Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Stone, Marjorie

With the appearance of The Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning in five volumes from Picketing and Chatto Press in its "Pickering Masters" series, 2010 brings the first comprehensive scholarly edition of EBB's poetry, prefaces, and essays in over a century. Prepared by a team of US, Canadian, and UK scholars, with Sandra Donaldson as General Editor, The Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning runs to 2700 pages of relatively fine print. The apparatus includes critical and textual introductions, complete lists of variants in EBB's published poems (many revised substantially after their initial appearance in print), annotations, and headnotes to individual works summarizing their compositional and publication history, contexts, reception, and modern criticism. The edition incorporates archival research in numerous US and UK libraries and special collections, as well as information from the more than twenty-five volumes of letters by EBB now in print. This year adds to these, with Volume 17 of the The Brownings' Correspondence (from Wedgestone Press, 2010), impeccably edited by Philip Kelley, Scott Lewis, and Edward Hagan. New critical studies include innovative treatments of many of EBB's works by Linda Hughes in The Cambridge Introduction to Victorian Poetry (2010), several analyses of Aurora Leigh and of Casa Guidi Windows, discussion of the transatlantic contexts of "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point," a subtle new reading of silence in Sonnets from the Portuguese, and another on silence in EBB's representation of the sublime landscape of Vallombrosa, and two articles on religion and devotional poetry in her 1838 volume The Seraphim, and Other Poems. Other subjects this year include recent developments in EBB criticism, the classical and mythic contexts of "Hector in the Garden," EBB's engagement with Milton as well as with Byron and Shelley, and connections between EBB and Augusta Webster treated in Patricia Rigg's groundbreaking new study, Julia Augusta Webster: Victorian Aestheticism and the Woman Writer.

The Pickering and Chatto Edition, and New Possibilities for Research

The first of three articles on EBB in the newly launched The Journal of Browning Studies (formerly Browning Society Notes), Simon Avery's succinct "Re-reading EBB: Trends in Elizabeth Barrett Browning Criticism," (1 [2010]: 5-13) provides a useful overview of the history leading up to the publication of The Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (hereafter abbreviated as WEBB). Analyzing various "'tipping points'" in EBB studies, Avery traces publications and cultural transformations from the 1970s into the twentieth century that have brought the poet out of "a critical wasteland" to a position where she "once more" takes her place among "major nineteenth-century poets" (p. 5). He notes the debates among critics (including among feminist critics), as well as the transition from locating EBB primarily within a recovered female tradition to less segregated considerations of her works in relation to a broad array of topics. These include not only gender, politics, religion, genre, and form, but also "urban literature, cosmopolitanism, ekphrasis writing, medical science, and sexual violence," as well as literary collaboration and the postcolonial contexts brought to the fore by Laura Fish's "beautiful novel, Strange Music (2008), inspired by the history of the Barretts' Jamaican plantations" (p. 11). While the historical record speaks to EBB's impact as the most internationally influential English woman poet of the nineteenth century--read in France, Italy, North America, and even Russia--scholars and students have been hampered by the absence of a comprehensive modern edition. By comparison, four scholarly editions of Robert Browning's complete poetry have been produced or undertaken in recent decades (see Britta Martens' "A Survey of Work on Robert Browning 1996-2009," a companion essay to Avery's in Volume 1 of The Journal of Browning Studies).

In the second half of the twentieth century, three of EBB's major works became available in scholarly editions. Variorum (though not critical) editions of Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) by Fannie Ratchford and Miroslava Wein Dow appeared in 1950 and 1980 respectively. Julia Markus' critical edition of Casa Guidi Windows (1851) appeared in 1977, somewhat eclipsed by Cora Kaplan's 1978 Women's Press edition of Aurora Leigh, with its stimulating critical introduction, but no attention to the matters of textual editing that Markus had considered in relation to Casa Guidi Windows. Since 1992, scholars have had the benefit of Margaret Reynolds' scholarly edition of Aurora Leigh (1859) from Ohio University Press, with material from its "Critical" and "Textual" introductions and its annotations partially incorporated in her Norton Critical Edition of Aurora Leigh (1996). For EBB's other poetry, however, as well as her essays and prefaces, scholars have generally fallen back on Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke's 1900 edition of The Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, which, despite its still useful annotation (especially as compared to Harriet Waters Preston's 1900 Cambridge edition), is far from "complete" or edited according to twenty-first-century norms. Various factors contributed to this state of affairs, including the initial focus on the recovery of EBB's major works, her serial textual revisions, and the widespread scattering and fragmentation of her extensive manuscript remains at the 1913 Sotheby auction of the Brownings' personal effects.

A brief history of the Pickering and Chatto edition is provided in a prefatory statement on the "The Editorial Team" (Vol. 1, pp. xii-xiii), while Donaldson's "General Introduction" explains its structure and editorial principles. The WEBB volume editors include Donaldson herself, Rita Patteson, Marjorie Stone, and Beverly Taylor; WEBB associate and contributing editors include Simon Avery, Cynthia Burgess, Clara Drummond, Barbara Neri, Elizabeth Woodworth, and Melissa Brotton, with Jane Stewart Laux as an editorial associate. Rather than adopting a strictly chronological approach, Volumes 1 and 2 of WEBB (with Taylor and Stone as Volume Editors) begin with EBB's collection of Poems (1856). This, the last of four editions titled Poems (1844, 1850, 1853, 1856) which EBB published in her lifetime, reflects her own structuring and presentation of her poetical output (with texts reflecting her latest revisions) up to the year in which she published Aurora Leigh. The 1856 collection omits works appearing in her first two volumes of poetry (1826, 1833) and includes selected works only from her 1838 volume (frequently, in heavily revised form). It includes all of the works in Poems (1844)--the collection that established her transatlantic reputation--plus additional works published between 1844 and 1850 or in her 1850 Poems, such as Sonnets from the Portuguese, as well as Casa Guidi Windows (1851). Aurora Leigh appears in Volume 3 (the shortest volume at 357 pages with prefatory materials), edited by Donaldson with a "Critical Introduction" by Stone. The apparatus incorporates and builds on Reynolds' groundbreaking work, as Donaldson's "Textual Introduction" indicates (pp. xxxi-xxxix). Volume 4, edited by Donaldson, presents works published in EBB's lifetime not included in her cumulative collections of 1850, 1853 and 1856: most notably, the Homeric epic The Battle of Marathon (1820) privately printed by her father for her fourteenth birthday, An Essay on Mind, With Other Poems (1826), Prometheus Bound, ... with Miscellaneous Poems (1833), as well as works from her 1838 collection and prefaces to her earlier collections excluded from Poems (1856). It also includes Poems before Congress (1860), EBB's two critical essays published in the Athenaeum in 1842 ("The Book of the Poets," a survey of the history of English poetry, and the "Greek Christian Poets"), along with works published in her lifetime but not included in any of her collections. The last category includes the intriguing poem beginning "Who are thou of the veiled countenance," published in 1827 in the Jewish Expositor, and Friend of Israel. Volume 5 of WEBB, edited by Donaldson, Patteson, Stone, and Taylor, opens with the posthumous Last Poems (1862), although the majority of this 800-page volume is composed of publications from EBB's surviving manuscripts, the first half constituting one of the largest bodies of juvenilia produced by any English poet, the second including many unpublished works, some quite extended, from later phases in EBB's career.

"The Editorial Team" statement concludes with the hope that the edition will stimulate "a new phase" in scholarship on EBB (vol. 1, p. xiii). Possibilities for research that the edition opens up include more investigation of the revisions in her poems, often closely related to her experiments with form and versification, a subject treated by several critics this year (see Hughes, Robert Stark, and Rhian Williams below). As the volume introductions and headnotes indicate, EBB also gave careful attention to the structure and sequencing of her various editions of Poems, a point that invites further scrutiny. (Appendix II in Vol. 2 of WEBB prints Tables of Contents for EBB's various collections.) In addition, the edition makes accessible the full range of genres and forms that EBB worked in. While some of these have received considerable attention (her sonnets, the novel-epic form of Aurora Leigh, her ballads), others have been much less discussed. These include the ode, the dramatic lyric (overlapping with the monodrama, to use one of her own terms), the elegy, the rhapsody, hymns and religious verse, the essay, translation, and Anacreonic verse (in the 1844 poem "Wine of Cyprus," unanimously admired by Victorian reviewers). Matters of reception too call for new treatments. While the critical tradition persists that EBB's poetry was greeted by predominantly negative reviews, the reception summaries of the WEBB headnotes generally indicate, to the contrary, a mix of positive and negative reviews (as in the case of Tennyson and RB), often reflecting vigorous debates amongst nineteenth-century critics. The headnotes also speak to the extensive transatlantic connections EBB developed through publishing in US periodicals and correspondence with American poets and critics. The annotations underscore the intertextual dimensions of her poetry, often illumined by her letters. As might be expected, the echoes of Romantic poets, especially Wordsworth, Byron, and Keats (Hemans and Landon to a lesser degree) are especially frequent, as are biblical and classical allusions. Some poems, however, such as "The Lost Bower" (1844), point to the importance of the medieval contexts EBB was immersed in through her collaboration on Richard Hengist Horne's The Poems of Geoffrey Chaucer, Modernized (1841), while others like "A Vision of Poets" (1844) point to her knowledge of literature in several European languages. As the headnote to "An Island" (1837) indicates, she was furthermore engaging with issues of science as well as faith, in this case by indirectly registering her disagreement with the Natural Theology of the Bridgewater Treatises.

The previously unpublished materials in Volume 5 constitute an extended terrain for new research. These include the draft of a long unlocated "Ode to America" acquired by the Armstrong Browning Library of Baylor University, Texas, as the WEBB edition was nearing completion. The "Ode" is entangled with a draft of Sonnet V of the Sonnets from the Portuguese, predating any of the previously known manuscripts of the sequence. Amid its very large body of juvenilia demonstrating EBB's precocity as a young poet, Volume 5 publishes "The African," a narrative poem of over 600 lines about an African prince enslaved in Jamaica; it dates from her adolescence, like her "Fragment of an 'Essay on Woman,'" inspired by reading Mary Wollstonecraft. Unpublished works from the 1830s include multiple translations of Goethe's poems (misidentified for many years as original poems by EBB) and poems that cast light on EBB's response to illness, such as "The Repose. Written in sickness--but much happiness--1839" and "The Gorse" from the same year. The 1840s, the decade that brought the creative outpouring of Poems (1844), is particularly rich in unpublished experiments such as "The Princess Marie" (1842), a long ballad about the noted female sculptor, Princess Marie of Orleans, daughter of Louis-Philippe, the King of France. There are, in addition, numerous experiments with dramatic speakers (one in the voice of a starving working-class child) from the 1840s, which join other such works, like EBB's "monodrama" on Aeschylus: a poem misattributed to Robert Browning for decades and described by scholars as one of the best poems he left unpublished. (The monodrama was first included in an edition of EBB's poetry in the Broadview teaching edition of her selected poems; see the 2009 Year's Work.)

The Brownings' Correspondence, Volume 17

The WEBB editors begin by acknowledging their debt to Philip Kelley, whose lifelong work has provided such important primary materials for scholars on the Brownings, especially through The Brownings' Correspondence. In Volume 17, covering the period from February 1851 to January 1852, the large majority of the letters are by EBB. While many have previously appeared (although in some cases only in part) in diverse editions of EBB's letters to individual correspondents, as usual they are published in BC in full, and often with additional, helpful annotation. For example, we find a newly published letter to John Kenyon of May 1, 1851 not included in Frederic G. Kenyon's The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1897), including comments on Casa Guidi Windows, the Brownings' travels, and the "Straussites" (pp. 23-26). Recurring topics in Volume 17 include the Brownings' meetings with various writers (Tennyson, Carlyle, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, among others) during their 1851 visit to England and stay in Paris in 1851-52. As the volume's Supporting Documents indicate, Rossetti found RB "short," but "well made" with a "stunning" head, but EBB the reverse of the female "stunners" he sought for his models: in his eyes, she was as "unattractive a person as can well be imagined," "quite worn out with illness" (p. 271). Other much discussed topics are the Great Exhibition, religion (especially controversies over Catholicism), and Mary Russell Mitford's revelation of details from EBB's private life in her account of the Brownings ("Married Poets") in Recollections of a Literary Life, or Books, Places, and People (1852).

Given the Brownings' residence in Paris during the "revolution-time" of 1851-52, with "the great heart-beat of the world" at hand (p. 216), EBB's letters in Volume 17 volume are especially concerned with the dissolution of the National Assembly on December 1-2, 1851, by Louis Napoleon and the fighting that followed on the Parisian barricades. Although EBB believed that "nothing except popular sympathy" could justify the coup d'etat by Louis Napoleon (p. 180), and she expressed scepticism of his motives (pp. 208, 217), she supported the coup because she saw the National Assembly as "an unrepresenting representative assembl[y]" (p. 187) and because she considered "the republic in 1848" as repressive of liberties and a free press as the president in December 1851 (p. 191). She also believed, despite the opposition of "Legitimists, Orleanists, & English" (p. 189) as well as socialist intellectuals, that Louis Napoleon had the support of a majority of the French people, through the plesbiscite that confirmed his position. "I am a democrat, & respect the decisions of any people" (p. 209), she declared, expressing scorn for the response of English "'insular'" views (p. 240) and for those who elevated an "'intelligent minority'" over "'des animaux'" who, in their view, constituted the French majority (p. 209). At the same time, manifesting her own ideological contradictions, she described those who died on the barricades as "a little popular scum, cleared off" by the troops (p. 198). The heated conflicts over the French political developments of 1851-52 are reflected in the Brownings' own "domestic emeutes" (pp. 189, 191, 212) and the evident differences among their correspondents.

Italian politics were equally a subject of conflict in 1851-52. Appendix III of Volume 17 reprints English, American, and Italian reviews of Casa Guidi Windows, plus more reviews of EBB's Poems (1850) to add to those in Volume 16. The Casa Guidi Windows reviews are as often admiring as critical (again contrary to the modern critical tradition), with differences often turning on views of Italian liberation and EBB's critique of the English peace party. There is also a generally more positive response in America than in England. The divided reception of the poem is mirrored in the extracts from letters in the volume's "Supporting Documents." Admirers included the Italian patriot, Joseph Mazzini, the American poet Longfellow, and surprisingly, Edward Fitzgerald who was later to thank God after EBB's death that no more Aurora Leighs would be written. Critics included Mitford, who privately described Casa Guidi Windows as a "dull tirade on Italian politics," a subject she thought would excite no sympathy because Italy and its people were degenerate, an "extinct volcano" (p. 268). The reviews reflect the international reputation EBB had developed by mid century, as do the references in Volume 17 to a series of lectures on the English poets at the College de France, Tennyson, RB, and EBB prominently among them (p. 231). Volume 17 also reprints the essays on EBB and RB published by the French critic Joseph Milsand in 1851-52 in the leading European periodical, the Revue des Deux Mondes.

Critical Studies

A major contribution this year to EBB scholarship is Linda K. Hughes's Cambridge Introduction to Victorian Poetry (2010), which integrates a judicious overview of key dimensions of Victorian poetry (experiments in form, print and periodical culture, rhetoric, religion, technology and science, empire, and struggles for "liberties") with illuminating analyses of poems by diverse authors from the 1830s through the 1890s. The study is especially original in its suggestive pairings and clusterings of works. Thus, Hughes considers EBB's "The Dead Pan" in a chapter on engagement with tradition by grouping it with three poems on Demeter (by Tennyson, Swinburne, and Dora Greenwell), as well as RB's "Artemis Prologizes" and Arnold's Empedocles on Etna. The same chapter groups EBB's "A Musical Instrument" with a cluster of poems that adapted "classical material to enter debates about gender and sexuality" (p. 47), then analyzes EBB's ode, "Napoleon III in Italy" in conjunction with Tennyson's "Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington," noting the parallel forms but opposing politics of the two works (p. 52). In underscoring the continuing importance of the ballad to Victorian poets, Hughes links EBB's "The Romaunt of the Page" with D. G. Rossetti's "Stratton Water" (p. 66) and her "The Romaunt of Margret" with his "Sister Helen" (p. 67)--passing by the more obvious (though still under-investigated) parallels between EBB's "The Poet's Vow" and Tennyson's "The Lady of Shalott." Her discussion of Sonnets from the Portuguese (pp. 77-79) begins with a comparison to Mary Wroth's sequence, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (1621) and concludes with a brief treatment of its connections with Christina Rossetti's Monna Innominata (1881), the subject of several earlier studies. "The Seraphim" and "A Drama of Exile" are fruitfully discussed in the context of Tractarian poetry and poems on biblical subjects by Amy Levy and Grace Aguilar (pp. 155-157). Hughes also considers lesser known works by EBB, such as her paired dramatic lyrics, "A Woman's Shortcomings," and "A Man's Requirements" (pp. 230-31), noting their critique of the sexual double standard. Throughout, she is attentive to poetic form, as in her pithy treatment of EBB's experiments with rhythm and half-rhymes in her "epistolary dramatic monologue," "Lady Geraldine's Courtship" (pp. 25-26). Hughes's more extended analysis of both the poetics (including the Sicilian sestet form) and the politics of Casa Guidi Windows (pp. 217-221) is especially compelling in probing the poem's mixed political discourses (akin to EBB's response to French political developments in 1851-52, noted above): on the one hand, democratizing rhetoric suggestive of the Chartists, on the other, rhetorical apostrophes to inspired leaders.

Aurora Leigh is the work discussed from the most varied perspectives in Hughes's Cambridge Introduction to Victorian Poetry: for example, in relation to experimental forms in Victorian poetry (p. 7), Victorian adaptations of classical epic (pp. 63-64), the "impress" of periodical culture (p. 89), poetry on marriage and the heart's affections (pp. 175-176), and "Liberty for Women" (pp. 229-235). Judging Aurora Leigh the "most important Victorian poem making the case for women's rights" (p. 229), Hughes also chooses it for one of the two close readings that constitute her book's "Coda." Here she analyzes the much discussed passage describing the portrait of Aurora's dead mother in conjunction with Walter Pater's description of La Gioconda or the Mona Lisa--another striking pairing (pp. 265-267). She also considers the poem's Danae portraits and its Wordsworthian and Carlylean echoes, emphasizing its Romantic poetics.

Robert Stark's "'[Keeping] up the Fire: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Victorian Versification," in The Journal of Browning Studies, 1 (2010): 49-69, brings an impressive technical expertise in prosody to the most detailed and astute analysis of the blank verse form of Aurora Leigh published to date. Arguing that one of EBB's "greatest accomplishments" in this work is "transforming blank verse into a pliant verse-form well suited to the age of the novel" (p. 49), Stark traces the "history of critical disparagement" of her "deviations from the expected norms--her use of caesura, elisions, and metrical substitutions." He posits that "the poet of Aurora Leigh is deeply involved in the most vexed questions of literary technique in the nineteenth-century, sometimes in a leading and sometimes in a contrarian role" (pp. 51-52). Stark is especially original in approaching EBB's experiments in prosody within the framework of her poetical criticism in her 1842 essay "A Book of the Poets," where she condemns a "hard and stiff and uniform" rhythm "cut in boxwood," and notes both the "orbicular grandeur" of Marlowe's blank verse and the "secret" power of the blank verse of Shakespeare, Fletcher, and Milton, which she metaphorically characterizes as an "arched cadence, with its artistic keystone and underflood of broad continuous sound" (cited, p. 50). Not all of EBB's attempts in Aurora Leigh to shape this "arched cadence" by "imposing diverse rhythms upon the iambic norm" (p. 53) are judged to be equally successful by Stark, but he does demonstrate how radical her experiments were. Analyzing her use of "elision" or various types of "hypermetric additions," he notes that she permits a "greater frequency and a greater range of elisions, substitutions, and additions" in line openings than elsewhere, in keeping with her original intention of writing a poem "'running into the midst of our conventions'" (p. 61). Her handling of the caesura as well often "radically interrupts" the rhythm of the iambic pentameter line (p. 61). The combined effects of these innovations, he suggests, "render[s] her versification dynamic and charge[s] it with the vicissitudes of real language" (p. 65). Although Stark does not cite it, his analysis yields similar findings to Margaret Morlier's equally original 1999 analysis of the iconoclastic rhymes of Sonnets from the Portuguese in the context of Victorian rhyming handbooks and class ideologies. Stark's close readings do much to explain both the outraged response of Victorian reviewers more wedded to traditional prosody than EBB and the intricate relationship between sound and sense in Aurora Leigh. This last point is also underscored by Hughes in her brief treatment of rhythm and rhyme in its prototype, "Lady Geraldine's Courtship," and by Rhian Williams in her analysis of the "new rhythm" of Sonnets from the Portuguese (below).

Stark's emphasis on the novelistic license operative at the level of the versification in Aurora Leigh is complemented by Monique R. Morgan's chapter on "Juxtaposed Fragments of Genres in Aurora Leigh" in her monograph Narrative Means, Lyric Ends: Temporality in the British Long Poem (2009). Morgan's introductory chapter frames her approach to the interplay between "two seemingly antithetical modes, lyric and narrative, in four canonical long poems" with EBB's much cited comment to Mitford on her plans to "write a poem of a new class" uniting story, poetry, and philosophical digression (pp. 1-2). In the Aurora Leigh chapter itself, she cites earlier critics on the generic mixing of Aurora Leigh, but chooses to focus on what she sees as the text's more "basic" use of "lyric and narrative modes" (p. 122). This binary approach risks simplifying the text's generic complexity in by-passing its Byronic satire and philosophic digressions, as well as the features making it a notable example of Victorian sage discourse, as critics such as Rebecca Stott have argued. It clears the stage, however, for an insightful analysis of the temporal gaps marking Aurora's narration, especially moments when her retrospective autobiography is interrupted by a shift to a mobile present that Morgan associates with the "abstract, static present" and the "extreme immediacy" of lyric poetry (pp. 128, 130). Morgan also subtly analyzes the "contradictory narrative techniques" of the last two books and EBB's use of similes to "expose the false confidence of symbols," mirroring her use of "lyric and epistolary forms to expose the false confidence of retrospective narration" (pp. 132, 145).

Two other treatments of Aurora Leigh read it in conjunction with later works by nineteenth-century authors not considered in EBB scholarship to date: Mary Loeffelholz's "Mapping the Cultural Field: Aurora Leigh in America," an essay in The Traffic in Poems: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Transatlantic Exchange (ed. Meredith McGill [2008], pp. 139-159), and Laura Rotuno's "Writers of Reform and Reforming Writers in Aurora Leigh and A Writer of Books," in Gender and Victorian Reform (ed. Anita Rose, afterword, Mary Ellis Gibson [2008], pp. 58-72). In her illuminating and wide-ranging essay, Loeffelholz argues that the "notoriety" of Auorora Leigh on both sides of the Atlantic and the enormous salience of gender in the negotiation of late nineteenth-century cultural hierarchies all conspired to make Barrett Browning's epic verse-novel both a powerful mediator of transatlantic poetic exchange and a template for resolving the cultural place of poetry in gendered terms" (p. 141). Her analysis goes beyond the more usual focus on Emily Dickinson's reading of Aurora Leigh, a subject elsewhere treated this year in Elizabeth Petrino's brief consideration of the echoes of EBB's "A Vision of Poets" (pp. 86-87 in "Alllusion, Echo, and Literary Influence in Emily Dickinson," The Emily Dickinson Journal, 19, no. 1 (2010): 80-102). Loeffelhoz first analyzes the thematic connections, gender debates, and class politics linking Aurora Leigh to Kathrina (1867), a "blank verse tale of the growth of a poet's mind" written by Josiah Holland, "popular poet, author of domestic advice literature, literary editor of the Springfield Republican during the 1850s, and editor of Scribner's Monthly Magazine from 1870 to 1881" (pp. 141-142), then considers Lucy Larcom's An Idyl of Work (1875), "based loosely on Larcom's own years (from 1836 to 1846) as a factory worker in the Lowell, Massachusetts, textile mills" (p. 148). In Kathrina, it is the male partner Paul who is the poet with high artistic ambition (and views of women reminiscent of Romney's in Book II of Aurora Leigh), while the heroine Kathrina (modeled on Holland's wife Elizabeth, Dickinson's close friend) speaks for "art's responsibility to the greater social good" (p. 143). Kathrina is ultimately consumed by Paul's quest for "'artistic embodiment'" as she sinks into "consumptive death" (p. 147). Holland's Kathrina thus "normalizes Barrett Browning's more audacious plot," Loeffelholz observes (p. 142), in a work that "went through fifty printings in three years (including at least one London edition" (p. 147). Larcom's An Idyll of Work draws on plots and motifs in both Tennyson's The Princess and Aurora Leigh, but Loeffelholz notes particularly striking parallels between the depiction of the list of books cherished by the mill-girl Esther, a list "transatlantic in its contents," and Marian Erie's "more impoverished and fragmentary acquisition" of books (pp. 149-51). A key difference is that, "unlike Aurora Leigh, An Idyl of Work imagines its transatlantic cultural capital as an asset that can be shared directly between and indeed generated by working women themselves" (p. 151).

Rotuno's essay treats parallel conventions of the "female Victorian Kunstlerroman" (p. 59) in Aurora Leigh and A Writer of Books (1898) by "George Paston" (Emily Morse Symonds). Both Aurora and Paston's heroine Cosima Chudleigh are "daughters of fathers with libraries"; both aspire to write in the face of critical prejudices against women authors; both "attempt to help those suffering under the brutal realities of marital abuse, mental instability, and rape"; and the texts in which they appear were similarly interpreted as calls for reform of injustice against women (pp. 58-60). The reform Rotuno focuses on, however, is chiefly the need for women writers to reform themselves, by moving beyond "romanticized visions of what it means to be a writer" (pp. 60-61). Some of her claims seem debatable. For instance, does Aurora Leigh endorse "nineteenth-century rhetoric concerning the dangers" of women reading by representing Aurora as "having fallen victim" to such reading (p. 62)? Or does EBB satirically dissect such rhetoric in Book I of Aurora Leigh in her representation of the "world of books"? Rotuno acknowledges a degree of irony on this subject in both texts (p. 64), and she ultimately points out "significant differences" between the conclusions of the two works, in that "Aurora Leigh presents its heroine as more capable than Cosima to speak to large audiences about social significant issues" (p. 67), whereas Paston's "final descriptions of Cosima's attempts to compose her masterpiece undermine her description of what a female novelist should strive to create" (p. 68). One is left with the impression, however, that there are fewer parallels and more differences between Aurora Leigh and A Writer of Books than Rotuno addresses. More uniformly convincing is her original analysis of the pen as sword metaphor and Aurora and Romney's passionate embrace in Book IX of Aurora Leigh, both ironically suggesting "epic romance," not the "'live throbbing age'" of modern Victorian Britain that Aurora aims to represent (p. 67).

EBB's dynamic portrayals of Italy and Italian subjects in Aurora Leigh, Casa Guidi Windows, and works from Poems before Congress and Last Poems are the focus of Fabienne Moines's "Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Italian Poetry: Constructing National Identity and Shaping the Poetic Self," pp. 123-136, in the collection Performing National Identity: Anglo-Italian Cultural Transactions, ed. Manfred Pfister and Ralf Hertel (2008), the proceedings of a conference in Berlin. Like Sandra Gilbert, Moine emphasizes the parallels between EBB's personal "poetic struggles" and an "allegorised Italy" (p. 124), analyzing the female and maternal metaphors of the body, childbirth, and suffering that turn Italy into "a real person performing a role" and emphasizing the connections between "national and personal identities" (p. 126). At points, this approach leads to a recuperation of the biographical myths that recent scholarship has questioned, most notably in Moine's casting of the poet as a "crippled lady" experiencing "rebirth" under the influence of her marriage and her experience of Italy as a "land of emotions" and "sensations" (pp. 124, 130). Moines's attention to the rhetorical tropes of works such as Casa Guidi Windows and "Italy and the World" yields more persuasive insights, as in her comments on the anaphoras and "hypotactic syntax" in the latter work, which perform national identity through the energetic "interplay of repetitive patterns" (p. 131). Moine's concluding remark that EBB's "Italian poetry has remained widely unread" (p. 135) may point to the need for more dialogue between continental scholars and those in the UK and North America. This might be especially fruitful given the focus on performing the national identities of "Englishness and Italianita" (p. 10) and the parallels between English and German cultural interactions with Italy noted in the collection Moines's essay appears in, which resonates with recent work by Matthew Reynolds, Maura O'Connor, Alison Chapman, and others on the Anglo-Italian relationship. There is one slip to note in the collection's introduction: the suggestion that EBB had "an affectionate friendship" with Anita Garibaldi (p. 20).

The transatlantic rather than continental dimensions of EBB's works are the focus of Tricia Lootens's brief but resonant treatment of "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point" in "States of Exile," also in McGill's Traffic in Poems collection on transatlanticism (pp. 15-36, see above). Lootens primarily focuses on a nuanced reading of Felicia Hemans' "The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers" in a fascinating exploration of Plymouth Rock as "a crucial site" within American patriotic structures of feeling and the transatlantic "poetess tradition" (pp. 15-16). However, she briefly turns to EBB's "deeply transatlantic text" in her conclusion (p. 29). Whereas Hemans' poem was rapidly assimilated into patriotic celebrations of "'Forefathers' Day'" (p. 23), "Barrett Browning's black pilgrim evokes the power of national sentimentality" in a more "disquieting fashion," through the "song" she sings to the "white child" born of her rape, her challenge to the "hunter sons" of the Pilgrim fathers, and the "disdain" she expresses in her final leap to death. The song evokes "a moment of passionate, eerie reconciliation," as the slave hears the dead child's voice rising to join her, Lootens remarks, adding, "This is America singing" (pp.30-31). One possibly unintended irony of this essay is that its focus is so insistently on America, despite Lootens' excavation of patriotic sentimental discourse, that the deep transatlanticism she posits is somewhat thwarted. Is it solely America singing when a black American slave woman is projected out of the consciousness of an English woman with Jamaican slaveholding familial roots and placed on Plymouth Rock? Or does EBB's poem embody a transatlanticism that is both more fraught and more complicated in its triangulation of more than one national site than Lootens's focus suggests? As McGill observes in her introduction to this timely collection, the Caribbean and other locations tend to be occluded when transatlanticism takes the form of "an Anglo-American binary," as she acknowledge it does in The Traffic in Poems (p. 10).

Rhian Williams explores and dissolves binaries of a different kind in her subtle, insightful article, "'Our Deep, Dear Silence': Marriage and Lyricism in the Sonnets from the Portuguese" (Victorian Literature and Culture, 37 [2009]: 85102). Probing the "doleful triangulation of silence, woman, and marriage"-the fact that marriage, especially in Victorian England, is "often considered to be synonomous with silence" (p. 86)--Williams also engages with the nature of lyric expressive modes in the sequence, as Morgan does in relation to Aurora Leigh (see above). Noting that it was Aurora Leigh and not the Sonnets "which heralded Barrett Browning's re-admittance to a literary canon that her example helped to re-figure," Williams asks if we might see the apparently problematic inviting of silence in the earlier work in a different way, and also question the privileged yet "sometimes-prohibitive lyrical ideology of one voice speaking" (pp. 87, 88). Analyzing the ways in which silence, in both the courtship correspondence and the sequence is mobilized in "moments of emotional profundity," she argues that "Sonnets from the Portuguese operate in thoughtful response to the marriage they anticipate, and seek to establish expressive modes that are predicated on mediation and exchange--neither male nor female, but vigorously conjugal" (pp. 87, 88-89). These efforts, "marked by moments of silence," disrupt "our readings both of lyrical expression and of marriage itself," in seeking to imagine a lyric expression beyond the boundaries of subjectivity. "Rather than entrenching boundaries (as the delineation of a female poetic subject in Aurora Leigh would suggest), the Sonnets from the Portuguese actually work hard to dissolve borders and replace them with interfaces of conjugal exchange" (pp. 88-9). Drawing on Helena Michie's work on Victorian honeymoons, Williams reframes marriage not as a silencing transformation for women but as a "site of lyrical debate" (p. 90), then reframes lyric as a site of doubleness and interactive "'in-betweenness'" (a term she adopts from Isobel Armstrong), in the process developing a more layered conception of the lyric mode than Morgan's (see above). She then turns to some strikingly original close readings of various sonnets: I, VI, X, and the central four sonnets in the sequence, especially the "deep, dear silence" of XXII, a sonnet, as she points out, "exactly at the centre" of this sequence of 44 sonnets "and titled with a doubling of two (XX and II)" (p. 97). Her readings focus on the silence and speech of the printed voice and the complex doublings evident at the level of image and form (including rhythmic indeterminacies and eye-rhymes) in a sequence where the "'pulses ... beat double'" (Sonnet VI) throughout, "finding ways of segueing between the lyrical and the marital" in "numinous" moments of "human interrelation" (pp. 94, 97). Williams concludes that Sonnets from the Portuguese "does not constitute the paradigmatic example of the Victorian marriage, but rather an energetic overhauling of its terms" (p. 99).

Silence is also central to EBB's representation of the sublime Vallombrosa landscape in the hills above Florence, a point nicely brought out by Katerine Gaja in "The Brownings at Vallombrosa: Landscape and Language" (The Journal of Browning Studies, 1 [20101: 37-48), an article which makes reference to "A Drama of Exile," as well as the Vallombrosa allusions in Casa Guidi Windows and Aurora Leigh. Gaja first gives a lively account of the Brownings' attempts to spend the hot summer months of 1847 in the "'sublime solitude'" surrounding a monastery, "like an eagle's nest, in the Apennine," as EBB described it: a site made poetically resonant for the two poets through its inspiring the landscape of Eden in Milton's Paradise Lost (pp. 37-8). After a five-day ascent, with Elizabeth dragged in a basket by oxen up the precipitous slopes, their plans were thwarted by the rule that forbade the entry of women into the monastery's guest house or foresteria. Robert's "'desperate cries of appeal'" to the Father in charge that his wife had "'written about & translated from the Greek Fathers!'" made no impact, leading to denunciations by both Protestant poets of those "'idiots of monks,'" as RB termed them (pp. 39-40). Gaja notes how EBB repeatedly associates the landscape of Vallombrosa in both her letters and her poetry with a "'strange dialect'" of silence, with its "'supernaturally silent'" pine forests. She suggestively relates these references to the "idea, first presented in A Drama of Exile (1844), of a sublime language that lies beyond silence, that fallen man can no longer hear" (p. 40). Much as Williams focuses on numinous moments of silence in Sonnets from the Portuguese, Gaja considers how in EBB's poetry Vallombrosa is represented as a numinous site of silent communion, a "place of extreme, almost uncanny animation. Its lambent shapes seem closer to fire, air, or water than earth: pines palpitate, waters leap, mountains move, aspire, conspire, pant, rend the clouds, and wait the mysterious source of inspiration that [EBB[ calls 'commission'" (p. 41, alluding to Aurora Leigh, 1:626). This is a poetically written article that, like Williams', invites more consideration of those silent moments, "one and infinite," that recur in Victorian poetry, especially by the Brownings--in EBB's "Bertha in the Lane" (1844) for instance, which also has Miltonic echoes, like her Vallombrosa allusions in her later works.

The introductory chapter in Erik Gray's Milton and the Victorians (2009) rightly notes the need for more study of the "Victorian Milton," a neglected subject as compared to studies of Milton and the Romantics. Approaching this subject through the lens of Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence and the feminist revision of Bloom in Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic, Gray's study emphasizes the "characteristically oblique nature of Milton's influence on Victorian authors" (p. 9). It includes a brief analysis of Miltonic echoes in EBB's "The Lost Bower" (pp. 39-41) and an allusion in Sonnets from the Portuguese (Sonnet 29), as well as mention of the lock of EBB's hair given to RB in the courtship period, later bound with a portion of the lock of Milton's hair saluted in Keats's famous sonnet (pp. 168-169) and today preserved in the Keats-Shelley House in Rome. Surprisingly, however, Gray's treatment of EBB's most direct (as opposed to "oblique") and extended engagement with Milton, "A Drama of Exile," does not extend beyond a paragraph on the "Bloomian anxiety" of EBB's prefatory description of her attempt to "walk in [Milton's] footsteps" by taking up the story of Eve and Adam where Paradise Lost leaves off (p. 39). His introductory summary of scholarship on Milton and the Victorians also omits any mention of treatments of EBB's response to Milton by a number of scholars (for instance, by Dorothy Mermin, David Riede, Linda Lewis, Terence Allen Hoagwood, and several others on "A Drama of Exile"; by Esther Schor on Casa Guidi Windows; and by Susan Brown on Aurora Leigh). Nevertheless, Gray's study provides a valuable set of contexts for more study of EBB's engagement with Milton than has thus far appeared. Such as study might include her many references to Milton's works and prosody in her correspondence and her essay on English literary history "The Book of the Poets," as well as poems such as "The Seraphim," "A Vision of Poets," and "The Virgin Mary to the Child Jesus"--the last jumping off from the end of Milton's "Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity," much as "A Drama of Exile" takes as its starting point the end of Paradise Lost.

"The Virgin Mary to the Child Jesus" is among several poems in EBB's 1838 volume treated in Heather Shippen Cianciola's "'Mine Earthly Heart Should Dare': Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Devotional Poetry" (Christianity and Literature, 58, no. 3 [2009]: 367-400), one of two articles on religious issues this year. In this thoughtful, substantial article, Cianciola argues that EBB's "devotional poetics are emphasized most clearly by her poems' investment in what Janet Larson calls the 'processes of spiritual formation,'" and that her "socially activist texts" both "broaden our definition of Victorian devotional poetry" and critique "ideas of authority and power" based on gender difference (p. 368). Since gender differences have been frequently emphasized in the EBB scholarship that Cianciola cites, what makes her approach particularly original is the nuanced conception of devotional poetry and poetics that she develops. Citing EBB's Romantic emphasis on the importance of "'the sense of soul'" to the vitality of "'any work of Art'" (pp. 369-370) and noting the important context of Tractarian poetry by John Keble and others as Hughes does (see above), she explores the "transformative" process integral to EBB's devotional poetics (p. 377), her resistance to the "dogma of any particular Christian sect" (p. 368), her emphasis on poetics as much as piety in religious poetry (p. 381) together with "'real warm emotion & feeling'" (p. 380), and the anchoring of her "Christian views firmly in material reality" and the language of a shared humanity (pp. 381, 383). Her insightful close reading of "The Virgin Mary to the Child Jesus" (pp.386-389), which builds on Cynthia Scheinberg's ground-breaking discussion, develops these themes, with particular emphasis on Mary's embodied experience and her role as female prophet, an aspect also addressed in an earlier article of my own in Studies in Browning and His Circle along with a range of Victorian contexts for the poem (see the 2005 "Year's Work"). In addition, Cianciola perceptively analyzes "The Seraphim," "The Soul's Travelling" (a poem passed over by modern critics but admired by Victorian reviewers as the WEBB headnote indicates), and the four hymns EBB included in her 1838 volume (cutting them back to one in her later collected Poems). While these hymns have been earlier treated by Scheinberg and by Karen Dieleman in the context of EBB's Congregationalist poetics (see the 2007 and 2009 "Year's Work"), Cianciola reads them, especially "The Measure: Hymn IV," rather differently in the context of the "theological language of sufficiency and sacrifice" and of "mediation" (p. 391). Dieleman's new article, "The Practices of Faith: Worship and Writing," also in Christianity and Literature, 58, no.2 (2009): 260-265, is part of a "Seminar on Christian Scholarship" and much briefer than Cianciola's. It reinforces arguments made in Dieleman's earlier articles concerning EBB's subscription to the Congregationalist principles of "the absolute authority of scripture and the intellectual and spiritual independence" of individual believers (p. 262). Here Dieleman returns to "The Measure," suggesting, rather differently from Cianciola, that the poem moves "away" from "mediation" and "toward exegesis" (p. 263); she also sees "The Virgin Mary to the Child Jesus" as a poem in which Mary "situates herself within a Jewish religious community by citing Hebrew prophecies ... rather than formulating her own prophetic vision" (p. 264).

Lauren P. Matz emphasizes the influence of classical myth rather than the Christian contexts of EBB's poetry in "'A Little Taller than Homer': Elizabeth Barrett Browning's 'Hector in the Garden'" even though her article appears in Cithara: Essays in the Judaeo-Christian Tradition (48, no. 2 (2009): 28-33). Matz interprets this playful poem about the fashioning of a giant body of the Homeric hero Hector out of flowers as a "poem about power and control"--"human power over nature, female power of male" and "artistic creation over military might." Her approach thus accords with Beverly Taylor's, who argues that the poem prefigures Aurora Leigh in "whittling Homer's hero down to size" (see the 2009 "Year's Work"). By considering the poem in the context of "the extensive ongoing relandscaping" by EBB's father of the Hope End estate of her girlhood, Matz further suggests that it reflects an exertion of power against Edward Moulton-Barrett. The mythic contexts Matz explores are more intriguing than the better-known biographical ones: in particular, her consideration of EBB's probable knowledge of the rites associated with the worship of Adonis, the dying vegetation god, which included the planting by women of short-lived "Gardens of Adonis" in baskets and platters, which were thrown into the water along with effigies of the dead God. As Matz points out, the matriarchal and seasonal nature of such classical rites was "known to classicists long before Sir James George Frazer's The Golden Bough," and the poem similarly presents Hector as a vegetation god created by a female. In support of her reading, Matz emphasizes the allusion to the Roman witch Canidia in Stanza IV of the poem, who is described in Horace's Epodes as burying a young man alive up to the neck in order to steal the power of his body for a love-charm. Also figuring in Matz's argument is EBB's delightful semi-fictionalized essay about a "warrior" girl named Beth, first published in The Brownings' Correspondence (1:360-362). Beth, of course, fantasizes not only about becoming a poet "a little taller than Homer," but also about taking Lord Byron as her "lover."

EBB's relationship with both Byron and Shelley is cogently addressed this year in Jane Stabler's "Romantic and Victorian Conversations: Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning in Dialogue with Byron and Shelley," the concluding essay in Fellow Romantics: Male and Female British Writers, 1790-1835, ed. Beth Lau (2009). Like other contributors to this collection, Stabler is interested in how "influence might work through fellowship, rather than competition and anxiety" (p. 231)--resisting the Bloomian paradigm that Eric Gray finds still useful in Milton and the Victorians (see above) and fruitfully considering the Brownings together rather than in segregation from each other. Noting how often "nineteenth-century critics of Barrett and Browning judge them against Byron and Shelley" (p. 233), Stabler investigates how "their conversations about their Romantic doubles complicates notions of gender in the role of the poet" (p. 234). She considers works by EBB such as "Leila" and "The Romaunt of the Page" (modeled principally on Byron's Lara, she suggests [p. 237], as Angela Leighton has also noted). Stabler takes issue with my own use of a "linear" Bloomian paradigm in a chapter on "Romantic Revisionism" in Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1995) (though a Bloomian model modified by feminist critiques to "audacity of authorship"), arguing that "the intertextual dynamics of Barrett's writing are surely less orderly" than "Stone's account suggests," and describing the Brownings' "engagement with Byron and Shelley" as "an uneven, lateral, sibling matrix," not a "Bloomian trajectory" (p. 235). I would cheerfully concur with her critique (one of the sources of chagrin in writing the "Year's Work" is confronting the limitations of one's own interpretations in the light of new scholarship)--although EBB's many poems addressed to or invoking Byron in her youth (see Vol. 4 of the WEBB), like her essay on "Beth," suggest that she may have seen Byron more as a lover/ rival than a sibling. Stabler also critiques the view that Byron's influence on EBB waned as she matured (p. 246), as expressed in books on EBB by Helen Cooper and Dorothy Mermin. A particularly original and engaging dimension of Stabler's essay is her contrapuntal account of how EBB sought to convert RB in the courtship correspondence to a more favorable view of Byron and he did the same with her in the case of Shelley, even though he endorsed her critique of Shelley's "'white ideal all statue-blind'" in "A Vision of Poets" as "'perfect'" (p. 245). As a result, the "warmth of Barrett's Byron impregnated Browning's view of the poet," as EBB predicted their secret marriage would be viewed as "'mad and bad'" (p. 246). As for RB's view" of Shelley influencing EBB, Stabler finds this in a suggestive reading of two 1847 sonnets, "Life" and "Love" (pp. 248-249). She also notes previously undiscussed echoes of both Byron and Shelley in Casa Guidi Windows (pp. 249-50). "By the time of their settled married life in Italy, Barrett and Browning had reached accord over Byron and Shelley," Stabler concludes (p. 251).

Finally, Patricia Rigg's comprehensive and illuminating Julia Augusta Webster: Victorian Aestheticism and the Woman Writer (2009) includes many suggestive references to connections between EBB's poetry and Webster's, reminding us that, if EBB's response to precursors such as Byron was evolving and multi-faceted, much the same can be said of the later writers who engaged with her. Like the essays by Mary Loeffelholz and Laura Rotuno, Rigg's book points to the pervasive impact of Aurora Leigh: in this case on Webster's three-volume novel Lesley's Guardian (1863), a portrait of the "struggling, independent woman artist" (p. 54), and her long poem published the same year, Lilian Gray, "similar in its essential structure" to EBB's major work, particularly in portraying a "love triangle made problematic by issues of class" (p. 58). Rigg also notes connections between Aurora Leigh and both Webster's "Lota" in A Woman Sold and Other Poems (1867) and "Siste Viator" (1874) (pp. 119, 200), between "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point" and Webster's powerful "Medea in Athens" (p. 126), and between EBB's "Bertha in the Lane" and Webster's "By the Looking Glass," alike in their "rather sinister expose" of the rivalry between sisters (p. 97). As might be expected, Webster's reviewers often measured her against her precursor, sometimes finding her wanting in "'the rapt utterance of a Mrs. Browning,'" like H. Buxton Forman (p. 30), sometimes deciding that she had inherited her precursor's "'mantle,'" along with her inspiration from "'the cold severity of classical literature'" (p. 151). Rigg's widely researched study extends our understanding not only of Webster's response to EBB, but also of the contexts in which the earlier poet worked. It contains, for example, a useful overview of the culture and the contributors associated with the Athenaeum, a journal "'ahead of its times'" in opening its doors to women (p. 219).

I would like to thank Cynthia Burgess of the Armstrong Browning Library and my Research Assistant Kala Hirtle for assistance in gathering the materials for this review.