Age. At the same time, she stresses affinities between the visions of both poets by complicating the intra/inter binary she begins with, noting EBB's emulation--although with modifications--of Wordsworth's "transmuting" of "intersubjective encounter into intrasubjective poetic vision" and his fusion of thought and emotion in the "'feeling intellect'" described in the closing book of The Prelude (pp. 828-829). Drawing on earlier treatments of Wordsworthian echoes and body/soul divisions in Aurora Leigh by Kathleen Blake, Linda Peterson, Angela Leighton, and Joyce Zonana, her article also analyzes the differences between Wordsworth's failure to engage with "the urban blind Beggar" and Aurora's engagement with Marian after encountering her in Paris in a scene that echoes both The Prelude and Wordsworth's "My Heart Leaps Up" (p. 832). As Kobayashi observes, Aurora's relationship with "a fully embodied" fallen woman (p. 835) prompts an intersubjective engagement that Wordsworth does not present in his own encounter with a prostitute in The Prelude (p. 840). While "Aurora and Romney's final intersubjective union seems very much like intrasubjective fusion," Kobayashi argues that in this instance "intrasubjectivity approaches intersubjectivity, as spirituality is conceptualized in natural physicality" (pp. 841-42). Although the differences between these two forms of engagement are at points difficult to keep in view in this erudite and densely theorized article, Kobayashi subtly interweaves her analysis of The Prelude and Aurora Leigh, Wordsworth's vision and practice and EBB's, combining insightful criticism and scholarly research (including archival research) in illuminating ways.

Whereas Martinez, LaPorte, and especially Kobayashi all address EBB's mediation of Wordsworth in Aurora Leigh, in "Rejecting the Script of Sensibility: Elizabeth Barrett Browning," Chapter 5 of Sensibility and Female Poetic Tradition, 1780-1860: The Legacy of Charlotte Smith (Ashgate, 2009), Claire Knowles examines EBB's "fraught relationship to her female poetic heritage" (p. 15). Tracing this heritage back through Felicia Hemans and Letitia Landon to Charlotte Smith, Knowles delineates a tradition of sensibility displaced by sentiment and identifies Landon, "one of the last true poets of sensibility writing in the nineteenth century" (p. 135), as a "primary precursor" (p. 138) for EBB. She argues that EBB found Landon's "focus on the suffering female body" of sensibility and on the "material and physical" to be "deeply troubling" (p. 15), and that she "worked long and hard not to reject but to reposition" this focus through a more spiritualized poetics (p. 142). In other words, Knowles agrees with Angela Leighton's important study, Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart (1992), in its argument that "Victorian women's poetry ... grows out of a struggle with and against a highly moralized celebration of women's sensibility" (cited Knowles, p. 151). At the same time, Knowles cogently distinguishes between sensibility and sentiment, and traces this tradition farther back than Leighton to Smith. She does not consider the influence of Smith's Elegiac Sonnets on EBB's own "grieving" sonnets of the early 1840s (an interesting subject for exploration). Like Derek Furr, she focuses more on interpreting "Felicia Hemans: To L.E.L" (1835) and "L.E.L.'s Last Question" (1839), arguing that both illustrate EBB's "aversion" to "Landon's solipsism" (p.137). She also presents an original reading of the sonnet "Tears" (p. 144), suggestively contrasts EBB's neglected lyric "That Day" with Landon's "Love's Last Lesson" (pp. 147-149), and reframes EBB's "Sentimental Poetics" in ways that bring out its complexity (p. 147), much as Peaches Henry also does this year (see below). Knowles reads Aurora Leigh as an "attempt to make a definitive break from a female poetic tradition exemplified in the writing of poets like Hemans and, in particular, Landon" (p. 150): a break that is incomplete because, according to her, Aurora "spends much of her career writing to please an absent Romney" (p. 154) and "becomes a 'real' poet only once she accepts that the individualistic expressions of emotion that are characteristic of the female poetic tradition need to be accompanied by masculinised rational thought" (p. 156). The last point is debatable, however, given the confounding of the gendered categories of thought and feeling in Aurora Leigh underscored by Kobayashi's article on "Feeling Intellect" this year.

Jill Rappoport casts new light on EBB's connections with Charlotte Bronte in "Fictions of Reciprocity in Jane Eyre and Aurora Leigh," Chapter 2 of Giving Women: Alliance and Exchange in Victorian Culture (Oxford, 2012)--connections similarly brought out by newly published letters speaking to EBB's admiration for Bronte cited above. Refreshingly, Rappoport departs from conventional comparisons between the "humbling" of the heroes (p. 45) that emphasize parallels between "the blazing halls of both Rochester's and Romney's homes," "their heroic attempts to rescue the arsonists" (p. 63), and above all their subsequent literal and symbolic blinding. As she demonstrates by approaching the two texts within a wide-ranging study of women's gift-giving in Victorian culture, this conventional focus has obscured other important parallels, especially the ways that both Aurora and Jane "use financial gifts to circumvent property law and construct new family ties" (p. 6). Rappoport's analysis of the two heroines' circumvention of "common law practices of couverture and primogeniture" (p. 46) is especially original. As we learn of Aurora's disinheritance through practices that punish her father for marrying a foreigner and consolidate the "Leigh property for the benefit of a single male heir" (now Romney), Aurora's aunt emerges as an unexpectedly "tender" figure (p. 56), anguished because she is legally thwarted from providing for her niece. Romney's attempt to gift Aurora with 30,000 [pounds sterling] that itself circumvents these laws is more well-meaning than Rochester's attempts as a Sultan-like lover to shower Jane with gifts. But Aurora rightly views it as a "snare" to her independence because, as Rappoport notes, contrary to Jacque Derrida's "twentieth-century philosophical assertion that the recognition of a gift dissolves it," for "Aurora as for other nineteenth-century women," being indebted to male gifts has lasting consequences (p. 57). Rappoport also applies gift theory by Marcel Mauss and others to Romney's socialist scheme to lift Marian Erle out of poverty through a utilitarian marriage, exemplifying inequities in which Aurora is a complicit partner in privilege (p. 59). The exchange between Aurora and Marian in Florence "in which both women help each other" is more reciprocal and equal, as Rappoport treats it, although she notes that the "same narrative that celebrates Aurora's ability to reject a gift seems unable to imagine the same agency afforded to a working-class, 'fallen' woman" (p. 61). More debatably (judging by the critical ink spilled on the issue), she finds a similar reciprocity and a righting of "unbalanced patriarchal economies" (p. 64) in the humbling of Romney and Rochester, arguing that "just as Jane and Aurora use gift transactions to rewrite their connections with female friends and partners, even their marriages create non-conventional kinship out of balanced gift exchange." Chapter 1 of Rappoport's study is also relevant here, for a discussion of gift-giving and exchange (sometimes in relation to abolition), in annuals prior to and including The Liberty Bell, thus providing a useful context for a brief treatment of "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point" (pp. 35-37).

Aside from Rappoport's brief consideration, "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point" is discussed in two articles this year. In "Troubling Memories: Nineteenth-Century Histories of the Slave Trade and Slavery," Transactions of the RHS 21 (2011: 147-169), the distinguished historian Catherine Hall describes a University College of London project "concerned with understanding the legacies of slave ownership," noting that "less has been said about the memories and histories of slave owners" than slaves (pp. 147-148) and the "stain" or "guilt" such memories entailed (p. 152). She considers EBB, a "leading woman poet" who benefited from the financial "compensation" offered to West Indian slave-holders in 1833, in conjunction with Lord Holland, a leading Whig peer whose family similarly benefited from compensation, and Thomas Babington Macaulay, son of a leading abolitionist (Zachary Macaulay) and "the great historian of England" (p. 153). Particularly intriguing parallels, with some differences, emerge between EBB's family history in Jamaica and Lord Holland's. Holland, both a nephew of the abolitionist Charles James Fox and a "West Indian proprietor" through marriage to a Jamaican heiress, supported "abolition of the slave trade in 1806" but in 1823 "did not support the abolitionist attempt to abolish slavery" (pp. 153-154). He then continued to oppose "immediate emancipation," was largely silent on the subject of slavery in his Memoirs of the Whig Party, and received over 2,200 [pounds sterling] in compensation during the "apprenticeship" period that ended West Indian slavery gradually between 1833 and 1838 (pp. 154-156). Like Lord Holland, EBB's father, Edward Barrett Moulton-Barrett "was a Whig, a supporter of the 1832 Reform Bill and a Wesleyan Methodist," but although he "instructed his attorney to abolish the whip," he likewise did not support abolition and received 7,800 [pounds sterling] for "397" slaves on his Jamaican "Oxford and Cambridge estates" (p. 159). Hall subtly analyzes EBB's "ambivalence about her family connection" to slavery (p. 160): on the one hand, her acceptance of legacies and of shares in the ship David Lyon, both derived from the West Indian trade; on the other, her support of abolition in 1833 and her representation of a nameless, raped slave woman in "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point." Although Hall states that she "began" this poem "in Pisa in 1846" (p. 160), evidence indicates she made an initial start while still in England (see Stone and Taylor's Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Selected Poems [Broadview Press, 2009] on the dating of the poem's "false start" and its initial male speaker, as well as their headnote in WEBB, vol. 2). Hall concurs with an unpublished paper by Cora Kaplan arguing that the US setting of the poem allowed EBB "to use elaborate, melodramatic, and violent scenarios ... without implicating her family" (p. 160) and concludes that although "she hated slavery, yet she had lived much of her life on the proceeds of the plantations" (p. 162).

In "The Margins of the Dramatic Monologue: Teaching Elizabeth Barrett Browning's 'The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point," VP 49, no. 4 (2011): 557-568, Melissa Schaub takes up a subject earlier addressed by Tricia Lootens (see the 2006 special issue of Victorian Poetry on EBB). Whereas Lootens, in her richly contextualized article, addresses the fraught pedagogical challenges the poem poses based on her experience at the University of Georgia, Schaub describes her own rather different experience of teaching the poem in a "Women's Literature class" (evidently in North Carolina, judging by her "Contributors" affiliation). Schaub finds students only too ready to sympathize with, rather than "judge" (in Robert Langbaum's terms) the slave speaker's act of infanticide-and also prone to conflate the speaker with the poet herself, with occasional students even assuming that "Elizabeth Barrett Browning was gang-raped and killed her own baby" (p. 558). She argues that such "a strong misreading" (although one might see it as a weak misreading rather than Bloomian misprision) reveals "the nature of the dramatic monologue itself as EBB "stretches the convention of the form" (p. 558) in a poem that she finds completely lacking "the irony" that is a "hallmark" of the genre. Schaub's initial generic framing of Victorian dramatic monologues seems somewhat dated, relying on Robert Langbaum's widely influential The Poetry of Experience (1957) much more than scholars who have historicized the form's development, its diverse manifestations in the hands of various poets, and its effects on differently situated readers. Including work by A. Dwight Culler, Alan Sinfield, Glennis Byron, Linda Hughes, Herbert Tucker, Ekbert Faas, Dorothy Mermin, Cynthia Scheinberg, Patricia Rigg, E. Warwick Slinn, and Cornelia Pearsall, this now large body of scholarship calls in question some of Schaub's broader generalizations about the form. Schaub's thought-provoking article gathers strength as it proceeds however, and she does engage to a degree with Mermin's works on the audience in dramatic monologues and aspects of Slinn's and Pearsall's theorizing of the genre in terms of performative speech acts. She is most original in discussing the effects of the "highly wrought poetic and biblical diction" in "The Runaway Slave" on contemporary students accustomed to "linguistic realism" (p. 560) and in analyzing the representation of infanticide. Schaub notes that this representation produces "extreme sensations in many readers" and in herself as "the mother of a small child," perceptively showing how this effect is created through the apparently accidental start of the "killing," the "concrete detail," the "recursiveness of the description," and the "tortured syntax and punctuation" (p. 562). At the same time, she finds that her own students are only too ready to accept the poem's abolitionist perspective on the speaker's infanticide: "We do not judge her, only slavery" (p. 564). This is an interesting study of some student responses to "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point," but more reflection on the body of rather anecdotal evidence used would have been useful. Schaub does not address the racial composition of her classroom (a central issue in Lootens's article), for example, or raise the question of whether a class with more men in it than most Women's Studies classes might result in differing responses to the act of infanticide. Her statement that the poem "still" is not one of EBB's "more commonly studied texts" (p. 558) is also open to question, since its very inclusion in The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women from which she takes her text suggests its now relatively canonical status.

Although it is not primarily focused on pedagogical issues, Peaches Henry's "The Sentimental Artistry of Barrett Browning's 'The Cry of the Children,'" VP 49, no. 4 (2011): 535-556, will be extremely useful to those teaching a work that, unlike "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point," perennially appeared in traditional anthologies but poses different challenges. As Henry notes, while "The Cry of the Children" was widely recognized as one of the "best" works in EBB's 1844 Poems, "modern critical opinion has routinely dismissed it as too religious, sentimental, or socially conscious" (p. 535), in part because "Barrett Browning suffered from the nineteenth- and twentieth-century devaluation of sentimentality in a more complex and profound way" than other writers of her era "in Britain or the United States" (p. 537). Henry succinctly analyzes and vigorously interrogates this critical tradition, arguing that EBB's "deployment of sentimental strategies and devices often resulted in some of her most intellectually complex and aesthetically powerful poetry" (p. 536). To advance this case, she reframes "The Cry of the Children" within theoretical and historical reassessments of sentimental literature in the fields of both Victorian Studies and American Literature, drawing on critics such as Jane P. Tompkins, Joanne Dobson, and Fred Kaplan and scholarship on the novel as well as poetry. Henry also makes adept use of nineteenth-century reviews of EBB's poetry to tease out the underlying "sentimental aesthetics" (p. 543) that informed the response to the poem, and she historically contextualizes it through detailed quotations from the Royal Commission Reports on Children's Employment and Victorian newspapers. While it is routinely noted that these reports were a catalyst for the poem's composition, earlier critical treatments of it typically note this only in passing, much as the poem is always anthologized but seldom closely analyzed, with the exception of recent readings by Caroline Levine and Herbert Tucker in an exchange in 2006 in Victorian Studies on what Levine terms "Strategic Formalism." Henry takes the poem on more historicist terms, presenting the most extended close reading to date of "The Cry of the Children" within the theoretical and historical contexts of sentimentalism. She gives particular attention to its two key motifs of "crying" and the turning factory wheels and identifies a number of biblical echoes that have not been previously noted. For instance, Henry analyzes the hallucinatory, "dream-like" operation of the wheels in light of the prophet Ezekiel's vision of God enthroned on a chariot mysteriously connected to "whirling intersecting wheels with eyes around the rim," observing that "[w]hereas Ezekiel's wheels signify God's omnipresence, omnipotence, and omniscience--His power and dominion over the world--the factory wheels represent the corresponding profane power of the Captains of Industry over the lives of the children" (p. 548). This historically contextualized, original, and cogent reading illuminates the reasons why "The Cry of the Children" proved to be so powerful for readers in the nineteenth century on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as in Russia and Italy.

While Henry brings out the serious side of EBB's manipulation of a sentimental aesthetic in one of her most widely known poems, in "Girl Professional: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Serious Play," The Journal of Browning Studies 2 (2011): 5-17, Sandra Donaldson analyzes the vein of humor evident even in her copious, yet seriously professional juvenilia. The full scope of this juvenilia is now apparent in the hundreds of pages of works in WEBB, Volume 5, edited by Donaldson, Rita Patteson, Stone, and Taylor. Donaldson's article begins with some fruitful comparisons between the young Brontes and Elizabeth or "Ba" and her closest brother Edward or "Bro." As she notes, collections such as the Berg "Poems by Elizabeth B. Barrett," which also includes some of Bro's writing, indicate that works by the young Moulton-Barretts were effectively "published" in the form of manuscripts circulating within the "public" of an "extended" familial "community of readers" (p. 6). Charades and poems written by the children were also marked "For Sale," with a "price" and "place of publication"--"usually Nursery Row"--added (p. 7). The most amusing pieces of juvenilia that Donaldson discusses are "three polite letters in French" to Homer, Socrates, and Pindar, "presumably an exercise" that the "sixteen-year-old EBB" playfully adapted, in which she addresses the classical authors "in a friendly yet formal way, as a junior colleague might" (p. 8). Homer comes first, as she tells him how much more she loves him than his "rivale" Virgil, laments that he is dead ("Quel dommage!"), and vows her eternal friendship. She addresses Socrates as "Monsieur le Philosophe," emphasizing the majesty his beard gives to him, jokes about his shrewish wife (who has made him unaccustomed to politeness), and in a postscript, hopes to see him often when she comes to Hell. The letter to Pindar is the shortest, because she does not know enough Greek to understand his poetry perfectly, as she indicates to him. Donaldson also suggestively treats EBB's Homeric epic The Battle of Marathon and her "Fragment of 'An Essay on Woman'" (reflecting her adolescent reading of Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman), as examples of the "classic pedagogical technique of imitatio": "by adopting the subject and style of a wide array of writers," EBB became "imbued with and also transformed the ideas and expression of the thinkers and writers she admired" (p. 10).

One result of this professional artistic training, EBB's technical interest in meter, is briefly considered in two books this year. In The Music of Verse: Metrical Experiment in Nineteenth-Century Poetry (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), Joseph Phelan's informed attention to "the recovery of nineteenth-century metrical thinking in all its peculiarity and complexity" (p. 2) includes mention of EBB in Chapter 4, "'The Accent of Feeling': Towards Free Verse." As Phelan notes, accounts of the historical emergence of free verse typically focus on the "beginning of the twentieth century"; they also radically simplify and distort earlier "attempts to dispense with the conventional metrical regulation of English verse." Paradoxically, he points out, these innovations were often "undertaken under the aegis of classical authority" or through appeals to a "national tradition" (p. 134). Like Blake the "young Elizabeth Barrett" looked to Milton "to sanction her own departures from metrical orthodoxy," commenting in a letter to Uvedale Price that the English epic poet wished "to free English verse from the Iambic & Trochaic dynasties" (p. 143). Analyzing her vocabulary in this particular letter as "a confusing mixture of accentual and quantitative terminology," Phelan does not otherwise comment upon EBB's extended correspondence with Price on classical meter. He does note, however, her use of an "imitative harmony" modeled on Milton's in the blank verse of Aurora Leigh (p. 144), citing Robert Stark's illuminating study of this subject (see the 2011 "Year's Work"). EBB's correspondence with Price is also the aspect of her interest in meter considered by Jason David Hall in "A Great Multiplication of Meters," the illuminating introduction to his edited collection Meter Matters: Verse Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century, (Ohio University Press, 2011). This parallel focus in the two studies is intriguing, possibly reflecting the neo-formalist swerve in Victorian poetry studies and the renewed attention to technical aspects of versification, including classically influenced meters. In contrast to Phelan, however, Hall emphasizes the technical expertise, not the "confusing mixture of accentual and quantitative terminology," in EBB's correspondence with Price. He remarks, that, while "she may have had an ad hoc classical education ... the young Elizabeth Barrett nevertheless knew her classical meters sufficiently well to exchange pointed comments on accent and quantity" with the author of Essay on the Modern Pronunciation of the Greek and Latin Languages (1827) (p. 13), Drawing on Yopie Prins's work, Hall also stresses EBB's relative achievement within "otherwise male-dominated specialist discourses" on the "theoretical principles" of meter. Hall's analysis of the role of meter, both in defending class and gender structures through exclusive knowledge and in subverting these, provides a suggestive framework for more consideration of EBB's wide-ranging experiments with poetic meter and form, a subject thus far treated by Alethea Hayter, Fred Manning Smith, Margaret Morlier, as well as Levine, Tucker, and Stark.

Anne Buchanan Weiss revisits the much mythologized subject of EBB's illness in "Of Sad and Wished-For Years: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Lifelong Illness," Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 54 no. 4 (2011): 479-503. Weiss argues that "the mystery" of EBB's "illness can finally be explained," hypothesizing that the poet suffered from the "rare muscle-weakening disorder ... hypokalemic periodic paralysis" or HKPP (p. 479). Symptoms of HKPP can include muscle weakness or paralysis, episodic attacks (beginning in puberty), reaction to heat and cold, heart palpitations, and response to certain foods or to medicines such as digitalis (p. 501). Weiss's theory, prompted by her daughter's experience with HKPP and sense of "eerie familiarity" on reading the courtship correspondence of the Brownings (p. 480), is intriguing. Her diagnosis seems most plausible, if still quite conjectural, in relation to the mysterious illness EBB experienced in adolescence and the feelings of recurrent weakness she registers in her 1831-32 diary, especially the "horrible dead precursive feeling" she describes feeling "all thro' my hands & feet" (cited, p. 489). EBB's most serious illness, however, beginning with the rupture of a blood vessel in her lung in 1837, was followed by the spitting of blood and chronic coughing, and "cough is not a symptom of HKPP" according to Weiss (p. 490). Thus, even though EBB's description of her extreme weakness and of heart palpitations keeping "pace with the Wild Huntsman" (cited p. 491) in 1838 accords with the HKPP diagnosis, as does her description in 1846 to RB of her "continual aching sense of weakness" and "palpitation" (cited, pp. 495-6), one is left with the nagging thought of that cough. The cough also remained the key feature that EBB associated with periods of illness in her later life. In 1853, in one of the letters in The Brownings' Correspondence, volume 19, she remarks, "Italy has done me great good-I am well & without a cough to signify--there's always a sort of potential cough with me .. a sense of the sleeping lion .. but I dont cough .. above once or twice in four & twenty hours" (p. 135). Weiss's case might have been more convincing if she had relied less on popularizing biographies by Margaret Forster and Peter Dally, had more carefully documented and researched past interpretations of EBB's illness, and had made more use of primary materials in The Brownings' Correspondence. As it is, the medical aspect of her interdisciplinary analysis seems stronger than the literary aspect. Weiss herself aptly concludes that she sees the poet "through HKPP-colored lenses" (p. 502).

Finally, two essays this year approach EBB in continental and comparative contexts, in relation to other women writers. Valerie Sanders presents an engaging and insightful analysis of parallels between three "eloping women" (p. 85)--Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Barrett, and George Eliot--in "Writing Elopement: Secrecy and Sensation" in She's Leaving Home: Women's Writing in English in a European Context, edited by Nora Sellei and June Waudby (Peter Lang, 2011), pp. 81-96. While Sanders acknowledges that EBB was "actually married" when she left England with RB, unlike Shelley and Evans, she points to a number of parallels in the three women's narrations of their flights with partners to sexual experience and Europe, "in circumstances that made an easy reconciliation impossible with the woman's family" (p. 85). All three narratives move uneasily between "the honeymoon and the travel narrative," reflecting the tension Helena Michie notes in the honeymoon journey beween "'privacy and publicity, invisibility and display'" (p. 84). In "all three cases the mothers had long since died," and defiance is focused on fathers and brothers (p. 86), with trouble coming "from the woman's family rather than the man's" (p. 87). Although EBB's "elopement" was the "least scandalous," it is "described in the most melodramatic language" in her letters to her sister Arabel, in letters drawing on "Gothic" conventions. Sanders concludes that the shifting and "uncertain readership" of these elopement narratives and their "fluctuating style and genre, and significance as private/public events" manifest "their awkwardness or lack of place in literary history" (p. 94).

EBB is considered in relation to German writers and the Viennese critic and philosopher Helen Druskowitz in Helen Chamber's scholarly investigation, "Reading and Responding to English Women Writers: Annette von Droste-Hullshoff, Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach and Helen Druskowitz," Women's Writing 18, no. 1 (2011): 86-102. Druskowitz's book Drei englische Dichterinnen (Three English Poetesses, 1885), on Joanna Baillie, EBB, and George Eliot, placed these authors "in a wider European context" and introduced EBB's works to Ebner, although Ebner was "unimpressed" by Drukowitz's translations of the English poet's works (p. 94). Presenting EBB "in the English-speaking world as the greatest female lyric poet of all time" (but claiming Droste as her "equal" in Germany), Druskowitz analyzed weakness in EBB's earlier works, emphasized "her intellectual powers and originality," and found her most distinctive feature in the "strength of sentiment" taking on "the intensity of irresistible passion" in her poetry (p. 96). She found the "high degree of subjectivity" in Aurora Leigh acceptable because of the author's "very idiosyncratic and interesting mind" (pp. 96-97), and concluded her essay with "a strongly worded expression" of EBB's "special significance for women readers in Germany as in Britain" (p. 98). Chambers' transnational and comparativist perspective opens a window on a wider view of EBB, whose impact in Germany has been relatively uninvestigated in criticism written in English.

Once again, I would like to thank Cynthia Burgess of the Armstrong Browning Library for her help in identifying materials for this review.