Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Stone, Marjorie

This year's work on EBB brings the harvest of conferences and special journal issues marking the bicentenary of the poet's birth in 1806. The harvest includes scholarship on an increasing range of her output, including works little discussed in contemporary criticism, such as her 1826 poem "An Essay on Mind," works in her 1833 and 1838 collections, and the neglected but ambitious 1844 poem "A Vision of Poets." As might be expected, Aurora Leigh and the Sonnets from the Portuguese continue to attract considerable scholarly attention, while Poems Before Congress and other poems by EBB on Italian politics also figure prominently this year, together with the pedagogical and creative challenges posed by "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point." Poetic voice is a recurrent topic; other topics include EBB's engagement with Aeschylus and classical translation, with the tradition of the epigram, and with Shakespeare; her response to debates on modernity and to the periodical press; her impact on American women poets; and the new light cast by manuscripts on her poetic development.

The largest gathering of work on EBB to appear this past year is Elizabeth Barrett Browning 1806.2006: A Bicentenary Issue (VP 24 [2006]), guest edited by Beverly Taylor and Marjorie Stone. In their "Introduction" to this issue, entitled "'Confirm my voice': 'My sisters,' Poetic Audiences, and the Published Voices of EBB," Stone and Taylor publish for the first time an incomplete manuscript fragment by the poet beginning "My sisters! Daughters of this Fatherland / Which we call England" (pp. 394-395), using the fragment to demonstrate the challenges negotiated by the poet as she sought to insert her voice into a predominantly male tradition of public poetry in the 1840s. Taylor and Stone also contend that to "accommodate the amplitude" of EBB's poetry, its diverse "generic registers," and the "multiplicity of its effects," we "might do better to speak of the published 'voices'" of her poetry, arising in a period when "voice" itself emerged "as a powerful figure" (p. 392) for the origin of poetic utterance as new technologies transformed it into a print phenomenon. Like the array of papers presented in March 2006 at a conference at the Armstrong Browning Library also celebrating the bicentenary (some of them published in this special issue), the VP bicentenary collection ranges well beyond the feminist preoccupations of the path-breaking critics of the 1970s and 80s, who so fruitfully focused on such topics as EBB's representations of women and her expositions of the sexual double standard, women's legal disabilities, their limited access to education and employment, and the exploitation of prostitutes and seamstresses.

In "Telling it Slant: Promethean, Whig, and Dissenting Politics in Elizabeth Barrett's Poetry of the 1830s," the first essay in the issue, Simon Avery aptly observes that "we are now coming to recognize" EBB's writing "as important for our understanding of areas as diverse as the experiences of the nineteenth-century woman writer, developments in Romantic and Victorian poetic aesthetics, and the construction of the nineteenth-century vates figure. 'How shall we re-read thee? Let me count the ways'" (p. 405). Avery adeptly situates the poems from EBB's 1833 and 1838 volumes within the broader contexts of intellectual and cultural history, elucidating their varying strands of Whig, Promethean, and Dissenting politics, and interpreting them in the context of major Romantic as well as Victorian issues and themes, such as the aesthetics of the sublime. As he points out, much of the 1830's poetry does not seem to manifest the political engagement of 1820's works by EBB; in fact, the poet "appears to withdraw somewhat from direct commentary upon political issues," turning to "large mythic narratives, landscape poetry, and religious verse" (p. 406). Avery contends, however, that works such as EBB's 1833 translation of Prometheus Bound, "The Tempest" (1833), "The Deserted Garden" (1838), and "An Island" (1838) engage with key political issues in the period, including "reform and the extension of civil rights" as well as "authoritative power and structures of tyranny" (p. 410).

While Avery reads these oblique political engagements within the familiar developmental narrative of EBB's ascension to a more confident public and political voice, Stephanie Johnson challenges this trajectory in "Aurora Leigh's Radical Youth: Derridean Parergon and the Narrative Frame in 'A Vision of Poets.'" In a subtle Derridean analysis of the aesthetics of the "frame" in "A Vision of Poets"--a major work from Poems (1844) widely appreciated in the nineteenth century--Johnson reads the earlier work as more radical than Aurora Leigh in its subversions of Victorian poetics and gender politics. She also attentively explores the paradoxes that attend the embodiment and representation of the poet's voice in the poem: at once omni-present and disccmcertingly absent. While the female poet may seem absent from the poem's center, Johnson argues, the complex framing structure of the work exposes a "lack in the male narrative," and validates "the female poet" by directing her "to a path marked by self-empowerment rather than self-sacrifice" (pp. 426-427).

Formalist analysis is also important in Herbert F. Tucker's wide-ranging contribution to the special issue, "An Epigrammar of Motives; or Ba, for Short." In the "critic's contrarian mood" of "loyal opposition," Tucker sets out on an "expedition in ebbigrammatology" in which he tries EBB's "work against a standard of aphoristic concision," and attends to her not as "reformer or woman writer or evangelist or polemicist," but to the complicated ways in which she turns the "epigram" against itself (p. 445). Ranging from the beginning to the end of her writing career, Tucker wittily shows how the "dialectic that energizes epigrams" in her poetry and prose embodies a "constitutive ambivalence" about the compression and "fixation of meaning which it is the generic boast of the epigram to perform" (p. 447): an ambivalence that he relates to her "conflicted attitude towards littleness as such" (p. 447), and to her rejection of the neoclassical conventions that shape many of her youthful works. His essay includes a particularly illuminating consideration of "An Essay on Mind," too often dismissed as a pedantic work of juvenilia, as well as analyses of passages in "A Drama of Exile," several of EBB's sonnets, Casa Guidi Windows, Aurora Leigh, and Poems before Congress, opening up a generic perspective hitherto overlooked in EBB's variegated canon.

In another contribution notable for its range, "Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Shakespeare: Translating the Language of Intimacy," Gail Marshall examines EBB's intertextual engagement with the powerful, precursor voices created by and associated with Shakespeare, considering Sonnets from the Portuguese, Aurora Leigh, and letters written throughout the poet's career, but especially in the courtship period. Drawing on George Steiner's theorizing of translation, Marshall considers how EBB's Shakespearean allusions adapt his words to her own ends and function as a language of intimacy, overriding the pattern of emulation and imitation imposed by Victorian reviewers casting her as Shakespeare's dutiful daughter. Investigating the "strategic manipulations involved in according the accolade 'Shakespearean' to a woman writer," Marshall shows how EBB resisted both "the lure and the straitjacketing of such a term, and how instead she effects a 'dialectic of trust' in her reading and writing of Shakespeare" (p. 467).

Two contributions to the special issue, by Tricia Lootens and Laura Fish, primarily focus on EBB's radical anti-slavery poem of rape and infanticide in contexts that explore the personal dimensions of its politics within contemporary as well as Victorian contexts. In "Publishing and Reading 'Our EBB': Editorial Pedagogy, Contemporary Culture, and 'The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point,'" Lootens explores the question "What company does Elizabeth Barrett Browning now keep in our curricula?" (p. 487), and addresses the challenges the poem's palimpsest of unsettling dramatic and personal voices poses in the classroom. Lootens embeds her illuminating analysis of EBB's abolitionist poem within an extended investigation of critical controversies within the academy, editors' choices in representing the poet's oeuvre, the marketing of EBB, her cultural currency on the internet, and the aesthetic and visceral power of her poetry.

In "Strange Music: Engaging Imaginatively with the Family of Elizabeth Barrett Browning from a Creole and Black Woman's Perspective," British-Caribbean author and critic Laura Fish reflects upon the creative process that led to her forthcoming novel Strange Music, a "fictional exploration of the family of Elizabeth Barrett Browning from Elizabeth's own perspective and from that of a Creole and a black woman," the third figure suggested by "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point" (p. 507). Excavating the ways in which EBB's powerful abolitionist voice is vexed by her family's own relationship to slavery, Fish thoughtfully probes the ethical and social functions of art, the absence of black women's voices from the literary tradition, and the responsibility and imaginative capacity to give voice to the experience of women of color. In the second half of the article, Fish provides an excerpt from Strange Music, in which the narrators are "Kaydia, a domestic maid; Sheba, a field worker; and Elizabeth Barrett herself," explaining that her novel "draws on the postmodern notion that history consists of multiple, even contradictory, versions" (p. 515). In their differing ways, both Fish and Lootens suggest how dynamically "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point" intersects with our own contemporary structures of race, gender, and power.

The next essay in the VP special issue is Lana Dalley's "'The least "Angelical" poem in the language': Political Economy, Gender, and the Heritage of Aurora Leigh," one of several new essays on Aurora Leigh this year (see below). Dalley investigates the neglected subject of EBB's relationship to the liberal economic theory of Adam Smith and others, considering how this theory "comes to bear on the poetic vision of Aurora Leigh and the manner in which Victorian feminist essayists draw upon the figure of Aurora Leigh to formulate their arguments for women's increased (economic) autonomy" (p. 525). This essay breaks new ground not only in showing how deliberate and explicit EBB's allusions to political economy are in Aurora Leigh, but also in exploring the text's impact on writers and activists such as Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, Bessie Raynor Parkes, Frances Power Cobbe, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, and Clara Collet, all of whom "directly cite Aurora Leigh as a key literary expression of their economic vision" (p. 525). As Dalley demonstrates, the "complex and often fraught historical relationship between liberalism and feminism is elucidated in Victorian discourse about women's property and wages, a discourse which Aurora Leigh helps to develop" (p. 527).

In the first of two essays focusing on Poems Before Congress this year (for the second, see below, under Browning Society Notes), Elizabeth Woodworth reframes EBB's most overtly political text in the context of Carlyle's influential text on "heroes," Tennyson's hyperbolic and jingoistic reactions to French interventions in Italy, and Coventry Patmore's support of the English rifle clubs. Like several other essays in the VP special issue--Johnson's, for example, and Tucker's--her essay also takes up formal considerations, assessing the sequencing of poems within EBB's volume in order to interrogate the conventional critical view that her Risorgimento poems express a naive and unreflective hero worship of Napoleon Ill. She also includes excerpts from a previously unpublished letter by Robert Bulwer Lytton, which calls in question the common view that Napoleon III was uniformly denounced by British readers of EBB's verse. Analyzing the multiple voices that speak in Poems Before Congress, and the ironies created through their dialogical juxtapositions, Woodworth argues that EBB was more heroic than Tennyson in opting to publish on a charged political issue without recourse to the pseudonyms that the Poet Laureate hid behind.

In her contribution to the VP issue, Corinne Davies addresses the subject of how Robert Browning's poetic voice and vision continued to engage in dialogue with EBB's after her death, a subject that has been neglected in the accumulating scholarship on the collaborative dimensions of the two poets' relationship by Mary Rose Sullivan, Dorothy Mermin, Mary Sanders Pollock, and most recently, by Davies herself and Marjorie Stone in an essay in Literary Couplings: Writing Couples, Collaborators, and the Construction of Authorship (2006). Focusing on EBB's "The Dead Pan" (1844) and "A Musical Instrument" (1860), Davies demonstrates how "the dialogues on high art, power relations, and sexuality which the Brownings began in their courtship letters" continue in the echoes of her poems on the goatgod Pan in his "Pan and Luna" (1880) (p. 561). EBB used the figure of Pan "to deal with aesthetic issues of poetic process and product, with theological issues of belief and godhead, and with complex cultural issues of sexual desire and violation of the woman," Davies suggests (p. 561). In contrast to "The Dead Pan," "A Musical Instrument," overtly "sexual and pagan" in its origins like "Pan and Luna" (p. 564), suggests how much her "vision of art and incarnation had darkened at the end of her life-it is dark enough to speak to the struggling T. S. Eliot... who quoted the lines about 'cost and pain' frequently.... It is dark enough to challenge RB in the late poems to recognize 'cost and pain' and to articulate female strength and desire in The Ring and the Book and 'Pan and Luna'" (p. 567).

Like the introductory essay to the VP special issue, two additional essays in it draw on unpublished manuscript evidence to cast new light on EBB's poetic development. In "Cobridme de flores: (Un)Covering Flowers of Portuguese and Spanish Poets in Sonnets from the Portuguese," Barbara Neri investigates unpublished manuscript notes associated with EBB's 1831-32 Diary to uncover new evidence for the influence of an array of Portuguese poets on Sonnets from the Portuguese, focusing in particular on Soror Maria do Ceo (1658-1753) and Luis de Gongora y Argote (1561-1627). Making resonant associations between the baroque qualities and striking metaphors of EBB's much analyzed sequence and works by both Maria do Ceo and Gongora, Neri demonstrates that the title was more than merely a convenient mask for autobiographical content, and that the literariness of the sequence involves more than Petrarchan sonnet conventions and the influence of Camoens alone among Portuguese writers. Like Laura Fish, Neri, who is a performance artist as well as a critic, also demonstrates the continuing impact of EBB on creative expression today, through her ongoing multi-media and dramatic work in "The EBB Project" (www.barbaraneri.com). Through a link on this website, one can now order a DVD of the The Consolation of Poetry (see the 2004 "Year's Work"), Neri's multi-media performance on EBB and the Sonnets from the Portuguese as presented at the 2005 New York International Fringe Festival.

The VP issue concludes with Clare Broome Saunders' similar use of archival material in "'Judge no more what ladies do': Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Active Medievalism, the Female Troubadour, and Joan of Arc." Saunders shows how "EBB uses medievalism to present positive examples of female activity" in her "development of the style of the medieval female troubadour in Sonnets from the Portuguese" and in her "use of the ... medieval military woman, Joan of Arc, as a potent image for making contemporary social comment in her unfinished draft for the unpublished 'The Princess Marie'... and in her sonnets 'To George Sand'" (p. 587). Like "My sisters," the fragment published by Stone and Taylor, "The Princess Marie"--one of EBB's most substantial, unpublished poems-explores the challenges involved for women artists when they cross from the personal to the public spheres: in this case, the challenges for a woman sculptor.

Another essay appearing in a subsequent issue of VP this year, Karen Dieleman's "Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Religious Poetics: Congregationalist Models of Hymnist and Preacher" (VP 45 [2007]: 135-157), similarly extends the range of works examined by critics by including a discussion of EBB's hymns (in particular, "The Measure") along with its consideration of works such as "The Seraphim," "A Drama of Exile," and Aurora Leigh. Demonstrating considerable originality, Dieleman calls in question the often-noted importance of the figure of the cultural prophet as a type of the poet for EBB, arguing instead that an "alternative paradigm"--the poet as preacher--was equally important to her, and also more in keeping with her "democratic attitude as to how (religious) knowledge or wisdom is gained" (p. 136). For EBB, moreover, Dieleman argues, Congregationalist figures of the preacher were especially important, in particular the Reverend James Stratten, a London preacher whom EBB much admired and whom she frequently refers to in her letters to her sister Arabella. This refraining of EBB as "preacher" rather than "prophet" incorporates many suggestive insights, shaping the interpretation of her poetic method in works such as Aurora Leigh.

The second largest collection of work on EBB this year appears in Volume 32 (2007) of Browning Society Notes, now edited by Joseph Phelan, an issue that marks the bicentenary by publishing several of the papers first presented in September 2005 at "'Our Italians': Anglo-Italian Relationships 1845-46," in Vallombrosa, Tuscany. In the first of these, "The Home Front in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's 'Mother and Poet' and 'The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point,'" Sandra Donaldson suggestively compares the "complicated" homefront pain of "Mother and Poet" with EBB's anti-slavery poem of maternal anguish. Just as, in "Mother and Poet," EBB's "telling of war ... opens up the concept to war's several fronts, to war's hideous and hidden costs" (p. 28), so "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point" draws in part, Donaldson argues, on the "complicities" EBB experienced on slavery's home front as the daughter and sister of Jamaican planters (p. 30). Donaldson's analysis of the complicities of violence also takes in parts of Casa Guidi Windows and Poems before Congress. In the former she insightfully notes how the opening child's song, "O bella liberta! O bella!" "suggests a pun on the epic bass note, the Latin bellum--is the beauty of liberty necessarily won only through the shock and ugliness of war?," a question especially resonant in our present global context (p. 32).

In the second article on EBB in the BSN issue, "'I cry aloud in my poetpassion': Elizabeth Barrett Browning Claiming Political 'Place' in Poems Before Congress," Elizabeth Woodworth offers a treatment of EBB's least appreciated mature collection that nicely complements her VP article noted above. Rightly contending that Poems Before Congress "merits reassessment as a volume" (p. 38), Woodworth argues that EBB here continues the examination of citizenship as a process undertaken in Casa Guidi Windows. "The process of citizenship Barrett Browning enacts with the publication of PBC becomes a process of international citizenship that explores traditional notions of boundaries--national/international, poetic/politic, private/public--and interrogates their existence," she points out (p. 42). Woodworth also analyzes the grammatical ambiguity of the volume's title (invoking, she suggests, both the European congress of powers that never convened and the American Congress) and ably explicates the sequencing and rhetoric of the respective poems in the volume, a point largely overlooked in existing scholarship, with the exception of an essay by Katherine Montweiler covered last year. The notes in Wordworth's deeply researched article teem with information and insights on the complicated contexts of Poems Before Congress.

Also appearing in Volume 32 of BSN, Simon Avery's "Casa Guidi Neighbours: Eliza Ogilvy, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Poetry of the Risorgimento" casts further light on a relationship first opened up by Alison Chapman. Avery explores "the ways in which Ogilvy and Barrett Browning were Casa Guidi neighbours not just geographically--that is, actually living next door to each other--but also poetically" (p. 57). He provides a detailed analysis of the many parallels between Ogilvy's Italian poems and Casa Guidi Windows in particular, while also noting the political differences between the two poets (regarding Louis Napoleon, George Sand, and spiritualism, for example). Their differences need to be kept in mind given the influence of Ogilvy's "Memoir," written to accompany Frederick Warne's 1893 edition of Poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (p. 56). "Ogilvy's poems might not possess the strong vatic voice of Casa Guidi Windows," Avery acknowledges, and "are often far less successful aesthetically," yet they nevertheless are informed by a similar understanding of "power and politics in Italy" (pp. 60-61).

Two additional essays with more biographical perspectives in Volume 32 BSN also treat EBB in part: Christopher M. Keirstead's "'He Shall be a "Citizen of the World"': Cosmopolitanism and the Education of Pen Browning," and "Ottocento Spiritualism: From Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Evelyn de Morgan," by Judy Oberhausen and Nic Peters. Keirstead focuses on Pen's education as terrain in which the Brownings negotiated "boundaries between public and private, male and female, and between politics and aesthetics" (p. 75), arguing provocatively that, unlike Robert, EBB tended to celebrate "hybrid allegiances on Pen's part with an openness that reminds one of some postcolonial authors and theorists today, such as Homi K. Bhabha, who speaks of the value of 'in-between' spaces of identity" (p. 76). Oberhausen and Peters explore the shared interest in Swedenborgianism and the common Florentine contexts that underlie both EBB's interest in spiritualism and the similar interests of the painter Evelyn Pickering De Morgan (1855-1919). Intriguingly, they argue that "for women like Barrett Browning, De Morgan, and others, spiritualism became not only a belief in an afterlife but also a commitment to promoting social good in this life" (p. 89), an aspect of EBB's interest in spiritualism hitherto insufficiently investigated.

Among individual articles, essays, and book chapters, the most substantial to appear this year is Clara Drummond's "A 'Grand Possible': Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Translations of Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound" (International Journal of the Classical Tradition 12 [2006]: 507-562). The length of a small monograph, this article provides the most comprehensive and deeply researched treatment of EBB's engagement with the classical tradition to date, building on earlier work by Rowena Fowler, Alice Falk, and Jennifer Wallace. Drummond not only considers in detail the poet's two translations of Prometheus Bound (1833, 1850), casting new light on many details such as the contexts for the two epigraphs that prefaced the 1833 translation (p. 529). She also analyzes "the confusion about the publishing history" of the two translations evident in several accounts of Classical translations (p. 508); EBB's classical education in relation to norms of the time; the impact of her relationships with her brother Edward's Greek tutor, Daniel McSwiney, the Greek scholar Hugh Stuart Boyd, and Robert Browning on her passion for Greek; her learned correspondence with Uvedale Price concerning classical meters; her theories concerning the literal versus the poetical demands of translation; the influence of Romantic theories of the sublime, Longinus' On the Sublime, and Schlegel's The Theatre of the Greeks (1827) on her response to Aeschylus and other Greek dramatists; her critical marginalia on Shelley's incorrect readings of Greek (pp. 557-558), and her resonant allusions to Aeschylus in Aurora Leigh, "A Vision of Poets," "Wine of Cyprus," and other works. Concluding with a close analysis of the 1833 and 1850 versions of Prometheus' speech "on his gifts to man" (pp. 553-557), Drummond shows how EBB's theories of translation and poetry contributed to her changing translation practice and the more poetic style of her 1850 translation. While EBB's versions of Prometheus Bound have not had the "lasting influence of Chapman's, Pope's and Cowper's Homeric translations," Drummond concludes (p. 562), they did in the nineteenth century provide the epigraphs from Briton Riviere's 1880 painting Prometheus (p. 547), and they are important in understanding "larger concerns about the significance and aspirations of poetry" (p. 562).

Alison Chapman is the author of two new essays on EBB this year, both exploring transatlantic circulations of poetic identity and ideas: "'I think I was enchanted': Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Haunting of American Women Poets," in Representations of Death in Nineteenth-Century US Writing and Culture (2007), ed. Lucy E. Frank, pp. 109-124; and "'Vulgar needs': Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Profit, and Literary Value," in Victorian Literature and Finance (2007), ed. Francis O'Gorman, pp. 73-90. The first of these analyzes tribute poems addressed to EBB by American poets Anne C. Lynch Botta, Sarah Helen Whitman, and Emily Dickinson, showing how works by all three speak to the relational sense of identity women poets have to their precursors as well as to the "circulation of a feminine poetic modality associated with nineteenth-century sensibility--a modality which Barrett Browning's poetry resists" (pp. 110-111). Chapman's discussion reveals how much these writers were "haunted" by EBB "as a seductively doubled figure of both loss and presence, spiritualization and materialization" (p. 120), while they also turned to her as "a transnational poetess who offered a model for American women's public agency" (p. 111). Building on work by Ann Swyderski and other critics on Dickinson's response to EBB, and on Anne Lohrli's recovery of Whitman's three sonnets to EBB, Chapman's analysis is the first, to my knowledge, to include attention to Botta's tribute poems.

In her second essay, on profit and literary value in EBB's periodical publication, Chapman turns to EBB's publication of a series of poems on the Italian liberation struggle in the American newspaper, the Independent, a subject hitherto passed over by scholars. Despite the ambivalence both Brownings expressed about publication of poems in such venues, Chapman argues, the Independent publications reveal the value (including, but also over and beyond the considerable profits) that EBB found in transatlantic circulation of her works through mass publications. The Independent permitted her to express ideas on Italian politics apt to be more censoriously treated in the British press, as well as to reach an American readership whose approach to Italian liberation was intertwined with its anti-slavery sympathies. Chapman's analysis also brings out the degree to which EBB was immersed in the Italian newspapers of her day, as well as the Brownings' material support of the "value" of the Italian cause through their investments in Tuscan funds--considered risky by many other British expatriates at the time.

This year has brought several new treatments of Aurora Leigh, aside from Lana Dalley's and Karen Dieleman's noted above. In "Blinding the Hero" (differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 17 [2006]: 52-67), Mary Wilson Carpenter casts new light on the much discussed topic of Romney's blinding in Aurora Leigh, both by theoretically framing her analysis within Naomi Schor's work on "Blindness as Metaphor," and by considering previously unoted parallels between EBB's novel-epic and Charles Kingsley's novel Westward Ho! (1855). "In this novel, the hero is, interestingly enough, also endowed with the surname of Leigh, and even more interestingly, this newly blinded hero also winds up in a household with two women, one of whom is a mother" (p. 54). Carpenter's reading of Aurora Leigh against Westward Ho! brings out the underlying resistance to dominant gender ideologies in Marian's ultimate refusal to abase herself before Romney as "your slave, your help, your toy, your tool" (9.370), standing in sharp contrast to the "racialized, fantasized" mixed race heroine in Kingsley's novel (p. 59), who devotes herself to the wounded hero Amyas Leigh at the novel's close, declaring "Only let me fetch and carry for you, tend you, feed you, lead you, like your slave, your dog! Say that I may be your slave!" (cited Carpenter, p. 58). In a final section, "Surprised by Cholera," Carpenter further links her analysis of blindness in Aurora Leigh to the text's allusions to the cholera "pandemic" of 1839-56, which hit Britain in 184849 and again in 1854-55 (pp. 61-63). The cholera allusions introduce an "unsentimentalized, demetaphorized" vision of cholera into the text as "one among the hideous, disfiguring diseases of the poor," Carpenter points out (p. 65).

Carpenter's treatment of the cholera allusions in Aurora Leigh leads her to address in passing the much discussed representation of the slums and the working classes in this text, a subject considered at more length this year by Brent Shannon in "'A finished generation, dead of plague': Contagion, the Social Body, and the London Poor in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh," SBHC 27 (2006): 41-52. Building on earlier arguments by Cora Kaplan, Deirdre David, and other critics, Shannon argues that "Aurora Leigh's language of contagion reveals the poet adopting the rhetoric and imagery of the social body popularized by contemporary nineteenth-century reformers and reflects the widespread anxieties of her middle-class audience" (p. 42). Shannon helpfully demonstrates the parallels between EBB's portrayal of lower-class life and treatments by social reformers such as Edwin Chadwick, William Acton, and Henry Mayhew, arguing that in Aurora Leigh the poor "often appear willfully ignorant and stubbornly resistant to civilization" (p. 44). Conflating Aurora's perspective with EBB's own, however, he too often ignores contextual ironies created by the poet's use of a dramatic perspective, ironies treated by earlier critics such as Margaret Reynolds in the "Critical Introduction" to her scholarly edition of Aurora Leigh. He also overlooks Aurora's unreliability as a narrator in arguing that, as Aurora erroneously affirms, Lady Waldemar was herself responsible for having Marian "drugged and delivered to a Paris brothel" (p. 49).

Among book chapters, Aurora Leigh plays a central role in Kirstie Blair's important new study of Victorian Poetry and the Culture of the Heart (2006), which includes as Chapter 3, "'Ill-lodged in a woman's breast': Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Woman's Heart." Using Barrett Browning's works to explore the gendered heart in Victorian discourse, Blair argues that in Aurora Leigh EBB "is particularly concerned with ways of rewriting the cliche of the woman's heart and wrestling, through her heroine, with the concept of 'writing from the heart' and the related assumptions that poetry must be personal and emotional" (p. 20). While this statement of her argument suggests that Blair's argument aligns with Angela Leighton's in her influential study, Victorian Woman Poets: Writing Against the Heart (1992), Blair's focus is in fact quite different: on the physiology, affects, and literalization of metaphors associated with the heart, not on "its association with romantic love" (p. 117). Blair subtly reads the pervasive metaphors of the heart in Aurora Leigh in relation to "nationalism, politics, the gendered body in society and the role of poetry" (p. 118), linking EBB's discourse of the heart to Hemans', but also to the spasmodic poets, and fruitfully blurring the boundaries between the feminine and the masculine heart much as EBB herself does. At the same time, Blair reveals how fraught the poet's negotiation of the insistently gendered heart is, given the close connection between the woman's heart and her womb in medical and literary discourse of the period. This is a principal reason why, as Blair points, Aurora's most graphic and sensuous metaphors of the heart pertain to poetry, not to her own body or to "love and desire" (p. 136). In representing Aurora incorporating "a more 'masculine' heart of assertive passion and force into hers without a sense of self-conscious shame or fear of exposure," EBB "provides an ideal for women's poetry," as well as for "writing from the heart in general, to aspire to," Blair concludes.

Blair's focus on the heart leads her to consider many of the remarkable and often discussed metaphors of the breast in Aurora Leigh, a motif in the text that also enters into Simon Dentith's "'As Flat as Fleet Street': Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Matthew Arnold and George Eliot on Epic and Modernity," Chapter 5 in his wide-ranging book on Epic and Empire in Nineteenth. Century Britain (2006). Dentith places EBB's adaptation of epic conventions in Aurora Leigh in the broader context of "nineteenth-century debates about modernity, the place of poetry in the modern world and the meaning and possibility of heroic action" (p. 85). Contrasting EBB's with Arnold's and Tennyson's contributions to these debates, Dentith rightly finds a Carlylean strain in her approach to the heroic, and furthermore draws suggestive parallels between the treatment of epic in Aurora Leigh's and in George Eliot's works, especially Middlemarch. Dentith's analysis (including Chapter 2 in his book) is also useful in setting EBB's response to the debates over "The Homeric Question" in the wider context of what he terms debates over "epic primitivism." In particular, he analyzes the allusion in Aurora Leigh to the theory of F. A. Wolf, interpreting the Homeric epics as composite, collaborative texts, not the product of a single poetic genius. Focusing on the powerful metaphor of "Juno's breasts" in this complex allusion to the "aetheist" Wolf (5.1254), a passage that has drawn the attention of earlier critics, Dentith reads the allusion and the metaphor in light of the Homeric controversy and EBB's revision of gendered epic conventions.

Along with Aurora Leigh, EBB's Italian poems, and a number of EBB's lesser known works, Sonnets from the Portuguese features prominently this year, with two new readings that place the sequence suggestively in the wider contexts of the Petrarchan and the nineteenth-century sonnet traditions respectively. In "(Re)gendering Petrarch: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese" (TSWA 25 [2006]: 247-266), Marianne Van Remoortel cogently builds on Dorothy Mermin's "pioneering" 1981 article, "The Female Poet and the Embarrassed Reader" (p. 248) by focusing on the "gendered distinction between literal and metaphoric meaning" in the Sonnets from the Portuguese (p. 249). This distinction, she argues, is the "key" to understanding the complicated reception history of the sequence, if one considers "the gendered cognitive, social, and cultural parameters that govern the construction and interpretation of Petrarchan metaphors" (p. 249). Van Remoortel analyzes "several strategies" in the Sonnets from the Portuguese that EBB employs in order to "assert her subjectivity in relation to the Petrarchan love-sonnet tradition and Victorian society," including her refusal of a name that might subject her to dispersion into figurative meaning, like Petrarch's Laura (pp. 252-253). While EBB carefully subverts Petrarchan metaphors, however, when the sequence is approached within a biographical Victorian framework, "none of the speaker's strategies of subjectivity carries any metaphorical or subversive power" (p. 256), explaining how differing readers can find the sequence either radically transgressive in its treatment of love-sonnet conventions or sentimentally conservative in its gender ideology. The "source of the exceptional interpretive elasticity," Van Remoortel contends, "is a complete overlap of literal and figurative meaning," since the Petrarchan metaphors of abasement and inferiority to the beloved correspond to "Victorian women's actual living conditions" (p. 260).

Joseph Phelan's authoritative and wide-ranging study, The Nineteenth-Century Sonnet (2005) places Sonnets from the Portuguese in a differing set of contexts, more English than Italian. Phelan treats the sequence along with other sonnets by Wordsworth, Felicia Hemans, and others in Chapter 2, "'Transcripts of the private heart': The Sonnet and Autobiography" (pp. 34-60), arguing that the "Sonnets from the Portuguese are one of the nodal points of the form during the century, a moment at which a number of different features come together to produce a new orientation" (p. 59). Phelan's analysis overlaps with Gail Marshall's treatment of EBB and Shakespeare cited above because he points out how important Shakespeare's sonnets were to a "confessional" model of the sonnet, pointing to a connection more briefly treated by Jane Wood in "Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Shakespeare's Sonnet 130" (N&Q [2005]: 77-79). Other features making EBB's sequence "nodal" in the century, according to Phelan, include its "rhetoric of authenticity" and its explicit narrativization and associations with "the hegemonic literary form of the period, the novel" (p. 59). It also represents "the first sustained attempt to revive the Petrarchan amatory sonnet sequence in the nineteenth century" (p. 60), one that was to influence several subsequent sequences. Phelan provides especially suggestive readings of the motif of imprisonment and confinement in Sonnets from the Portuguese in the context of similar motifs in Wordsworth's sonnets. Curiously, however, his chapter on "The Political Sonnet" makes no mention of EBB's works at all, focusing on male authors exclusively (though with the welcome addition of some Chartist writers). The omission is surprising because "Hiram Power's 'Greek Slave'" is surely an outstanding example of a political sonnet in the period, and as Margaret Morlier has pointed out, the heroic sonnet tradition and the "politics of rhyme" it entails is an important influence on both the Sonnets from the Portuguese and EBB's famous (and one might argue, political) sonnets to George Sand. EBB's many religious sonnets also do not figure in Phelan's chapter on "The Devotional Sonnet," but given the sweep of his study, and the number of authors it treats, such omissions are understandable.

Finally, Hyson Cooper brings welcome attention to "The Cry of the Children," one of EBB's most mentioned but little analyzed works in "A Voice, a Song, and a Cry: Ventriloquizing the Poor in Poems by Lady Wilde, Thomas Hood, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning," SBHC 27 (2006): 26-40. Arguing that the "elevated style of the various voices" in "The Cry of the Children" "undermines any potential concern at their potential implausibility," Cooper contends that EBB "reminds her readers that children in the position she describes have no voice whatsoever, and it becomes the job of the poet to express their grievances in the language she herself uses best" (p. 36). Poetic voice may be less classless than Cooper maintains--how might EBB's poem compare to a Chartist poem on the tribulations of the poor using more realistic speech, one wonders? However, this article does demonstrate through its interesting comparisons with Hood and Lady Wilde the widespread use of "ventriloquism" in poetic representations of the Victorian working classes.

With another special journal issue marking EBB's bicentenary yet to appear (the Victorian Review) and Volume 16 of The Brownings' Correspondence approaching publication, it seems as if next year will continue to be one in which publications on EBB proliferate. A selected teaching edition of EBB's poetry is also forthcoming from Broadview Press, and the editorial team headed by Sandra Donaldson continues to work on a complete scholarly edition to be published by Pickering and Chatto Press.