Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Stone, Marjorie

2009 brings a wealth of new information on EBB's later career and works with the publication of her extensive correspondence with Isa Blagden, her closest friend from the early 1850s up to her death in June 1861. This year too is particularly rich in studies that explore EBB's relationships and parallels with other writers, including Shakespeare, Coleridge, Hemans, Landon, Tennyson, Carlyle, Clough, George Eliot, Jean Ingelow, Frederick Douglass, and the Italians patriots Garibaldi and Mazzini. Aurora Leigh features most prominently among works discussed; others include Casa Guidi Windows, Sonnets from the Portuguese, ballads such as "The Poet's Vow" and "A Romance of the Ganges," "A Vision of Poets, "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point," "Hiram Power's Greek Slave," "Lord Waiter's Wife," "Mother and Poet," and the previously neglected "Hector in the Garden." Themes range from the politics of childhood, motherhood, slavery, and nations (especially Italian nation-building) to representations of love, EBB's spiritualist and "electric" poetics, religious developments that shaped her poetry, and her engagement with classical literature. Two new editions of EBB's poetry have also appeared: a French translation of Sonnets from the Portuguese and an annotated edition of EBB's selected poems with contextual appendices from Broadview Press.

The most important new scholarly resource for EBB critics and students this year is Florentine Friends: The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning to Isa Blagden 1850-61 (2009), co-edited by Philip Kelley and Sandra Donaldson with Associate Editors Scott Lewis, Edward Hagan, and Rita S. Patteson. Of the 196 letters from EBB to Isa Blagden in this meticulously annotated and illustrated collection, 146 are published for the first time, while 22 others present the full texts of letters earlier published only in part (p. xii). Addressed to the friend whom EBB addressed as "My dearest Isa" from 1853 on, these letters are comparable in their intimacy to the poet's correspondence with her sister Arabella Moulton-Barrett, comprehensively edited by Scott Lewis in The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Her Sister Arabella (2002). In their literary range and interest, they provide a counterpart to EBB's extensive correspondence with her closest friend before her marriage, Mary Russell Mitford, published by Meredith B. Raymond and Mary Rose Sullivan in 1983, and re-issued in the volumes of The Brownings' Correspondence that have thus far appeared. The Isa letters, however, reveal dimensions of EBB in her maturity that remain largely or partially invisible in these earlier bodies of correspondence, in part because Isa moved in the relatively liberal artistic and political continental contexts that shaped EBB's vision and aesthetic practice after her marriage and move to Italy. As the natural, Calcutta-born daughter of an Englishman and a Eurasian mother, Isa was also shaped by a relatively unconventional background, aspects of it investigated for the first time in the biographical sketch published in Appendix I of Volume 16 of The Brownings' Correspondence (see the 2008 "Year's Work"). The "Introduction" to Florentine Friends and the texts of the letters brings further details about Isa, an interesting artist in her own right, and her relationship with the Brownings: her love of literature and eclectic reading; her early publications in The English Woman's Journal and her first novel Agnes Tremorne (critiqued in frank and vigorous detail by EBB); her passion like EBB's for Italian Risorgimento politics; and the interest in spiritualism she shared with the poet.

The letters themselves speak to all of these subjects, casting much new light on many works in EBB's two late collections Poems before Congress (1860) and Last Poems (1862), such as "A Curse for a Nation," "Mother and Poet," and "A Musical Instrument," as well as Aurora Leigh. Although in the case of Aurora Leigh, some of the most relevant passages in the letters to Isa have earlier appeared in Frederic G. Kenyon's The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1897) or, in tantalizingly brief excerpts, in Margaret Reynold's Norton Critical Edition (1996), in Florentine Friends we find these letters in full, in the context of other newly published letters that speak to Aurora Leigh's contemporary contexts: for example, the "Odic water" mentioned in an 1855 letter (p. 95), associated with the "od-force" mentioned in Aurora Leigh (VII. 566). Most notably, in relation to Aurora Leigh, the Isa correspondence reveals the intricate social and intellectual networks that connected EBB (often through Isa) to woman artists such as Harriet Hosmer and to British women associated with The English Woman's Journal and the Langham place group such as Bessie Rayner Parkes, Frances Power Cobbe, and Barbara Leigh Smith (afterward Bodichon). More extensively than in her letters to Arabella, EBB also frankly comments to Isa on the Brownings' numerous artist friends, describing their studios, their works, and, in some cases, her response to their nude models. The Isa letters also manifest the depth of her engagement with Italian politics and political figures, among them the writer, painter, and 1849-52 prime minister of Piedmont, Massimo d'Azeglio (see, e.g., p. 202) and the Italian poet and patriot Francesco Dall'Ongaro, who translated "A Court Lady" from Poems before Congress into Italian.

Fascinating too is the evidence the letters present for networks connecting Isa and the Brownings to British diplomats and Italian liberal politicians: networks that functioned in part to evade the rigid censorship regime in Rome, where the Brownings had Isa send them newspapers and pamphlets via diplomatic addresses to escape the censors and to share with Italian friends. In this respect, the Isa letters point to the limitations of David Lowenthal's passing remark that the Brownings "had met few Italians other than their servitors in their sheltered life in Florence," in his otherwise illuminating analysis of Caroline Marsh's accounts of the condition of Italian women in "'The Marriage of Choice and The Marriage of Convenance': A Puritan Ambasciatrice Views Risorgimento Italy" (Browning Society Notes 32 [2007]: 99). The wife of the American envoy to Italy George Perkins Marsh and a friend of the Brownings who was "devastated" by EBB's death (p. 110), Caroline Marsh provides accounts of the social repression of upper-class Italian women in Piedmont and Turin that counteract the rather differing impression created by EBB's letters to Isa and Arabella, as well as the dramatic monologue "Mother and Poet." The Isa letters are also filled with references to the American artists and writers the Brownings met in Italy, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the sculptor William Wetmore Story, among numerous others. They reflect as well EBB's opinions on various English writers: for example, her growing enthusiasm for the novels of Anthony Trollope as opposed to William Thackeray. Her increasingly long and animated letters in the year preceding her premature death in June 1861 take on an added poignancy from their intense engagement with political and artistic life, even as they also testify to her body's increasing frailty. "I have great notches all over my heart to think of you by," EBB wrote to Isa in February 1858 (p. 146), in one of many expressions of affection.

The importance of EBB's correspondence to an appreciation of her poetry and representations of gender, nation, and citizenship is elsewhere amply demonstrated this year by one of the most wide-ranging articles to appear, Beverly Taylor's illuminating and witty "Elizabeth Barrett Browning and The Politics of Childhood" (VP 46 [2008]: 405-427). In a study that is simultaneously critical and biographical, Taylor first critiques prevailing views of EBB's approach to her son Pen's education and socialization, presenting it instead as an informed rejection of both Rousseau's ideas of appropriate masculine and feminine education and "the conventional English foundation of an exclusively masculine education in classical languages and literature" (p. 413). Taylor argues that EBB sought to raise Pen as a "citizen of the world" with a cosmopolitan understanding of "'living languages'" and modern cultures, preserving him from the English insularity that the child himself captured in his observation, "'The English always will shut their mouses when the speat'" (p. 410). EBB's approach to mothers as the shapers of citizens reflects a "transgressive" understanding of their role (p. 406) that Taylor finds manifested in "Lord Waiter's Wife" (1862) and the poet's sharp exchange with William Thackeray after he rejected the poem's portrayal of the sexual double standard as inappropriate for the Cornhill Magazine: an exchange in which EBB challenged Thackeray's embodiment of "paterfamilias, with his Oriental traditions and veiled female faces" with her own assertion of the right of "materfamilias" to regulate "customary laws" (p. 421). "Lord Waiter's Wife" is one of four poems that Taylor examines to show how EBB employs the "figure of the child" to "give voice to woman's experience and expose the social disabilities perpetuated by prevailing gender constructions" (p. 420). Other poems include "The Romance of the Swan's Nest," "A Romance of the Ganges," and "Hector in the Garden." The last, hitherto largely dismissed as a relatively trivial poem about fashioning a figure of the Greek epic hero Hector out of flowers is analyzed at greatest length. Taylor astutely draws on an exchange in EBB's letters concerning gardening, gendered spheres of activity and Voltaire's dictum cuhiver notre jardin to show how "Hector in the Garden" anticipates Aurora Leigh in whittling "Homer's hero down to size," by portraying the martial hero with a floral "schnoz," and sword of "flashing lilies" that is raked, spaded, and pruned by a "nine-year-old" girl (p. 418).

The Italian politics that permeate EBB's letters to Isa and the ideal of cosmopolitan citizenship that enters into Taylor's examination of EBB's theories of education and motherhood also figure prominently in the first of two treatments of Casa Guidi Windows this year: Hyowon Kim's Adopted Colors: Identity, Race, and the Passion for Other People's Nationalism; George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Imagining Kinship in 19th Century Nation-building (2008). Focusing on "the two most prominent women writers of the nineteenth century," Kim poses the question, "What, then, summoned English writers to answer the call of nations that were not their own?" (p. 3). She argues that for EBB and Eliot, "the literal and figurative place of the family becomes central to exploring the tensions between the nationalist rhetoric of liberation and the liberation of women" (p. 3). Whereas Romney in Aurora Leigh denigrates women's poetry as merely personal, for women writers "sympathy" generates "political force," leading "imagined kinship" to move outward from the personal to the political. "Both Eliot and Barrett Browning aligned themselves with marginalized, outcast voices, displaying a marked sympathy with 'dark Others' whose place within England disrupted the boundaries of English nation and family" (as in Eliot's The Spanish Gypsy and Daniel Deronda); or, as in EBB's Casa Guidi Windows, they embraced the "narratives of fledging nations" (pp. 4-5), expressing a "persistent desire for duty in the pursuit of other people's nationalisms" (p. 6). Although Kim initially suggests that "Barrett Browning's insistent engagement with the Italian movement relies on personal ties to Italy" (p. 12), her actual analysis of Casa Guidi Windows unfolds a more complex argument, one that serves as a corrective to the "feminist project of 'rescuing' Barrett Browning's text from critical neglect by approaching it as a "metaphor for her personal struggle against domestic tyranny" (p. 47). Her focus instead is "the question of political identity" in Casa Guidi Windows, and the "poetics" involved in constructing a nation and a national voice, from the doubly removed writer's position as a woman and outsider" (p. 49). An original aspect of this reading is that Kim approaches the "poet's literary pilgrimage" through Florence in Book I not as an act of spectatorship from a window, but as the act of an artist-flaneur who walks through and "blends in and out of the city" (pp. 55-56), speaking from within "a community of artists" as she draws on the cultural legacy of Italy's past to project a "vision" of a "national future" articulated through "the language of lineage and family" (p. 58). While Kim recognizes a retreat in Part II of Casa Guidi Windows, with its bitter portrait of the failure of the 1848-49 Italian democratic uprisings and the speaker's withdrawal behind the shut doors of her Italian home, she nevertheless finds a "resolute hope" in the poem's ending, developed through the representation of the mother and the child's role in the building of nations (pp. 66-67). This hope is somewhat muted in EBB's later poem "Mother and Poet," in which the "poet mother affirms her place as a national poet even as she relinquishes the claim" (p. 69). Kim further contrasts the tempered hope, agency, and commitment in Casa Guidi Windows with the sporadic enthusiasm and tourist's stance of Claude, the protagonist of Clough's representation in Amours de Voyage of the 1848 Roman revolution and short-lived republic. "Barrett Browning's course of action is not to leap onto the stage and join the actors, but neither is it to dismiss the events as fictional" as Claude does in asking, "What's the Roman Republic to me, or I to the Roman Republic?," echoing Hamlet's famous allusion to Hecuba (pp. 44-45).

In "The 1848-1849 Revolutions and the Italian Body Politic: Barrett Browning & Clough, Garibaldi & Mazzini" (Journal of Anglo-Italian Studies 9 [2008]:63-78), Arnold A. Schmidt similarly juxtaposes Casa Guidi Windows with Clough's Amours de Voyage, as well as with a political romance about the 1848 Roman revolution by Garibaldi, Cantoni il volontario (1869), and Mazzini's "first speech to the Republic's parliament" (p. 72). Schmidt also usefully and succinctly summarizes some of the complicated developments in Italian political history that form the contexts for these writings. Like Kim, he stresses the contrast between Claude's "passive" spectatorship and "inability to commit" to action in Clough's text and "those who did commit-like Barrett Browning, Garibaldi, and Mazzini," even though revolutionary action in 1848-49 did not prove successful (p. 77). In Casa Guidi Windows, however, as in the other texts Schmidt considers, the emphasis falls on the realization of hopes through "social collectivity," symbolized by the singing child in EBB's poem (p. 78). Schmidt brings out, as Kim does, the importance of the figure of the poet in Casa Guidi Windows, noting that "while governments have influence, artists appear more important than politicians" in EBB's invocation of Tuscan history (p. 70). One of the interesting aspects of his textual juxtapositions is that Garibaldi's work as he presents it underscores the relative realism of EBB's poem, since Cantoni is far from the kind of text one might expect from a seasoned and savvy guerilla leader and military strategist. Instead, Garibaldi draws on the conventions of chivalric and gothic romance to portray "the idealism and vitality of the Italian nation" through the fifteen-year old soldier Cantoni, "'beautiful as Apollo,'" and Ida, the fourteen-year old aristocratic girl he loves, who cross-dresses as a man and runs away to join the "Volunteers" with Cantoni (rather like the page in EBB's "The Romaunt of the Page"). The forces of tyranny are represented by diabolical aristocrats and Jesuit cohorts who "abduct Ida, plotting her rape," while in the catacombs of a convent where "libidinous nuns and priests perform sexual acts," Cantoni and Ida discover the "corpses of political prisoners" and a burial site full of infants' bones (pp. 66-67).

While Risorgimento politics dominate Florentine Friends and these articles on Casa Guidi Windows, EBB's anti-slavery poems have received relatively less attention in 2009, apart from two articles in a "special section" on "Abolition of the Slave-trade 1808-2008" in the Victorian Newsletter 114 (2008). Sara Hackenberg's "Alien Image, Ideal Beauty: The Orientalist Vision of American Slavery in Hiram Power's The Greek Slave" (pp. 30-50) makes relatively brief reference to EBB, aside from citing and briefly commenting on "Hiram Powers' Greek Slave." Nevertheless, this detailed analysis of the extensive international attention Power's statue received in the nineteenth century (viewed by more people than any other work of art), together with Hackenberg's analysis of the differing resonance it had on different sides of the Atlantic, makes this article an important contribution to understanding the contexts and rhetorical strategies of EBB's sonnet. As she points out, "Power's image, literally taken into the bosom of English and American domestic spaces, figured a woman simultaneously chaste and exposed, naked and clothed, pure and sullied, fallen and raised, ancient and modern, beautiful and awful, white and black, Eastern and Western, abstract and particular, idealized and problematic, unique and relentlessly reproduced, alien and deeply familiar" (p. 45). She sees EBB's sonnet as working to "reconcile" these "oppositional energies," as "the passive, silent image provides a truly global occasion" and encourages women in both East and West "to overthrow their own silence and 'appeal ... against man's wrong'" (p. 41). In another essay in The Victorian Newsletter's anti-slavery section, "Sight, Sound, and Silence: Representations of the Slave Body in Barrett Browning, Hawkshaw, and Douglass" (pp. 5168), Debbie Bark analyzes "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point" as a work "representative of literary constructions of the enslaved body through color, in which the slave body is signified through visual difference" (p. 53). While the speaker's "insistent" "self-referenced blackness" in this poem has been treated before, Bark's juxtaposition of the poem with Frederick Douglass's My Bondage and My Freedom (1855)--which, according to her, delineates "the enslaved body through sound rather than color" (p. 57)--is suggestive. As her own relatively brief analysis of EBB's poem makes clear, however, sound also figures importantly in this work, through the slave woman's song, which, together with the burial of her white-faced child in the black earth, facilitates the mother's reconciliation with her murdered infant. While Bark juxtaposes "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point" with Douglass' second narrative, she does not mention evidence for possible connections between his earlier, more famous 1845 Narrative and EBB's poem (see the 2005 "Year's Work").

Among the several studies of relationships between EBB and other writers this year, Robin L. Inboden's "Damsels, Dulcimers, and Dreams: Elizabeth Barrett's Early Response to Coleridge" (VP 46 [Summer 2008]) is especially ground-breaking as the first extended investigation of the "complicated nexus of gender, genre, and physical frailty" that attracted "Barrett to Coleridge" (p. 129), a relationship that has received much less attention than EBB's response to Wordsworth. Arguing that despite "Coleridge's 'masculine' status as a Romantic genius, ... 'feminized' elements of his poetry, poetics, and public image" made him a "liminal literary 'Grandmother'" for Barrett (pp. 129-130), Inboden analyzes EBB's views of Coleridge, their "parallel experiences of opium" and invalidism, and their representation of poetic visions in which liberation is achieved "through imaginative androgyny" (pp. 133, 134). She further develops her argument through detailed analysis of echoes of "The Time of the Ancient Mariner" and "Kubla Khan" in "A True Dream: Dreamed at Sidmouth, 1833," a vivid and rather weirdly occult poem that EBB never published in any of her collections. Noting Barrett's observation in 1842 that Coleridge said "every man ... had something of the woman in him" (except Wordsworth), Inboden then turns to a comparative analysis of Coleridge's "Christabel" and the transgressive, androgynous "female heroes of three Barrett ballads--'The Romaunt of Margret' (1836), 'The Lay of the Brown Rosary' (1840), and 'The Romaunt of the Page' (1839)." An epilogue treating the ironies of EBB's rather "star-struck" 1845 correspondence with Coleridge's daughter Sara Coleridge frames this original essay. As Inboden notes, EBB is so distracted by her professed "'reverence'" for the "'illustrious name'" Sara bears and her own evident desire to position herself as Coleridge's "true literary heir" that she can "hardly perceive Sara as an independent person" (pp. 147, 148). Not surprisingly, the correspondence ended as quickly as it began, she points out.

Brandy Ryan's "'Echo and Reply': The Elegies of Felicia Hemans, Letitia Landon, and Elizabeth Barrett," also in VP (46 [Fall 2008]), explores EBB's ambivalent response to two of her most important Romantic female precursors within the genre of the elegy, used by all three poets both "to locate particular value" in a dead poet's work and to position the "general values of poetry" within a "feminine poetic economy" (p. 249). An analysis of Hemans' elegy for Mary Tighe, "The Grave of a Poetess" (1828), and of Landon's "Stanzas on the Death of Mrs. Hemans" (1835) sets the stage for an exploration of Barrett's "Stanzas Addressed to Miss Landon and Suggested by her 'Stanzas on the Death of Mrs. Hemans" (1835)--retitled "Felica Hemans: To L.E.L., Referring to Her Monody on the Poetess" in EBB's Poems (1850). Through a subtle close reading, Ryan demonstrates how Barrett employs "critical, rather than connecting discourse" (p. 266) to interrogate the values her poem associates with Landon, along with the "use of sorrow as elegiac currency set in place by Hemans and circulated by Landon" (p. 265). Barrett challenges Landon's "too-close connection to the dead" (p. 267) and the "value of excessive sorrow ... as empty as a shadow" (p. 268), inserting herself as the dominant poetic presence by echoing and restructuring images and sections of Landon's "Stanzas on the Death of Mrs. Hemans" and addressing Landon with imperatives such as "'Go! take thy music from the dead, / Whose silentness is sweeter'" (p. 270). At the same time, Ryan suggests, Barrett betrays some envy of the "poetic and sympathetic bond" between her two precursors (p. 271).

In comparison, EBB's relationship with Tennyson as Amy Billone treats it in "Elizabeth Barrett's and Alfred Tennyson's Authorial and Formal Links" (SEL 48 [Autumn 2008]: 779-89) seems much less conflicted. In fact, Billone opens by provocatively suggesting that "if they had only met earlier, Elizabeth Barrett might well have married Alfred Tennyson," documenting "Barrett's longstanding passion for Tennyson as a man and as a poet" despite her sharp reaction to critical "accusations" about supposed "Tennysonians" in her poems (pp. 779-780). Billone offers a succinct overview of the parallels between the two poets-their youthful adulation of Byron, their "mysterious illnesses," their experiences of profound grief (p. 780), as well as their "fanatical" revising of their poems (p. 782)--a feature much more widely recognized in Tennyson's case than EBB's. She also briefly treats their respective opinions of each other (though Tennyson was interested in Barrett, he had more reservations about her poetry than she had about his) and usefully surveys some of the criticism on connections between works such as "The Poet's Vow" and "The Lady of Shalott," "Lady Geraldine's Courtship" and "Locksley Hall," and "The Princess" and Aurora Leigh (pp. 783-84). She concludes by analyzing previously unnoted textual borrowings connecting In Memoriam to Barrett's "1844 sonnet 'Grief'" (first actually published in 1842), and a passage in Aurora Leigh ("Art is much, but Love is more") in which EBB turns "the tables on Tennyson" by echoing and critiquing a line of In Memoriam framing Tennyson's earlier poetic "theft" from her. Billone's article, in combination with earlier ones linking these two Victorian poets, suggests how much we need a full-length study on the connections between EBB and Tennyson, in some respects more akin as poets than EBB and RB.

Brent E. Kinser's "'A Very Beautiful Tempest in a Teapot': Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Thomas Carlyle, and The Annotation of Aurora Leigh'" (Browning Society Notes 33 [2008]: 21-39), engagingly addresses EBB's relationship with Carlyle, which, as he rightly notes, has been "overshadowed" by RB's friendship with the influential and strong-minded sage (p. 21). EBB was a self-professed "'adorer of Carlyle'" who also questioned the prophet's dismissal of poetry and "song" as not true "work" (p. 22)--an interrogation registered in two poems Kinser does not consider, her sonnets titled "Work" and "Work and Contemplation." As for Carlyle, he expressed his typical view of poetry in saying of EBB's 1844 Poems (which she had sent to him) that she might have better said it "'in plain prose, so that a body could understand it'" (p. 24). The crusty prophet's hearty approval of the Browning's marriage and his high opinion of RB endeared him to EBB nevertheless, and she was delighted when, in 1851, Carlyle postponed traveling across the channel in order to have the Brownings' company (and Browning's service as a courier making travel arrangements for him and the "women"). Kinser's account of these biographical contexts frames the most original contribution of this article: an analysis of Carlyle's "annotated copy" of the first edition of Aurora Leigh (p. 21). Carlyle's comments, as he notes, are "by turns thoughtful and flippant," reflecting, once again, his views on poetry--"How much better had all this been if written straight forward in clear prose utterance," he wrote at the end of Book I--as well as his somewhat condescending paternalism: "Teapot running furiously clear now!" he wrote at the end of Book 7, and "'watery but pretty'" to express his comprehensive view of the work (pp. 32, 34, 33). Surprisingly, Kinser notes, there are no "substantive annotations" on Book 5, which most directly alludes to Carlyle's "teachings" on transcendentalism and the poet as Vates. Kinser, however, may overstate his case in claiming that there is "perhaps no other passage in all of Carlyle or indeed in all of literature that has more significance in relation to Aurora Leigh" than Carlyle's identification of the Vates as "Prophet and Poet" (pp. 33, 30).

Another little explored writerly relationship in EBB's case is treated by Gail Marshall in "Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Shakespeare: Translating the Language of Intimacy," an expanded version of her article of the same title in the 2006 bicentenary issue of Victorian Poetry, Elizabeth Barrett Browning: 1806-2006 (see the 2007 "Year's Work"). Approaching this subject again in Chapter 2 of her book Shakespeare and Victorian Women (2009), Marshall situates EBB among other Victorian women writers such as George Eliot, Anna Jameson, Christina Rossetti, and Mathilde Blinde, pointing out that, unlike many of her contemporaries, EBB "did not write" poems celebrating Shakespeare like those she wrote, for example, about Byron or George Sand (p. 46). At the same time, Marshall finds that Shakespeare figures "most prominently" among the predecessors named, invoked, and quoted in Aurora Leigh (p. 50), treated here at greater length than in her VP article. The earlier article focuses instead, as the remainder of her book chapter does, on parallels between Shakespeare and EBB drawn by critics of Sonnets from the Portuguese and EBB's complex use of Shakespearean allusions as a language of intimacy in her letters, especially the courtship correspondence with Robert Browning. The language of Sonnets from the Portuguese, as well as the sequence's invocation of Shakespeare, Petrarch, and other precursors is also discussed in some detail this year by Claire Malroux in her new French translation (see below, under editions).

The representation of love analyzed by Marshall and the prophetic discourse of Aurora Leigh treated by Kinser are subjects that enter into three articles on Aurora Leigh this year. In "The 'Prophet-Poet's Book" (SEL 48 [Autumn 2008]: 791-799), Christine Chaney approaches the work's generic mix of novelistic and poetic conventions by reading it as a "polemical life narrative" that frames "narrative subjectivity in ways designed rhetorically to persuade readers of the efficacy of its speaker's claims" (p. 792)--although, despite her title, she does not relate this generic mix to Victorian prophetic discourse. Instead, she argues (to the exclusion of other important influences) that EBB "inherited this hybrid narrative" (p. 792) from Mary Wollstonecraft's Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1792), pointing to the importance of a Romantic woman precursor whose impact on Aurora Leigh was also treated in a 2008 book chapter (see the 2008 "Year's Work"). Chaney's analysis of the "literary self-portrait" as a dialogical and layered "form for the living" in both Wollstonecraft's and EBB's works includes a suggestive analysis of the speaker's play with the conventions of portraiture and the female "self in relation to others" (p. 794) in the work's opening lines (pp. 795-796). Gregory Giles is similarly concerned with the layered subjectivity of EBB's novel-in-verse in "'The Mystic Level of All Forms': Love and Language's Capacity for Meanings in Aurora Leigh" (Victorians Institute Journal 36 [2008]: 123-136), an article that takes as its starting point Angela Leighton's earlier "valuable reassessment" of the "inexhaustible uses of the word 'love'" in Sonnets from the Portuguse (p. 123). Giles's subtle analysis of "Derridean" verbal repetitions and difference in Aurora Leigh, especially in relation to words associated with love and truth, finds an "endlessly productive ambiguity of meaning" in a text where selves are subject to interpretation, like the soul as a "'palimpsest, a prophet's holograph / Defiled, erased and covered by a monk's,'" in Aurora's striking images (1:826-827). His article includes an analysis of this interpretive process in relation to the text's complex opening portraiture analogy that forms a very interesting contrast to Chaney's quite different and more feminist reading of the same lines. Giles also analyzes Aurora's dead mother's portrait as "the daughter's ur-poem, the first model of how a poem should function" (p. 128). Marianne Camus' "The Intimations of Aurora Leigh in Elizabeth Barrett's Last Love Letters," in Last Letters, edited by Sylvie Crinquand (Cambridge Scholars, 2008, pp. 71-84) takes a more biographical approach in arguing that EBB's final courtship letters to RB "contain some of the elements that will characterize the author of the Italian poems, Casa Guidi Windows and above all, Aurora Leigh" (p. 73)--although her treatment of these "elements" remains at the general level of "writing strategies" (p. 76) and similar subject matter: for example, men as "the object of lively observation and humour" (p. 77).

Aurora Leigh is also a principal focus in a brief discussion of EBB's "spiritualist and electric poetics" (p. 176) in Jason R. Rudy's smart and innovative Electric Meters: Victorian Physiological Poetics (2009), which treats "manifestations of electricity-lightning strikes, electric shocks, nerve impulses, telegraph signals" in Victorian poetry, analyzing these as articulations of a "physiological poetics" shaped by developments in technology and science. What makes Rudy's approach especially original is that, from the start, he goes beyond more obvious electrical tropes of various kinds to analyze both the larger historical contexts of this "physiological poetics" and its formal manifestations in "metrical, rhythmic, and sonic effects" (pp. 2-3). Arguing that spiritualism is more important to Victorian poetry "than is generally acknowledged" (p. 174), he analyzes the paradoxical combination of materiality and the "invisible or elusive" (p. 172) in EBB's still neglected 1844 poem "A Vision of Poets," identifying it as "an early manifestation of spiritualist poetics" (p. 177). In Aurora Leigh, Rudy analyzes metaphors of touch and rhythms of the body in relation to the "spiritualist poetics" he sees informing the work. Elsewhere he points to a relationship that invites more exploration in remarking that Mathilde Blind viewed EBB as appropriately balancing spontaneity and "rhythmic spasm" with the constraints of form, in describing the earlier poet's success in conveying a "'distinctively womanly strain of emotion in the throbbing tides of her high-wrought melodious song'" (p. 165). Surprisingly, although Rudy gives extended attention in this book to metaphors of the telegraph, particularly in his chapter on "Tennyson's Telegraphic Poetics," he does not mention EBB's use of telegraphic metaphors and a "sonic form" suggested by Tennyson's "Locksley Hall" in "Lady Geraldine's Courtship: A Romance of the Age" (1844). The poem, like EBB's less well-known "A Rhapsody of Life's Progress," also published in 1844, draws on telegraphic metaphors to both celebrate and critique material progress. In "Lady Geraldine," we encounter the striking image of "wrap[ping] the globe intensely with one hot electric breath" (1. 210), a metaphor that uncannily prefigures the World Wide Web.

Karen J. Dieleman approaches EBB's interest in spiritualism from a very different angle in "Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Congregationalism and Spirit Manifestation" (Victorian Institute Journal 36 [2008]: 105-122). Whereas Rudy emphasizes spiritualism's importance in Victorian poetry generally, Dieleman agrees with Dorothy Mermin's observation that it "'was too thin and tawdry'" to provide EBB with material for poetry (p. 116). At the same time, she critiques the conventional view that the poet was naively credulous about spiritualism. "Barrett Browning's conviction as to the presence of spirits never muddied her perception as to the value of their communications," Dieleman states. "Poetry for Barrett Browning was a matter of religious truth, and the spirits revealed no significant truths" (p. 116). "Religious truth" for EBB, according to Dieleman, was shaped by her Congregationalist background, contexts, and beliefs. Whereas some other critics have seen an increasing religious heterodoxy in EBB's later career, Dieleman makes the interesting case that Barrett Browning's apparent "unorthodoxy" on issues such as universal salvation and the nature of the sacraments was "mid-nineteenth-century Congregationalism's unorthodoxy" (p. 107) and that, throughout her life, she subscribed to its two leading tenets: "the principle of Scripture's absolute authority and the principle of independent interpretation" (p. 110). If she began to give more weight to the second principle, it was because other influential Congregationalists did by mid-century, together with members of the closely associated Free Church of Scotland, which EBB was most drawn to in Europe where Congregational places of worship were not represented, as Dieleman convincingly argues (pp. 107-108). Whether or not EBB also "continually affirmed the infallibility of the Word" (p. 110), as Dieleman claims, the evidence she cites from the letters to Arabella does make it plain that the poet interpreted spiritualism in part through scripture (though she also expressed repeated interest in scientific investigations of the phenomena). Dieleman further suggests that EBB was interested in spirit manifestations because of the absence of gender distinctions among mediums, unlike the Newman Street churches that she criticized because she found "'the position of women ... marked too low among them'" (p. 115). Since the letters to Isa have a great deal to say about mid-Victorian spiritualism (though with a different spin than the more religious one encountered in the letters to Arabella), it will be interesting to see how this correspondence will influence interpretations of EBB's response to "spirit manifestations" and their presence or absence in her poetry and poetics.

Two studies that I overlooked in 2007 and 2008 remind us that the Congregationalism emphasized by Dieleman as key to EBB's poetic and theological values needs to be considered alongside other religious and philosophical contexts and debates that shaped her thought--such as the patristic theology she was exposed to (and resisted) in writing her essay on "Greek Christian Poets" (published in 1842 in the Athenaeum), the hermeneutic philosophies associated with the Higher Criticism, and the classical tradition she knew so intimately. The first two subjects are perceptively explored by Terence Allan Hoagwood in "'The Fate of Woman At Its Root': Elizabeth Barrett's A Drama of Exile and Jean Ingelow's A Story of Doom," Chapter 6 in Colour'd Shadows: Contexts in Publishing, Printing, and Reading Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers (2005) by Hoagwood and Kathryn Ledbetter. This chapter draws in part on Hoagwood's earlier article, "Biblical Criticism and Secular Sex: Elizabeth Barrett's A Drama of Exile and Jean Ingelow's A Story of Doom (VP 42 [2004]: 165-80--see the 2004 "Year's Work). However, the book chapter presents a much revised, more nuanced, and more fully contextualized analysis of what Hoagwood sees as the relatively radical gender politics of A Drama of Exile, its relation to works by other nineteenth-century women writers, and its nonliteral deployment of the biblical symbolism of scripture. "A Drama of Exile replaces religion with social meanings, denying the inferiority of women" emphasized in patristic tradition, Hoagwood argues (p. 128), and like other works in EBB's 1844 volumes, it reflects "Barrett's hermeneutical concerns" with "the properties of language as a medium which is a product of human work" (p. 129). He further emphasizes that "both Elizabeth Barrett and Jean Ingelow shared much" with the "hermeneutical thinkers" of the Higher Criticism, "including the recognition that (whatever the biblical books and their constituent elements originally meant) generations appropriate the scriptures to allegorize their own concerns in their own temporary contexts of actual human and social strife" (p. 131). EBB's relatively sophisticated engagement with biblical books and stories was also influenced by her extensive knowledge of classical myths and texts, a subject treated by Isobel Hurst in Chapter 3 of Victorian Women Writers and the Classics: The Feminine of Homer (2006). Hurst considers EBB's classical education in the larger context of classical training for women in the nineteenth century, then principally focuses on her engagement with the epic tradition in works ranging from her juvenile Homeric epic The Battle of Marathon to Casa Guidi Windows, Aurora Leigh, and "Mother and Poet."

Among new editions of EBB's poetry this year, Claire Malroux's Sonnets Portugais (2009) comes with a lengthy "Preface" that treats the "vicissitudes" (p. 7) in the critical reception of EBB, formal aspects of the sequence, and its biographical and literary contexts. Against the common view that EBB displays "excessive humility," Malroux emphasizes EBB's claiming of "the right to proclaim her love" following the example of "illustrious masculine precursors: Dante, Petrarch, Shakespeare," positioning herself not as "the woman-object of love" but as the "poet-lover who glorifies love" (pp. 14-15, my translations). Commenting on the English manner of referring to the sequence simply as "love sonnets," Malroux suggests that, given the manner in which the sonnets invoke the Beloved as a royal figure, musician, king, and angel, they might be better be termed "sonnets a l'amour" than "sonnets d'amour"--that is, as sonnets addressed to Love itself (pp. 10-11). Malroux makes the interesting decision to use the British Library manuscript as her copy text, and also includes in her edition translations of two of EBB's related sonnets ("Grief" and "Substitution") as well as translations of Emily Dickinson's three poems of homage to EBB. Her afterword addresses challenges of translating the sonnets and includes a thought-provoking discussion of earlier translations, including Rilke's, as well as much debated aspects of meter and rhyme in the sequence.

The other new edition this year is Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Selected Poems (2009), edited by Marjorie Stone and Beverly Taylor for Broadview Press. This includes a selection of poems written throughout EBB's career, beginning with works of juvenilia on the press gang and the condition of women and concluding with works from Last Poems such as "Mother and Poet." The full text of Sonnets from the Portuguese is included; A Drama of Exile and Casa Guidi Windows are represented through substantial excerpts. EBB's unpublished monodrama on Aeschylus, long misattributed to RB, is also included in this edition of her poetry for the first time. The prefatory material indicates that a website (www.ebbarchive.org) will provide additional annotated poems and supplementary resources for this edition. The text comes with four illustrations: the engravings that "A Romance of the Ganges" and "The Romaunt of the Page" were written to accompany; an image of Hiram Power's "Greek Slave"; and the arresting illustration of a powerful Pan done by Frederic Leighton for "A Musical Instrument." Like other Broadview editions, this one comes with a critical and biographical introduction, annotations, and appendices. In addition, headnotes to each poem provide information on their historical and biographical contexts, compositional histories, and critical reception. The appendices include excerpts from reviews and criticism, as well as material on religion and factory reform, the trans-Atlantic anti-slavery movement, and Italian politics. Also included is the previously unpublished original opening of "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point," which features a male rather than a female speaker, speaking in a manner that has been compared to Frederick Douglass in his 1845 Narrative. Whereas many Broadview editions choose to print poems as they appeared on their first publication, the editors choose EBB's 1856 Poems as the copy-text in order to present the poems as EBB revised them for the last edition of her collected poems that she oversaw in her lifetime ("About this Edition," pp. xvii-xix). In the publisher's quotations on the back cover, Linda Hughes describes the edition as "both a teaching text and an original contribution to scholarship," while Simon Avery states that its selections will "enable readers to gain an understanding" of EBB's "important contributions to nineteenth-century poetics" and "poetic skills beyond Aurora Leigh."

Finally, I note Richard S. Kennedy and Donald S. Hair's The Dramatic Imagination of Robert Browning (2007) only in passing here, given its focus on RB and Britta Martens' treatment of it last year. This new biography is also of interest to EBB scholars and critics, however, not only because it treats EBB's most important writerly and personal relationship in depth, but also because, compared to earlier biographies of RB, it includes a relatively informed and ample consideration of EBB as a poet in her own right, as in Chapter 11, "A Worthy Fellow Poet." Many of the other chapters bring out interesting aspects of EBB's life and work, viewed from a different perspective, together with her role as a sensitive and learned reader and critic of RB's poetry.

I would like to thank Cynthia Burgess of the Armstrong Browning Library for helping me to identify materials for this review, as well as my RA Kala Hirtle for her assistance.