Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Stone, Marjorie

Work covered this year is notable for its interdisciplinary range, internationalization, and volume. Topics include not only the politics of gender and nations, prosody, religion, the classical tradition, and relationships with other writers (this year, George Sand, Margaret Fuller, Emily Dickinson, and Robert Browning), but also medievalism, Darwinism, dance, sculpture, domestic servants, animal/human boundaries, literary tourism, and psychology. New publications in the US, Britain, France, Canada, Germany, Australia, and Uraguay include Volume 18 of The Brownings' Correspondence, a monograph by Simon Avery, more than twenty book chapters and articles, and a popularizing biography; there are also new digital resources. Along with criticism on Aurora Leigh, Sonnets from the Portuguese, Casa Guidi Windows, and well-known shorter works like "The Cry of the Children" and the sonnets to Sand, critics discuss EBB's three poems on Queen Victoria, her ballads, her poems to Flush, her 1831-32 diary, religious works such as "The Virgin Mary to the Child Jesus," and unpublished works such as the "The Princess Marie." With the exception of Avery, this scholarship does not yet draw upon new information and materials in the Pickering and Chatto Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (hereafter WEBB; see the 2010 "Year's Work"). Reviews of the edition have begun to appear, however, by Anthony Harrison and Stephen Prickett in the on-line journal Review 19 <http://www.nbol.19.org/view> and by Joe Phelan in the TLS (July 14, 2010). There is also a review essay by Alison Chapman, "Revolutionizing Elizabeth Barrett Browning," in Victorian Literature and Culture (39, no. 2 (2011) addressing the "new EBB"--"embedded within her complex intellectual, literary, and cultural networks: provocative, politicized, experimental, and modern"--revealed by recent scholarship

Recovery of this "new EBB" would have been impossible without the The Brownings' Correspondence (Wedgestone Press, 1984- ), and other editions of letters steadily being incorporated into its comprehensively annotated pages. Edited by Philip Kelley, Scott Lewis, and Edward Hagan, Volume 18 covers the period from February 1852 to March 1853. Reflecting EBB's self-identification as a "citizenness of the world" and her love of "wild wandering gypsey habits" (pp. 126, 254), the volume conveys the Brownings' continental mobility. The first section finds them living an animated life in Paris on the Champs Elysees in the political ferment following the coup d'etat of Louis Napoleon, mingling with writers and intellectuals. Accounts of EBB's long desired meeting with George Sand feature frequently. The middle section covers the Brownings' stay in London from July to early October, 1852, where they saw or met many other English and American writers, among them Tennyson, Coventry Patmore, John Ruskin--whose collection of "Turners" EBB considered "divine" (p. 220), James Russell Lowell and his poet-wife Maria, Richmond Monckton Milnes, and the Christian socialist Charles Kingsley. Kingsley is one of the probable models for Romney in Aurora Leigh: EBB expresses admiration for his "originality & intenseness" despite his "wild & theoretical" ideas (pp. 208, 205). He had a less charitable opinion of the Brownings, however, as a letter cited in the volume's "Supporting Documents" indicates: "he [RB] is very clever, but low-bred, effeminate.., a man who fancies that a man can be a poet by profession--& do nothing else--a wild mistake. She is wonderful: but very obstinate in her bad taste, & considers Socialism as stuff" (p. 370). The final part of Volume 18 covers the Brownings' journey back to Italy with a stop in Paris to savor "the palpitating life" of the boulevards (p. 274). Most of the letters are by EBB. While many are previously published in whole or in part, numerous letters are here published for the first time, including two to the women's rights activist Bessie Rayner Parkes. Some of the most revealing new letters are to Sarah Jane Streatfeild, of whom EBB remarked that she "is wild as a bird & won't sit upon everybody's finger" (p. 152). Streatfeild's short but intimate relationship with the Brownings is detailed in Appendix I (pp. 353-356). Although EBB did not begin concerted work on Aurora Leigh until she had returned to Florence in 1853, many details in these letters suggest the impact of her experiences in Paris and in London in 1852 on her most ambitious work.

In Elizabeth Barrett Browning (2010, Northcote), Simon Avery uses the "search for a 'home'" as a focus for a concise, engaging analysis of poems throughout EBB's career (p. xviii), complementing his earlier analyses in Elizabeth Barrett Browning (2003, Longman), coauthored with Rebecca Stott, and his essays in the 2006 VP and Victorian Review bicentenary issues on EBB. Avery is especially adept at contextualizing EBB's poetry within intellectual and political as well as literary history. Chapter 1, "The Shaping of a Poetics," explores EBB's "changing sense of her role as she shaped and refashioned her poetics," focusing on "the extensive number of poems which she composed about poets" (p. 2) or poetic fame, such as "The Progress of Genius," "The Vision of Fame," and "The Poet's Vow," as well as poems addressed to or memorializing Byron, Wordsworth, William Cowper, Felicia Hemans, Letitia Landon, and George Sand. Avery concludes that "few poets seem to have constantly interrogated their own vocation so overtly, so publicly and so obsessively" (p. 26). Chapter 2, "The Search for a Spiritual Home," analyzes "The Seraphim" and "A Drama of Exile," reading them in the context of religious controversies of the 1830s and 1840s precipitated by scientific developments and biblical higher criticism. Like Anthony H. Harrison, Avery finds "'adventurous poetic strategies'" (p. 33) in "The Seraphim"; in treating "A Drama of Exile," he addresses the "generically complex" tactics used to rewrite the "andocentric tradition" (p. 36). Chapter 3, "The Search for an Emotional Home," discusses the ballads of the 1830s and 1840s, arguing that "whilst EBB repeatedly explores love as a potential solution to her speakers' quests for a secure home in the world, these explorations often reveal love and relation-ships to be unsatisfactory and anxiety-ridden at best and, indeed, sometimes brutally destructive" (p. 42). Avery's analysis of "The Romaunt of Margret," EBB's 1836 gothic ballad about a demonic double, is particularly insightful. He also develops suggestive contrasts between the "single-sex," "ecological" erotic fantasy of "An Island" and the blighted heterosexual romantic love in "A Romance of the Ganges," "The Romance of the Swan's Nest," and "The Romaunt of the Page."

In Chapters 4 and 5, Avery discusses "The Search for a Political Home" in EBB's poetry and "Restructuring Home" in Aurora Leigh. As he notes, "EBB's career spans five decades which witnessed a series of major nationalist uprisings across Europe ... galvanized by ideals of the French Revolution" (p. 56). This is a point underscored by the poet's remark in a newly published letter in Volume 18 of The Brownings' Correspondence: "Wherever we go we stand face to face with a revolution" (p. 55). Along with "The Cry of the Children" and "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point," Avery analyzes early poems prompted by the Greek nationalist patriot Rhigas Feraios and by Teresa del Riego, widow of a Spanish patriot, as well as the juxtaposition in Poems (1844) of "Crowned and Buried" on Napoleon and "Crowned and Wedded" on Queen Victoria. Despite EBB's "Whig" support for "the legal, civil and religious rights of the individual" (p. 55), Avery concludes that "the notion of a supportive state was fundamental to the ideal of home she constantly interrogated in her works even if it often seemed impossible to bring into being" (p. 70). In Aurora Leigh "the eponymous heroine" finds "a resolution to the quest for home which draws together the spiritual, emotional and the political"--but only through "negotiation of the dominant nineteenth-century family unit" (pp. 71, 74). Avery discusses the successive journeys that are "structurally central to the text" (p. 75), presenting an especially original argument for the pivotal role of France, the "'poet of the nations,'" in providing "the greatest opportunities for social and political transformation" (p. 87)--a departure from the prevailing focus on Italy's role in EBB's life and writing, continuing this year (see below). While Aurora Leigh succeeds in envisaging "a suitable home for the intellectual woman in the modern world" (p. 98), Avery finds a more pessimistic view in EBB's later poems. In a coda, "The Exile and the Empty Home," he observes that in Poems before Congress (1860) and the posthumous Last Poems (1862), the "establishment of a political homeland seems further away than ever": "time and again EBB's speakers and protagonists are left in a state of exile--from God and religious certainty, from love and a meaningful relationship, or from supportive political structures," as in the "empty heart and home" depicted in "Parting Lovers" (1. 56), a companion poem to "Mother and Poet" (pp. 99-101).

EBB's critique in Book V of Aurora Leigh of the poet who "trundles back his soul five hundred years" (1. 191) indicates that, unlike many of her contemporaries, she did not turn back to the Middle Ages for a spiritual or cultural home. In this respect, as Clare Broome Saunders demonstrates in Women Writers and Nineteenth-Century Medievalism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), she resembled numerous other women writers. Bringing welcome attention to writers excluded from earlier studies of nineteenth-century medievalism, Saunders argues that poets such as Amelia Opie, Hemans, Landon, and EBB used medievalism to critique the "revival of past errors in the present," especially gendered chivalric codes, and to "provide a mask for political commentary considered inappropriate for their sex" (pp. 6-7). Chapter 1, "Recasting the Courtly: Translations of Medieval Language and Form," includes an analysis of Sonnets from the Portuguese as a sequence subverting "a poetic form dominated from its medieval origins by men" (p. 14)--a well-established critical approach, though one contested this year by Marianne van Remoortel (below). Chapter 1 also juxtaposes EBB's "translation" of courtly love conventions with the less familiar medieval translations of Louisa Stuart Costello. This opens up new terrain, more especially because Costello's translations of early French poetry were praised in the New Monthly Magazine in 1835, raising the question of their possible influence on EBB's participation in medieval translation projects such as The Poems of Geoffrey Chaucer, Modernized (1841) and the teeming medieval allusions in poems of the early 1840s such as "The Lost Bower" (documented in the WEBB headnotes and annotations). In Chapter 3, "Romance, Gender and the Crimean," Saunders first expands upon her 2006 article in the VP bicentenary issue by discussing ballads such as "The Romaunt of the Page" and "Rhyme of the Duchess May," then presents an innovative analysis of EBB's comments on Florence Nightingale and the Crimean War in the context of "images of medieval chivalry and legendary heroic deeds" in government propaganda and the popular press, designed to obscure "firsthand accounts of suffering" on the battlefront (p. 63). Chapter 4, surveying treatments of Joan of Arc by Robert Southey, Thomas de Quincey, and others, again provides an illuminating context for a remark in EBB's correspondence: in this case, her indication to Mary Russell Mitford in 1841-42 that she was considering an extended work on the French warrior maid, as opposed to Napoleon (Saunders, pp. 90-91). This chapter also treats the Joan of Arc allusions in EBB's sonnets to George Sand, as well as the unpublished ballad "The Princess Marie" on the sculptor-daughter of King Louis Philippe of France, now available in WEBB (5:616-625). Chapter 5, "Queenship, Chivalry, and 'Queenly' Women in the Age of Victoria" includes a discussion of EBB's work of juvenilia defending Queen Caroline and her three poems on Queen Victoria: "The Young Queen" and "Victoria's Tears," both published in 1837 in The Athenaeum, and "Crowned and Wedded"--dated as 1844 by Saunders, but first published in 1840 in the same periodical (see WEBB, 2:1). Here again, Saunders' discussion is especially useful in situating EBB's poems within their historical contexts.

Like Saunders, Elizabeth P. Gray provides a valuable set of contexts for appreciating EBB's poetic practice in Christian and Lyric Tradition in Victorian Women's Poetry (Routledge, 2009), although Gray treats fewer poems by her and at less length, given her express aim to offer "a fresh evaluation" of "more obscure Victorian women religious poets" (p. 1). Most notably, in discussing EBB's "long, rich dramatic monologue," "The Virgin Mary to the Child Jesus," Gray challenges Cynthia Scheinberg's argument that "literary depictions of Mary as a Jewish woman grant her prophetic voice," while "construction of her as Christian woman render her silenced" (pp. 96-97). Gray argues to the contrary that a number of Victorian women poets present Mary "as the foremost Christian singer," although Protestant women "struggle with the conundrum of honouring Mary but also avoiding honouring her overmuch" (p. 94)--certainly true of EBB's poem. Since Gray restricts her study to lyric poetry, she does not consider The Seraphim or A Drama of Exile, although she calls for more attention to Victorian women writers' "epic retellings of scriptural originals" in her conclusion (p. 228). Gray's segregation of an exclusively female tradition may present "the very particular creative and spiritual community" she explores (p. 227) as more self-contained than it in fact was. EBB's representations of Mary, for instance, engage with James Montgomery's phenomenally popular religious epic The Messiah, which she criticized as something her dog Flush might have written (see the 2005 "Year's Work"). Nevertheless, Gray's study of commonalities within women's religious poetry across denominations has many applications to EBB's writing: especially her analyses of themes such as the question of the appropriate poetic style for "'speaking God,' that is speaking of God and speaking to God" (p. 8), or strategies for rewriting religious "master narratives" (p. 9).

Like Gray, Marianne van Remoortel focuses on a female tradition in her interpretation of Sonnets from the Portuguese in Lives of the Sonnet, 1787-1895: Genre, Gender and Criticism (Ashgate, 2011). Whereas Saunders interprets EBB as groundbreaking in rewriting medieval sonnet conventions from a woman's perspective, Remoortel locates the sequence in the context of sonnet-writing by a host of other Romantic and early Victorian women, from Joanna Baillie to Felicia Hemans and Caroline Norton, documenting what the New Monthly Magazine in 1821 referred to as the "'prevalent disorder'" of '"Sonnettomania'" (p. 98). In analyzing these sonnet-writing "grandmothers" in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, van Remootel makes an important contribution to histories of the genre. She emphasizes the parallels between the themes addressed by these "poetesses" and those in Sonnets from the Portuguese: "love, death, faith, grief, hope, doubt, youth, nature," as well as illness (pp. 99-100). One textual parallel she notes between EBB's Sonnet 29 ("I think of thee") and a passage in a cycle of some 170 sonnets by Emmeline Stuart-Wortely published in 1839 is particularly striking (p. 101). (Van Remoortel also addresses this connection in a posting on Alison Chapman's new web resource, the Victorian Poetry Network <www. web.uvic.ca/~vicpoet). More controversially, Van Remoortel argues that "every single strategy allegedly ... used by the woman speaker" in Sonnets from the Portuguese to "posit her subjectivity vis-a-vis her future poet husband and the amatory sonnet tradition loses its rebelliousness when read as a paradigm of Victorian courtship ritual and female authorship" (p. 89). She also asserts that the Victorian critics who "cherished" the sequence for its "conservatism" and modern feminist critics who celebrate its "progressiveness" quote "exactly the same passages to support their arguments" (p. 96). The summary of criticism articulating the latter view (by Angela Leighton, Sarah Paul, Isobel Armstrong, and Margaret Morlier--see pp. 91-92) does not do justice to the subtlety and variation of scholarship on the "progressive" side--published by male as well as female critics, it should be noted. That said, Van Remoortel makes a compelling case that "by the nineteenth century," the sonnet had become a genre with "mixed gender affiliations" (p. 89), even if her own argument primarily addresses EBB's affinities with other "poetesses."

The "mixed gender affiliations," of both poets themselves and poetic genres such as the sonnet, are also very much at play in Amy Billone's "'Thy woman's hair, my sister, all unshorn': EBB's Sonnets to George Sand'" (VP 48, no. 4 [2010]: 577-593), one of this year's most original articles. Billone provides a dialectical reading of these "stylistically dense" sonnets (p. 578) in an essay that is itself stylistically innovative, modeled on the structure of "the Victorian sonnet pair" as a form. To do so, she offers "competing readings" of the sonnets designed not to "cancel one another," but to "illuminate the mechanisms that EBB employs both to assess and to reevaluate the perplexing relations among the gendered body, silence, and the sonnet form" (p. 579). First, Billone subtly reads "To George Sand: A Desire" as expressing EBB's desire to "assume Sand's position of 'pure genius,'" and "To George Sand: A Recognition" as embodying her resignation to the "inescapable affiliation with the female body." She then re-examines the sonnets in the context of Sand's fiction to come to a more "affirmative answer" to the question: "Does the sonnet as a synechdoche of lyric poetry succeed or fail to transcend the gendered constraints of the human body?" (p. 579). In developing her complex double argument, Billone demonstrates how a paradoxical combination of tribute and critique is manifested at the level of form in "To George Sand: A Desire" in the modulation from the initial metrical "cacophony" and irregularity of the opening lines centered on Sand ("Thou ...") to a "highly alliterative," "euphonic" second quatrain, where EBB enters the poem as the assertive speaking and subject ("I would ...") (pp. 579-581). She thus finds "an appropriative impulse" in this sonnet (p. 582), also evident in EBB's "On a Portrait of Wordsworth by B. R. Haydon," but one here modulated by EBB's profound identification with Sand and the "recognition" of shared womanhood in the second sonnet. Billone points out that the "'revolted cry'" of recognition here leads to a conclusion mirroring "the conclusion of many of Sand's novels" in its representation of an escape from the gendered body only realizable in death (p. 583). In the final counterpointed section of her article, however, she finds a source of greater optimism in analyzing EBB's response to Sand's artistic achievement. In effect, "Sand the author may have arrived at the very afterlife in her writings that her characters inconsolably craved," achieving through her art the "androgyny that EBB associates with the afterlife" (pp. 587,590). Hence the intense "love of Sand's writing" expressed by the English poet and her address to her as "my sister" (p. 589): a love persisting into the 1850s, as the letters in Volume 18 of The Brownings' Correspondence attest (see above). Billone adeptly shuttles between analyzing the sonnets' contexts and their meter and metaphors, exemplifying the partnering of neoformalism with cultural studies and new historicism called for by critics such as Caroline Levine, Herbert Tucker, and E. Warwick Slinn.

Levine and Tucker this year again consider the intricate intersections of politics with prosody in EBB's poetry, the subject of their spirited 2006 exchange in Victorian Studies over various kinds of "form" at work in "The Cry of the Children" (see the 2008 "Year's Work"). In her cogent, original, and forceful "Rhythms, Poetic and Political: The Case of Elizabeth Barrett Browning" (VP 49, no. 2 [235-254]), Levine identifies three models of reading the "politics of prosody"--"the ideological, the reflective, and the expressive"--then points out that all three "cast poetic form as a secondary effect." She argues to the contrary that "meter may itself exert or transmit power" (pp. 235-237): a possibility reinforced by research on unconscious "style matching" between the Brownings in one of the two articles relating to EBB written by psychologists this year (Ireland and Pennebaker, below). Levine thus turns her attention from the larger social and political "forms" that she fruitfully interrogates in her 2006 Victorian Studies essay to the prosody that is the principal focus of Tucker's "reply" to it. At the same time, she dialogically considers the imbrication of metrical forms with social and political forms through a complex analysis of EBB's three poems on Queen Victoria, poems often dismissed as "mawkish and inelegant" (p. 238). In "The Young Queen," Levine closely analyzes the interaction between EBB's "shaping of temporal experience through metre" and her use of a fourteener within "altered poulter's measure" to convey the rhythms and disruptions in the poem's "surprising layering of temporal registers": "the moment of death, the ceremonial time of the funeral, the transition from childhood to adulthood, and the abrupt transfer of state power" (pp. 238-239, 241). While one could read EBB's resistance to metrical regularity as "expressive" of her "liberalism" in politics, as Levine notes, her own more dialectical reading instead engages with the "multiple tempos" in the situation and institutions the poem concerns (p. 242). In "Victoria's Tears," Levine analyzes the "chiasmus" of its literary and political form and the similar way it "both evokes and refuses poulter's measure" (pp. 243,245). "Crowned and Wedded," she suggests, has more metrical affinities with EBB's two earlier poems on the subject than with the poem on Napoleon ("Crowned and Buried") it is paired with because "'The Young Queen' acts as a metrical sourcebook for the two poems that follow" (p. 246). Whether or not EBB deploys fourteeners in the three poems in a manner "independent of the politics they describe," as Levine observes at one point (p. 247), this article provocatively opens up the subject of negotiations with the "law" of meter and "the organizing forms of the world" (p. 249). Taking an approach Levine might term "reflective," Tucker more briefly treats the "specifically industrial experiment in the poetics of fatigue" in "The Cry of the Children" (pp. 124-127 of "Over Worked, Worked Over: A Poetics of Fatigue" in The Feeling of Reading: Affective Experience and Victorian Literature, ed. Rachael Ablow [Michigan Univ. Press, 2010], pp. 114-130). Tucker's analysis of the poem's "piston-pushing, time-clock-punching" meter, in which the poem's "rhythm, its actual cry," rebels "against the metre" (p. 125), extends the argument he initiated in his 2006 Victorian Studies response to Levine, reframing it within an illuminating consideration of the diverse forces and sensations contributing to poetic fatigue in Victorian poets and poems. Tucker's and Levine's analyses of EBB's experimental rhythms invite comparison with Robert Stark's findings concerning the versification of Aurora Leigh (see the 2010 "Year's Work").

The most substantial of four treatments of Aurora Leigh this year, aside from Avery's (above), is Clinton Machann's investigation of "Barrett Browning's Construction of Masculinity" in the novel-epic, Chapter 3 in his book Masculinity in Four Victorian Epics: A Darwinist Reading (Ashgate, 2010). Machann's reading of EBB's "complex and distinctive" (p. 58) representations of masculinity in the figures of Aurora's father and Romney Leigh is especially innovative because he departs from the usual focus on confining patriarchal traditions and reads masculinity through the lens of literary Darwinism instead (Darwinism also figures in Jennifer McDonnell's analysis of EBB's relationship with Flush, below). Machann's analysis of Aurora Leigh is best appreciated by first reading his very useful overviews of research on Victorian masculinity studies and literary Darwinism in Chapter 1, signaling his skepticism of approaches to gender as purely "constructionist" (p. 16), given scientific evidence of sex differences in "adaptationist theory" and related "biocultural" approaches (p. 22). In discussing Aurora Leigh, he emphasizes the "many positive masculine traits consistent with the normative values of Victorian bourgeois respectability" that Romney exhibits, even in his early "systematic, egotistic" phase, along with the "integrity" and "loyalty" that make him an "exceptional male mating partner" (pp. 67, 69). Observing that Romney is "placed in social contexts where the reader is invited to compare him with other male characters, most notably at the evening party at Lord Howe's" in Book V, Machann remarks upon his combination of "unquestioned sexual morality" with "sexual attractiveness," underscored by "the passion of Lady Waldemar" (p. 70): a sexual attractiveness maintained after his blinding, when Romney is "active, not passive" in seeking out Marian and Aurora in Italy (p. 78). Machann also discusses Aurora's meditations on "the difference between men and women in sexual matters" in light of evidence for "biological differences" in scientific research, and he charts the poem's displacement of traditional epic's "male violence" and "vividly described scenes" of male combat by "intense female-female competition" between Aurora and Lady Waldemar (pp. 75-77). Although he notes the curious absence of rivalry between Aurora and Marian, he does not see this "same-sex relationship" as "Aurora's ultimate personal goal in life" (p. 75). While Machann attributes some of these elements in Aurora Leigh to its emphasis on "psychological drama"--a feature he relates to spasmodic epics such as Alexander Smith's A Life Drama (pp. 77-9)--they also demonstrate how "Aurora's life history is quite successful in terms of our most basic model of human nature" and adaptation, he concludes (p. 80). Machann's original analysis of Romney's "extraordinary masculinity" (pp. 69, 72) brings out both the man's essential nobility as a social reformer and his sex appeal. One can imagine this analysis sparking lively debates in a classroom populated by students at the most active mating phase in their life cycles.

Such debates about sexuality and mating might be enriched by Cheryl A. Wilson's Literature and Dance in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2009), which includes a perceptive analysis of "the images and rhetoric of dance" in Aurora Leigh in Chapter 5: especially that "'indecent foreign dance called the Waltz,'" as it was termed early in the century (pp. 140, 136). Wilson does not mention Aurora's reference to dancing the more recently imported "polka and Cellarius" in Book I, 1. 424, alluding to the waltz-mazurka named after Henri Cellarius that was a sensation in the 1840s (see WEBB, 3:271, n.45), although it further bears out the validity of her thesis. "Literary texts that incorporate the waltz are particularly invested in female physicality, specifically the ways in which women's bodies displace their voices," Wilson argues (p. 138). She concentrates as much on the ways in which Aurora's language assumes physical form" because she "equates bodies with self-expression" (p. 141) as on her dance metaphors per se. Although such dance images do not seem to be as pervasive in the poem as the walking images Anne Wallace incisively treats in her 1997 ELH article (an analysis Wilson might have usefully referenced), Wilson does discover and analyze an intriguing array of waltz metaphors: as in Aurora's description of the dizzying effect of reading Proclus (V.1231-33), or in her much cited reference to the "'use of woman's figures'" (VIII.1127-32), which Wilson reads as incorporating metaphoric figures of dance as well as sewing (pp. 142-143). In further support of her thesis, Book IV includes idle chat amongst the wealthier classes attending Romney's stage marriage to Marian abut waltzing "three hours back. Up at six, / Up still at ten; scarce time to change one's shoes" (U. 621-622). "The presence of dance in Aurora Leigh is central to Aurora's development as an artist and individual," Wilson observes; it is related to issues of "mobility" as well as "questions of nationalism and sexuality" (pp. 144-145). Wilson briefly addresses the questions of nationality in EBB's "The Dance" in Poems before Congress (1860), which depicts "a solemn dance between Italian women and French men," culminating in an extraordinary homoerotic image of Florentine men kissing these French "martial strangers mouth to mouth" (pp. 145-146). Her analysis concludes with an insightful close reading of the metaphors of dance and "viols" in Book VIII of Aurora Leigh (11.1016-19, 1039-42).

Both Machann's analysis of Aurora Leigh through the lens of literary Darwinism and Wilson's consideration of its dance metaphors may suggest reasons why Aurora Leigh has always held a particular attraction to female readers. This is a point emphasized by Paula Marantz Cohen in her TLS "Commentary," "'You Misconceive the Question': Reconsidering Elizabeth Barrett Browning's 'Aurora Leigh'" (February 11, 2011, pp. 14-15), which returns to Virginia Woolf's assessment of Aurora Leigh. While Cohen's essay seems a little dated in referring primarily to feminist criticism of the 1980s--not more recent and diverse readings of Aurora Leigh from perspectives other than its gender politics--she does suggestively contrast the reception of EBB's epic with that of Wordsworth's The Prelude. Unlike Machann, Cohen rather reductively characterizes Romney as a two-dimensional character transformed from "a boorish denigrator to an enthralled acolyte" of Aurora's writing. Marianne Camus' "Entre air et terre: les 'elements dans Aurora Leigh d'Elizabeth Barrett Browning," Cahiers victoriens et edouardiens 71 (April 2010): 37-48, demonstrates that different image-systems are used to depict Aurora and Romney in her nuanced reading of imagery of the four elements in Aurora Leigh. Aurora is repeatedly associated with images of air and wind, as in Book VI.217, "My soul's in haste to leap into the sun'" and "best have air, air, although it comes with fire" (VII.697). In contrast, Romney, like the working classes whose suffering he laments, is associated initially with images of earth until purified by fire: his systematic rationality is "built up as walls are, brick by brick" (IV.353), while his idealistic attempts at reform are reduced to "eating clay" (VIII.630-635). Water, Camus notes, is relatively absent from the poem, except in its destructive aspects: as in the image of the "hard sea bites," Marian's metaphor for her suffering (VI.805).

Camus is also the author of "Elizabeth Barrett Browning in Italy," one of two essays on EBB in The Victorians and Italy: Literature, Travel, Politics and Art (ed. Alessandro Vescovi, Luisa Villa, and Paul Vita [Polimetrica, 2009], pp. 225-235). Here she explores EBB's "personal response" and "fluctuating relationship" to Italy as expressed in her correspondence (p. 225), noting how the poet associates her renewed health and vigor in Italy with her arrival at what she terms "woman's estate" (p. 226), and analyzing the liberating "life of the body" she experienced (pp. 227-228), a theme also discussed this year by Isobel Hurst and Paraic Finnerty (below). Camus persuasively critiques the romanticizing "Englishness" that characterizes some of EBB's descriptions of Italy (p. 229), arguing that "she looked at the Italians as she looked at landscapes" and sometimes characterized them as children (pp. 231-232). While this is true, Camus' essay (largely limited to EBB's earlier years in Italy), would have benefited from more consideration of criticism on the poet's complex relationship with Italy, from Sandra Gilbert to Alison Chapman and Jane Stabler, and also from Scott Lewis' wonderfully annotated edition of The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Her Sister Arabella (2002): letters pervaded by discussions of Italian matters (see the 2003 "Year's Work"). For instance, the letters to Arabella document EBB's relationships with some leading Italian political figures and writers, pointing to the inaccuracy of Camus's claim that EBB "certainly never made friends with Italians" (p. 230).

The other essay on EBB in The Victorian and Italy is Lindsey Cordery's "Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Casa Guidi Windows" (pp. 83-98). Cordery, a scholar from Uruguay, brings a "South American, early twenty-first-century, post-colonial, woman's perspective" (p. 87) to her reading of Casa Guidi Windows. She finds EBB "well-informed" on matters of Italian politics (p. 85), but emphasizes more her critique of "England's betrayal of the Italian cause" (p. 89). Corderey adds to scholarship on Casa Guidi Windows by presenting an innovative postcolonial reading of the poem's metaphors of "interstices" (II.776) through the theoretical framework of Homi Bhabha's "in-between spaces" (p. 91). She also provides the most detailed and informed analysis to date of the poem's representation of the death of Anita Garibaldi. As Corderey points out, EBB, "like so many others, knew nothing of Anita Riberior's life," but her "poetic tribute" to the "mother and fighter.., brief as it is, is, nevertheless suggestive" (p. 95). Corderey's observation that, at the time of its publication, the poem was "labelled difficult and generally not worthy of critical attention" (p. 91) reflects a common misconception about the poem's reception. In fact, the reviews were mixed, dividing along political and national lines (see the headnote in WEBB, vol. 2 and review excerpts in Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Selected Poems [Broadview Press, 2009]).

EBB's response to and representations of Italy are also issues addressed in several other articles this year, two of them--by Graham Smith and Paraic Finnerty--concerned with the theme of literary tourism explored in a new book by Alexis Easley (see below). Smith's "Michelangelo's Duke of Urbino in Literature, Travel-Writing and Photography of the Nineteenth Century" (in Strange Sisters: Literature and Aesthetics, edited Francesca Orestano and Francesca Frigerio [Lang, 2009], pp. 155-175) analyzes verbal and visual representations of Michelangelo's haunting statues of the Times of Day and Florentine Dukes in the New Sacristy of the Chapel of the Medici. Smith points out that EBB's evocation of these statues evokes Samuel Roger's earlier description of them in his immensely popular Italy, A Poem (1822), and that in 1851, "the year in which Casa Guidi Windows was published, life-sized plaster casts of Michelangelo's Dukes and Times of Day were exhibited in the Crystal Palace" (pp. 159-160). Finnerty's "Rival Italies: Emily Dickinson, John Ruskin and Henry James" (Prose Studies 32, no. 2 [2009]: 113-125) includes an analysis of the impact of EBB's poetry-together with periodical articles on Italy as a "'Woman Country'" (p. l18)--on Dickinson's imaginary constructions of the country she characterized (in Poem 541) as a feminized and eroticized "'Blue Peninsula'": echoing Aurora's description of the "blue hills" of "my Italy" (I.232), as Finnerty suggests (p. 120). Like EBB, Dickinson associated Italy with "passionate same-sex relationships" between women like the actress Charlotte Cushman and the sculptor Harriet Hosmer (p. 119). Finnerty further notes the Italian volcanic metaphors for passion and creativity in Dickinson's poetry, though not the thread of similar imagery in Aurora Leigh.

British and American women's responses to Italy also figure in one of two articles this year on EBB's engagement with the classical tradition. Isobel Hurst's "Classical Daughters: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Margaret Fuller" (Women's Studies 40, no. 4 [2011]: 448-468) comprehensively analyzes parallels and differences between EBB and Fuller, as well as their social interactions in Italy. Hurst considers their classical education by male mentors (comparable to Aurora's, wrapped in her father's "doublet"); their contrasting tastes in classical authors--EBB's passion for Greek and dislike of Latin versus Fuller's far greater appreciation of the Romans (pp. 452,457); the parallel freedom from "restrictive" gendered codes both women experienced in Italy (p. 462); and their similar fascination with George Sand (Fuller's achievement of a meeting with the French author in Paris was one of the catalysts for EBB's seeking to meet her [p. 459], the event repeatedly described in Volume 18 of The Brown. ings' Correspondence [see above]). Hurst also considers their opinions of each other's writings; and their similarly intense engagement with the liberation of Italy, despite differences in the degree of their republicanism and level of involvement in differing cities (EBB writing on events in Tuscany, Fuller writing journalist's despatches from the Roman front and nursing the wounded). Both interpreted events in contemporary Italy through Roman history, as in their differing invocations of Brutus and the assassination of Julius Caesar in representing the assassination of Count Pellegrino Rossi, the Pope's minister, on the steps of the Roman Senate in 1848. Hurst's article forms a suggestive foundation for future assessments of the relatively unexplored Fuller-EBB relationship, "central to a transatlantic conversation on the intellectual abilities of women and their relationship to literature and history" (p. 448). For instance, the "'avant-garde' enthusiasm for the writings of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe" that Hurst notes in Fuller (p. 458) is also seen in a series of newly published translations from Goethe by EBB dating from the 1830s (see WEBB, vol. 5)--formerly miscatalogued as original poems. EBB also shared the interest in Minerva that Hurst discusses in relation to Fuller (p. 461), as Linda Lewis' discussion of Minerva as a female "Wisdom figure" in Aurora Leigh suggests (in Lewis, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Spiritual Progress [1998]).

Like Hurst, Yopie Prins in "The Sexual Politics of Translating Prometheus Bound" (Cultural Critique 75 [Winter, 2010]): 164-180), casts new light on EBB's engagement with classical literature by comparing it to other women's: in this case, the later classical scholars Janet Case and Edith Hamilton. All three translated Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound: a play "with a long history of political readings" that women were especially drawn to translating as "a rite of passage" because its difficulty made it a "textual performance" in the "claim to classical literacy" (pp. 164-165). Prins argues, however, that women were also "bound to translate the play as a performance of subjection as well as mastery, making it a complex re-enactment of nineteenth-century gender politics" (pp. 165-166). EBB was "among the first English poets to attempt a complete verse translation of Prometheus Bound," although her initial 1833 translation was one she would later famously repudiate as "a Prometheus twice bound" (pp. 166, 168-169), publishing a more mature translation in Poems (1850). Prins's analysis of EBB's identification with the female figure of Io in Aeschylus' play is especially illuminating: Io's "cries of woe"--"Ah me! ah me! ah me!" in response to the torment of Zeus differ from those of Prometheus in the Greek, but "E.B.B. makes them the same in English," while in Aurora Leigh, Aurora "identifies with the 'I' in Io" (pp. 168-169). Prins' discussion of Case and Hamilton indicate additional reasons why Aeschylus may have held a special appeal for EBB: for instance, Case remarked that "'Aeschylus gives his women brains as well as heart'" (p. 172). One wonders if Augusta Webster--even more than EBB, largely self-taught in Greek as Patricia Rigg has shown in Julia Augustus Webster (2009)--was drawn to Aeschylus' most famous play for similar reasons in publishing her 1866 translation? Webster may have been influenced by EBB's 1850 translation--much admired in the reviews (see WEBB, vol. 1). Apart from Rigg's study (see the 2010 "Year's Work"), however, EBB's influence on Augusta Webster remains relatively unexplored, as does Webster's translation of Prometheus Bound.

In contrast, Emily Dickinson's response to EBB has been intensively investigated, and this year is no exception, given Finnerty's article on the poets' similar response to Italy (above) and Mary Loeffelholz's provocative and engaging "Master Shakespeare, Mrs. Browning, Miss Dickinson, and the Servants" (The Emily Dickinson Journal 20, no. 1 [2011]: 34-55). Whereas earlier studies such as Ann Swyderski's emphasize that Dickinson's most creative period followed her reading of the "Titanic Opera" of Aurora Leigh, Loeffelholz begins with Aife Murray's Maid as Muse, which connects Dickinson's fluctuating productivity to the "arrival and departure of key servants" (p. 35). Loeffelholz then turns her attention to the "conjunction of love and service" in Aurora Leigh and EBB's earlier A Drama of Exile, arguing that EBB's response to both servants and "the unequally gendered service ... intrinsic to heterosexual marriage" differs substantially from Dickinson's (p. 44). Loeffelholz's insightful analysis of the "service" metaphor in Aurora Leigh (including art, motherhood, and muse figures) is too multi-facted and nuanced to be summarized here. She uses it to support the argument that that EBB's artistic productivity was dependent, like Dickinson's on the "presence of a reliable maid," Lily Wilson, who, despite the tribute paid to Marian's service as a mother in Aurora Leigh, had to set aside her own child to return to the Brownings' service in 1856, just as her employer's poem was completed (pp. 48-49). Ultimately, Loeffelholz finds Dickinson more democratic in her "expanding sympathies" for servants, male as well as female (p. 50): she contrasts the "proudly American idealizations of free labor" in Dickinson and Harriet Beecher Stowe's work with the representation of the "bottom of the social scale" in both A Drama of Exile and Aurora Leigh as "chaos" (pp. 51-52). This reading, however, depends upon interpreting the allegorical "Earth-Spirits" of "inorganic and organic nature" in A Drama of Exile as "Barrett Browning's representation of laboring origins" (p. 51), in a conflation of inorganic nature with humanity. In the case of Aurora Leigh, Loeffelholz tends to overlook the modulations in Aurora's perception of the working classes as she matures (a point addressed by Avery in his analysis--see above). Loeffelholz's insightful article raises fascinating questions even though underlying narratives of nation may be at work in the use of EBB's English class politics as a foil to set off Dickinson's American democratic values.

EBB's most intimate and profound poetic relationship, with her poethusband--the subject of many studies and debates--is thoughtfully and judiciously treated this year in Chapter 3, "Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Model and Countermodel" of Britta Martens's Browning, Victorian Poetics and the Romantic Legacy: Challenging the Personal Voice (Ashgate, 2011). Martens argues that the "earliest and most important heir of Romanticism" with whom Browning "engaged in an extended dialogue was his wife," more especially because "EBB had herself a complex relationship with the Romantic tradition" (p. 91). Martens tends to side with critics such as Dorothy Mermin, Mary Saunders Pollock, and Corinne Davies who "stress the two Brownings' productive interchanges" (p. 92). At the same time, she argues that Browning persistently "conceptualized" EBB as "a self-expressive poet in the Romantic vein" like Shelley (p. 93), even though he praised dramatic monologues by her such as "Bertha in the Lane," as well as her critique of Shelley as "in his white ideal, / All statue&lind" in "A Vision of Poets." As a result, Browning struggled intensely in his own search for a poetic voice between the self-expressive mode he valorized in EBB and "his own impersonal" and dramatic style (p. 93). Martens perceptively explores this conflict, finding like earlier critics "resemblances to EBB's voice" in poems such as his "The Guardian Angel," which she attributes in part to the impact of the Sonnets from the Portuguese (p. 99). She then traces Browning's oscillating attraction to his wife's voice and attempts to distance himself from it in a series of later works. He achieved some "resolution" to this conflict in "One Word More" in Men and Women, but the oscillation returned after EBB's death. The discovery of Edward Fitzgerald's misogynist attack on EBB in his published personal letters ("Mrs. Browning's Death is rather a relief to me, I must say: no more Aurora Leighs, thank God!... She and her sex had better mind the Kitchen and their Children") resulted in Browning's heated reply, "To Edward Fitzgerald," in which "the speaker is all the more outraged ... because he sees his own and EBB's identity as fused" (p. 130).

One of two articles relating to EBB published in journals of psychology this year speaks in intriguing ways to the question of how the Brownings's poetic voices may have been influenced by their marital and poetic intimacy: a point Victorian reviewers remarked upon. In "Language Style Matching in Writing: Synchrony in Essays, Correspondence, and Poetry" (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 99, no. 3 [2010]: 549-571), Molly E. Ireland and James W. Pennebaker present findings from studies on unconscious language style matching (LSM) in conversation and dyadic relationships (p. 550). A widely observed pattern in human interaction, LSM results in the synchronization of functional versus content words and patterns in speaking styles, and is influenced by an array of factors from "sex and sexual orientation" to "social status" (p. 551). One of the studies conducted by Ireland and Pennebaker analyzed LSM in "three pairs of famous writers": the Brownings, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, and Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes* The biographical data on EBB that Ireland and Pennebaker fed into their analysis of LSM in the Brownings's relationship is dated and skewed-she is identified as an "invalid opiate addict for most of her life," and described as mainly writing "personal poems about her own emotions" (p. 562). Their selection and dating of the correspondence and poetry they investigate might also be seen as problematic. However, they do apply their sophisticated, computerized methods for investigating LSM to a large body of materials across four phases they identify in the Brownings' relationship (prior to meeting, the courtship, the first nine years of their marriage, and the remaining live), with some interesting results. Ireland and Pennebaker conclude that the two poets' LSM was "highest," as expected, "when the couple were happiest," rising to a peak between the courtship and 1855 (pp. 563-564). LSM in Plath's and Hughes' poetry, in contrast, "was much lower than the Brownings' average degree of matching" (p. 564). In addition, "Elizabeth appeared to gradually entrain to Robert's writing," and "Robert matched more with himself" than Elizabeth did with "herself," following the general pattern of women matching more to others than men (p. 563). One might infer from this article, however, that Elizabeth's "entrainment" is not necessarily a weakness or manifestation of dependency, since in other studies Ireland and Pennebaker cite, a higher degree of LSM is associated with "greater social sensitivity," "empathic tendencies," higher education, and better academic performance (p. 566).

The other article relating to EBB in a psychology journal this year is "'My Story for My Better Self': Love, Loss, and Working Through in the Diary of Elizabeth Barrett Browning" (Journal of the American Psychoanalytical Association, 58, no. 3 [2010]: 459-487) by Columbia University clinical psychologist, Wendy Wiener Katz. As Katz notes, EBB's 1831-32 diary has been mined for information by biographers and critics, who treat it as "a repository of secret--and therefore, it is implied, more true-thoughts and feelings," taking it at "face value" and overlooking the "layered, defensive, and conflictual nature" of the mental life it reflects (pp. 462-463). Katz argues instead that "the diary was analogous to a brief, self-prescribed, and self-administered psychotherapeutic treatment," enabling EBB "to mediate ... a series of intertwining losses--of parents and parent figures, of love, of childhood home and perhaps even of childhood itself--into a work of memorial and mourning" (pp. 461-462). Katz gives particularly thoughtful attention to the reasons why the diary was "born" in June 1831 and died in April 1832 (p. 467), to its role as EBB's "imagined companion" (p. 467), to its physical and material features (p. 468), and to its function in helping EBB to work through a variety of feelings and conflicts. Even though EBB began the diary three years after her mother's abrupt death, Katz finds the grief associated with this "mother-want" to be central to it, along with EBB's conflicts over her attraction to the blind classical scholar Hugh Stuart Boyd-"her first major love object outside her family" (p. 475), her fears over the possible loss of her idyllic childhood home at Hope End, and management of her anger at Boyd and others (p. 480). Citing Prins (see above), Katz explores the contexts, impulses, and identifications shaping EBB's first translation of Prometheus Bound, suggesting that work on it coincided with a "significant depressive episode" (pp. 484-485). She concludes that the diary, both as "an object and a process," served "adaptive and defensive functions" for EBB, "playing an important role in the history of her development as a writer and as a lover" (p. 486).

EBB's relationship with her famous spaniel Flush is the subject of several articles this year, two exploring the history of animal-human relations. Jennifer McDonell's "Ladies' Pets and the Politics of Affect: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Flush" (Australian Literary Studies 25, no. 2 [2010]: 17-34), is the most sophisticated, extended, and original treatment of this subject to date, bringing new scholarly paradigms on pets and interspecies connections to bear upon a topic too often considered as merely diverting or peripheral. Comprehensively analyzing the multitude of letters by EBB detailing "Flush's entire life," McDonnell reads them, notwithstanding their "light-heartedness and wit," as "constituting a meta-narrative on... interspecies sameness and difference, canine consciousness, the ethics of pet making and pet keeping and the ways in which systems of values along gender, class, species, and racial lines are interlinked" (p. 18). Her analysis draws throughout on the work of historians such as Harriet Ritvo, as well as theory by Derrida, Donna Haraway, Baudrillard, and Deleuze and Guattari. Noting that dogs are "boundary crossers," that destabilize the "binary structures" of the human/animal divide (p. 19), McDonell presents illuminating close readings of EBB's accounts of "dog-love" and her "figurative uses of dogs" (reflecting her alertness to the ideological linking of women and dogs--"Why what is Flush but a lapdog and what am I but a woman?," she asked). McDonell and her reflections on "canine consciousness and the canine gaze"--anticipating Darwin's The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals (pp. 21, 23-25), McDonnell suggests, thus chiming with the "literary Darwinism" Machann relates to Aurora Leigh (see above). McDonnell chooses to deploy the complex concept of "affect," including "within its definition feeling or emotion as manifested by facial expression or bodily language," because "sentimentality has always bedevilled the discussion of human/animal relations and pet-keeping" (p. 24). She analyzes EBB's poems "To Flush, My Dog" and "Flush or Faunus," as well as the "counter-discourse of contingency, affect and care" in EBB's response to Flush's three abductions by dog-stealers, leading the poet to resist arguments based on "abstract principle" vigorously advanced by Browning, her father, and her brothers against paying the ransom (p. 26). McDonnell concludes by cogently investigating the language connecting "animalised animals," like EBB's brothers' big dogs, Cataline and Resolute, to "the slaves on the Barrett plantations and the men who hunt them" (p. 32). As the headnote by Beverly Taylor to "My Doves" in WEBB suggests (2:33-34), the methodologies and concepts McDonnell employs might also be fruitfully applied to EBB's close observations of her pet Barbary doves before Flush entered her life.

In an article that intersects with several of the themes McDonnell explores, EBB's sonnet "Flush or Faunus" provides the structuring template for Laura Brown's "The Lady, the Lapdog, and Literary Alterity" (The Eighteenth Century 52, no. 1 [2011]: 31-45), an analysis of "the female encounter with the canine pet" (p. 32) in a range of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century texts. This encounter includes "several common components: the dynamic or formal chiasmus of distance and intimacy; the bed-side scene; the hairy, alien being; the substitution for parent, husband, or sexual partner; the point of contact--the embrace, the tear, the gaze; and the ardour, immoderate love, or heights of love that often mark these scenes" (p. 41). Like McDonnell, Brown also develops the ways in which representations of this encounter could sometimes relate to a racist discourse of "interspecies miscegenation" (p. 43). Hilary Newman's "Flush as an Example of Virginia Woolfs Art of Biography" (Virginia Woolf Bulletin 27 [January 2008]: 30-37) considers some of the strategic revisions Woolf made in EBB's biography, such as collapsing Flush's three abductions by dog-knappers into one dramatic incident. Maggie Humm's "The 1930s, Photography, and Virginia Woolfs Flush (Photography and Culture 3, no. 1 [2010]: 7-18) is also noteworthy here because, in exploring the photographic and cinematic perspectives in both Flush and Woolfs essay on Aurora Leigh, Humm addresses the modernist writer's interest in EBB's attention to "the visual" in her novel-in-verse (p. 11).

Thanks in part to Woolfs canine romance, Flush exerts a perennial appeal as an appendage to the image of EBB that haunts the cultural imaginary. Yet, as Alexis Easley points out in her multi-faceted study, Literary Celebrity, Gender, and Victorian Authorship, 1850-1914 (Univ. of Deleware Press, 2011), despite the Victorian poet's celebrity, she is curiously absent from the periodicals and guidebooks that began to map the literary "homes and haunts" of famous writers in London in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (p. 49). This is a gendered absence, Easley argues, since a similar "ghostly invisibility" arising from the "domestic ideology" that "mandated women's absence in the public sphere" effaces the London sites in which George Eliot and Christina Rossetti worked. "Even today, although there are many blue plaques marking literary women's homes in London, there is no literary shrine devoted to a woman writer equivalent to Keats's House, Carlyle's House, or Dickens's House" (pp. 49-50). Easley observes that when guidebooks "mentioned EBB's London homes, they interpreted them as isolated locations having little to do with the surrounding urban environment," and the poet herself was reduced to a disembodied, spectral presence (p. 61). Nor did her rural childhood homes feature in the guidebooks: in fact, there was disagreement agree even on the site of her birth. "The encylopaedias waver between London and Herefordshire," and although Anne Thackerary Ritchie in her DNB entry on the poet correctly listed her birthplace as Coxhoe Hall, Durham, John H. Ingram in his 1888 biography "argued that she was born in London" (p. 61). As Easley acknowledges (p. 60), in the literary tourism industry of the late Victorian period, as today, EBB was primarily associated with "the literary landscapes of Italy, particularly Casa Guidi" or the Protestant Cemetery in Florence where she is buried. This connection is borne out by the story of the EBB devotee Florence Barclay, narrated in Benjamin Kohlmann's " 'Stand Still, True Poet That You Are!: Remembering the Brownings, Imagining Memorabilia," (Zeitschrift Fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik 57, no. 2 [2009]: 125-137). A successful author of "romance-cum-religious novels," Barclay managed to acquire several EBB "relics" at the 1913 auction of the Brownings' effects, including the poet's favorite chair. During a long stay in Florence, Casa Guidi and EBB's monument in the cemetery were spots "pre-eminently dear to her" (p. 132-134). Kohlmann's analysis of memorabilia, literary celebrity, and literary sites takes up some of the same issues as Easley's book, including "'the power of setting to communicate a person's essence,'" in Deborah Cohen's words (cited, Kohlmann, p. 128). EBB's continuing presence in the Italian settings that evoke her "essence" is suggested by a last publication I note this year, in German: Elsemarie Maletzke's Eine Liebe in Florenz: [A Life in Florence] Elizabeth Barrett und Robert Browning (Frankfurt: Insel Verlag Gmbh, 2011), a romanticized account of the Brownings' love story against the backdrop of Florence.

In the twenty-first century, of course, "settings" are increasingly virtual. Responding to the shift to digital scholarship, two new scholarly websites on EBB have been established, in part to function as a digital surround to the Pickering and Chatto WEBB. One, created by Sandra Donaldson, General Editor of the WEBB, and associates at the University of North Dakota, features some of EBB's most heavily revised poems in differing versions accessed through a versioning machine <www.und.edu/instruct/sdonaldson>. An initial version of another, complementary site at Dalhousie University <www. ebbarchive.org> features various resources, including annotated teaching texts, reviews, and critical materials designed to supplement the Broadview edition of EBB's selected poems I co-edited with Beverly Taylor, as well as materials constituting a digital annex for the WEBB.

I would like to thank Cynthia Burgess of the Armstrong Browning Library for assistance in identifying materials for this review and Federica Belluccini for assistance with the German publication noted.