"Confirm my voice": "My sisters," poetic audiences, and the published voices of EBB.

Stone, Marjorie ; Taylor, Beverly

In a pocket notebook including works dating from the 1842-44 period, the poet who used the name Elizabeth Barrett Barrett before her marriage and Elizabeth Barrett Browning afterwards, or "EBB" for short throughout her life, (1) drafted an untitled, unfinished poem beginning "My sisters! Daughters of this Fatherland / Which we call England!" (2) In this fragment, published here for the first time (see below), she calls upon the women of England: "Give me your ear & heart-Grant me yr voice / Do confirm my voice--lest it speak in vain." Fifty years after her birth in 1806, there seemed little reason to believe that Elizabeth Barrett Browning had spoken "in vain." By 1856, hosts of readers--male as well as female, in England and well beyond its borders--"confirmed" her voice with widespread reviews, frequent tributes, strong disagreements (an indirect form of confirmation), and solid sales. Her 1844 Poems (published in the United States as A Drama of Exile: And Other Poems), combined with works such as "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point," published in the 1848 issue of the Boston anti-slavery annual The Liberty Bell, had established her trans-Atlantic reputation. By mid century, she stood with Tennyson among the first rank of English poets, celebrated not only by the public, but also by other writers and artists. She was the only woman writer included in the list of "Immortals" drawn up by the zealous young Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848. (3) She was also named by the Athenaeum as a suitable contender for the position of Poet Laureate on Wordsworth's death in 1850, the year in which an expanded new edition of her Poems appeared. (4) Casa Guidi Windows (1851), on the movement for Italian unification and nationhood, generated mixed reviews in England, given its controversial call for British intervention in continental politics. In Italy, however, in an 1852 address to the Piedmont Chamber of Deputies, it was cited by the Italian writer and politician, Massimo D'Azeglio, then Prime Minister of the Italian state, and praised even by some of the Italian patriots whom the poem critiqued. (5) Aurora Leigh (1856), the first extended portrait of the woman poet in English literature, further enhanced EBB's international reputation even as it generated animated debates, going into more than twenty editions by century's end. Meanwhile, notwithstanding the backlash in England against Poems before Congress (1860), the poet's second book calling for British intervention in Italian liberation, her collected poems were repeatedly reprinted, or issued in new editions, along with multiple selected editions. In the second half of the nineteenth century, her work was discussed in France, especially popular in North America, and translated into French and Italian--even, in the case of "The Cry of the Children," into Russian. (6)

While hosts of nineteenth readers in different nations and languages may have "confirmed" EBB's voice with ear, heart, writing, and speech acts of their own, their divergent responses to a body of work that is extraordinarily wide-ranging in its representation of speakers, deployment of poetic forms, and variable subject matter suggests how complex and multi-faceted an issue "voice" can be in her poetry. To accommodate the amplitude of her poetry and multiplicity of its effects--its intertextual engagements with precursors, its refraction through varying generic registers, and the "Uproar in the echo" (7) that it excited through its utterance--we might do better to speak of the published "voices" of EBB's poetry. Our attachment to the concept of a holistic voice in reading poetry--a voice that connects us to the poet herself or himself through a subtle medium as intimate as breathing--speaks to our nostalgia for the integrated unitary self as an ultimate origin of utterance. Yet as Margaret Linley, Eric Griffiths, and Yopie Prins, among others, have argued, "voice" emerges as a powerful figure for such an origin in the very period when new technologies, the expansion of the publishing industry, and the democratization of the reading public transformed it into a print phenomenon. Taking Griffths' analysis of the specific ways in which voice is constituted through print mediations in the Victorian period one step further, Linley points out that "at the moment when voice would seem to have died onto the page, its spirit returns, as the written sign of voice and in acts of reading aloud, as an organic (though technologically enhanced) prosthesis for the machine-made word." (8)

EBB was skillful in utilizing the resources of the "machine-made word" in the nineteenth century, as is evinced by her publications in the annuals, in newspapers (for many of her works on the Italian struggle), in periodicals on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as through established presses for poetry such as Moxon, and Chapman and Hall. Through these various channels, she disseminated a very large array of dialogically engaged voices: the epigrammatic voice of youthful works in the manner of Alexander Pope, such as An Essay on Mind; the lyric voices of wistful, unrealized desire in "A Dead Rose" or of stark, unremitting grief (as in her sonnet "Grief"); the dramatized voices of The Seraphim and A Drama of Exile, or of dramatic monologues such as "Bertha in the Lane" or "Bianca Among the Nightingales"; the swift, passionate, rhythmic voices of her popular ballads such as "Rhyme of the Duchess May"; the assertively female voice of Aurora Leigh expressed through rapidly shifting tonalities--confessional, meditative, satiric, self-reflexively ironic; the political voices of Guiseppe Mazzini, the chief theorist of the Italian Risorgimento, or of Napoleon III of France invoked or represented in Casa Guidi Windows and Poems before Congress; the vatic voices that recur throughout her poetry, from the early "Who Art Thou of the Veiled Countenance" (1827), excluded from all editions of her poetry to date, (9) to the thundering refrains of the highly controversial "A Curse for a Nation": "This is the curse. Write."

In a dramatic reversal of her public prominence in 1856, a half century later, at the centenary of her birth in 1906, these multitudinous published voices of EBB--voices that had spoken so variously and resoundingly on poetics, aesthetics, personal grief and desire, women's rights, factory reform, the abolition of slavery, the Italian Risorgimento, and religious, political, and economic issues of the nineteenth century--were increasingly muted. Numerous studies have charted the rapid decline in EBB's critical fortunes that occurred after the turn of the twentieth century, transforming her from one of the "Immortals" saluted by the young Pre-Raphaelites and by many others into the quaint icon whom Virginia Woolf famously described demoted to the "servants' quarters" in the mansion of literature where, in company with other forgotten Victorian poets, "she bangs the crockery about and eats vast handfuls of peas on the point of her knife." (10) Suffice it to say here that by 1908 critic John W. Cunliffe had converted her from a leading poet into a mere muse and handmaiden to Browning's genius, arguing that her "most enduring contributions to literature" lay not in her own writings but in his. (11) Cunliffe made this claim despite the fact that EBB's poems were read and appreciated into the twentieth century by modernist writers such as T. S. Eliot. (12) By the 1950s she was represented in anthologies, literary histories, and scholarly studies almost entirely by Sonnets flom the Portuguese (1850), approached within the sentimentalized context of a mythic love story epitomized in Rudoph Besier's play The Barretts of Wimpole Street, first produced in 1930 and subsequently translated into a Hollywood screen version (1934) viewed by millions. That story cast EBB not as the most famous woman poet of her age in the English-speaking world, but as the daughter of one man--the tyrannical patriarch Mr. Barrett of Wimpole Street--and the wife of another. In Tricia Lootens' apt terms, EBB became a "lost saint," venerated as a cultural icon suffused with sentimental religiosity, while her work fell from view. The most conspicuous residue of her critical misfortunes through much of the twentieth century is the lack of either a sound scholarly edition of her complete works or a comprehensive teaching edition with authoritative texts and annotations. (13)

On the occasion of the bicentenary of EBB's birth, in 2006 we can look back on a dramatic restoration of the poetic voices and of the achievements that were effectively erased through the first seventy years of the twentieth century. Second-wave feminist critics such as Ellen Moers, Cora Kaplan, and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar began the process of restoring her poetic canon in the 1970s, focusing initially on Aurora Leigh, read through the lens of feminist aesthetics and what Margaret Reynolds terms "feminist folk-poetics." (14) While these scholars were unaware of EBB's unpublished work "My sisters!" calling upon her female readers to give her both "ear" and "heart," and with their own voices to "confim" hers, the unpublished fragment is particularly resonant in the context of the struggle to make women's voices heard within a hegemonic, masculinist culture (or a "phallologocentric" culture, as late twentieth-century feminist critics termed it). Through an apostrophe extended into a dynamic, dialectical appeal, EBB underscores the ways in which receptive readers contribute to the woman writer's struggle to create a public poetic voice:

 My sisters! Daughters of this Fatherland
 Which we call England! work by the grace
 Of your small pacing steps to tread her shore
 & by your faith of heart to cheer her homes!
 White bosomed as her cliffs; & turning go
 Wherer (15) these strangers think her skies are full
 Upon the sucking babies who look up
 From the milk fountain to the path of stars
 Which shine aslant it true & tenderly!
 My sisters! who have brothers on the ships
 And in the cities--in the fields at work,
 And in the kirk at (16) prayer & in the mart
 The popular concourse & the legal court--My
 sisters! who have lovers in all these
 Working & praying & at merchandize
 With your names in their heart!--(17)
 Fathers perhaps in these--or in the graves
 Beside them, which are stiller & more green
 I do adjure you by this sisterhood--And
 by those tender names of sire & child
 Lover & brother which worked & work (18)
 In the great name of country & by all
 Those majesties & sanctities of place
 Give me your ear & heart--Grant me yr voice (19)
 Do confirm my voice--lest it speak in vain (20)
 Do give your ear to me--your heart to me
 Do grant this confirmation of yr voice
 To my voice, that it may not speak in vain..

The echo of Shakespeare's Marc Antony simultaneously appealing and admonishing "countrymen, lend me your ears" over Julius Caesar's corpse (21) suggests that both personal tensions and political motives animate this utterance, and that its ostensible self-effacement overlies ambitious social-political purpose. The lines encapsulate the Victorian ideology of gendered separate spheres which problematized a woman poet's desire to enter contemporary debates: the women EBB addresses are mothers, keepers of the home and the homeland's spiritual flame--"relational creatures," to borrow a formulation from the popular conduct literature by Mrs. Sarah Ellis (22)--whose power arises only indirectly, from their "influence" over the men who control England's mechanisms of political and economic authority in law courts, fields, and markets. (23) Although the fragment implies that women are crucial to the life of the nation, like the heart at its core (animating "her homes" with their "faith of heart"), it nevertheless represents women's participation beyond the home as limited activity on the perimeter, "small pacing steps" that "tread" England's "shore." (24) Because of their intense emotional links to the men inhabiting the public arena, EBB invokes her sisters to serve simultaneously as her audience, inspiration, and authorization to speak: "Do grant this confirmation of yr voice / To my voice, that it may not speak in vain."

This fragment, which finally falters in EBB's repeated attempt to stress what she needs from her "sisters," is particularly interesting in light of Linley's observation that we need to challenge the "privatized model of authorship" associated with the Romantic poet, and to investigate "the personal and private, so easily elided with lyric subjectivity, as tropes with a public function which enables private images to circulate" (Linley, p. 541). "My sisters" dates from the 1842-44 period, when EBB was self-consciously renegotiating her relationship to the categories of "poet" and "poetess," principally by shifting to more public and directly political interventions, and to more contemporary and socially committed subject matter. The shift is most dramatically expressed in the often-cited words that described her goal (realized more than ten years later in Aurora Leigh) of continuing in future what she had begun in the 1844 "Lady Geraldine's Courtship": that is, of producing a "completely modern" poem, "running into the midst of our conventions, & rushing into drawingrooms & the like 'where angels fear to tread';--& so, meeting face to face & without mask, the Humanity of the age" (BC, 10:102-103).

In contrast to the aborted fragment "My sisters!," EBB's most famous "modern" poem of the 184344 period, "The Cry of the Children," begins with a direct, sharp challenge to the men whom "My sisters" represents as working in market and law court: "Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers ...?" Women, at least the mothers of these exploited children, already hear, for the children "are leaning their young heads against their mothers, / And that cannot stop their tears." Drafted in the same notebook that includes "My sisters," "The Cry of the Children" is rooted in factual content associated with the "mart," "popular concourse," and "legal court," given its genesis in the work of EBB's correspondent and collaborator R. H. Horne with the Royal Commission for the Employment of Children in Mines and Factories. (25) The poem poetically translates, in particular, the Commission's harrowing accounts of the working conditions and lack of educational opportunities among child laborers, some of them as young as four, working up to sixteen hours a day (BC, 7:274). While evoking sentiment with such images, EBB speaks powerfully and directly to the men in charge. Rather than calling upon her "sisters" to lend her their ears, this poem penetrates the sphere of public utterance, as the poet calls out to her "brothers," asking if they "hear" the laboring children "Weeping sore before the bosoms of their mothers, / In our happy Fatherland?" (CW, 3:53-54; ll. 1, 21-22). Moreover, unlike the unpublished fragment, in which women are positioned as confined "Daughters of this Fatherland / Which we call England," "The Cry of the Children" combines the rhetoric of a feminized appeal to pity with forceful condemnation and an appeal to fear. In the final stanza's ringing indictment of a "cruel nation" treading on a child's heart, EBB assumes the voice of a Carlylean social prophet warning of the "angels in high places" who hear what the "brothers" in the factories, the courts, and the legislature do not hear: that "the child's sob in the silence curses deeper / Than the strong man in his wrath" (ll. 153, 151, 159-160).

A decade later when she wrote "A Song for the Ragged Schools of London" (CW, 6:22-28) to help raise funds for her sister Arabella's work with London street girls, EBB turned to her "sisters" not for authorization to speak, but to admonish mothers to look beyond their own infants comforted at their breasts to the hungry, ill-clothed, ill-educated poor: "O my sisters, not so much / Are we asked for," she insists (ll. 113-114), confidently assuming, rather than requesting, authority; she appeals, instead, for money to support charity schools:

 O my sisters! children small,
 Blue-eyed, wailing through the city--
 Our own babes cry in them ali:
 Let us take them into pity. (ll. 125-128)

Achieving the confident authority to address other political issues which did not directly touch on maternal concerns was not so easy as the vigorous language of the examples of "The Cry of the Children" and "A Song for the Ragged Schools" might suggest, with their indications that women's biological and cultural roles as mothers invested them with a special responsibility to nurture the nation's children. The "My sisters" fragment reflects the limited and indirect role Victorian women normally played in public debate, and the private struggle EBB experienced with her own internalization of separate-spheres ideologies.

The powerful desire expressed in "My sisters" for the confirmation of other voices found the response that EBB sought, both in the mid-nineteenth-century, in the reception of Aurora Leigh in particular (a subject discussed in Lana Dalley's essay in this volume), and again in the 1970s, when scholars began to remedy the collective cultural amnesia about her work beyond Sonnets from the Portuguese, not only by publishing new editions of Casa Guidi Windows and Aurora Leigh, (26) but also by increasingly making EBB's entire oeuvre the subject of discerning criticism. The essays in this issue commemorating the bicentenary of EBB's birth--like the array of papers presented in March 2006 at a conference at the Armstrong Browning Library celebrating the same occasion--range 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. As Simon Avery writes in this special issue on EBB's works, "we are now coming to recognize" her 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.'"

The essays gathered here, while frequently concerned with matters of gender, reveal the multiplicity of EBB's published voices in engaging with many other dimensions of her writing that have remained understudied, including contexts in politics, religion, and political economy, issues of genre and form, pedagogical and ethical challenges posed by her works, their innovative deployments of medievalism and Shakespearean allusions, their relation to twenty-first century creative works, and the new light that unpublished archival materials can cast on well-known works. Avery adeptly situates the poems from EBB's two collections published in the 1830s--works that have largely been regarded as non-political and highly personal or subjective in the voice that they articulate--within the broader contexts of intellectual and cultural history. He elucidates their varying strands of Whig, Promethean, and Dissenting politics, interpreting them in the context of major Romantic as well as Victorian issues and themes, such as the aesthetics of the sublime. While he reads these poems within the familiar developmental narrative of EBB's ascension to a more confident public and political voice over the arc of her career, Stephanie Johnson challenges this trajectory. In her subtle Derridean analysis of the aesthetics of the "frame" in "A Vision of Poets"--a major, neglected work from Poems (1844)--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 disconcertingly absent.

Herbert Tucker, in the "critic's contrarian mood" of"loyal opposition," sets out on an "expedition in ebbigrammatology" in which he attends not to EBB as "reformer or woman writer or evangelist or polemicist," but to the complicated ways in which she turns the "epigram," with its aphoristic concision, against itself. Ranging from the beginning to the end of her writing career, Tucker wittily shows how the "dialectic that energizes epigram" in her poetry and prose embodies a "constitutive ambivalence" about the compression and "fixation in meaning which it is the generic boast of the epigram to perform." His analysis of the changing modulations of the epigrammatic voices in EBB's poetry, and the internal tensions that inhabit them, opens up a subject that has for too long been overlooked. In another essay notable for its range, Gail Marshal examines EBB's intertextual engagement with the powerful, precursor voices created by and associated with Shakespeare by considering Sonnets from the Portuguese, Aurora Leigh, and letters written throughout her 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.

Both Tricia Lootens and Laura Fish primarily focus on the much discussed, controversial abolitionist poem "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point" in contexts that explore the personal dimensions of its politics, Lootens by focusing on the challenges the poem's palimpsest of unsettling dramatic and personal voices poses in the classroom, and Fish through her creative exploration of EBB's powerful abolitionist voice vexed by the Barrett family's own relationship to slavery. Lootens sketches an array of ways to consider EBB's cultural impact, illuminating critical controversies within the academy, the effects of editors' choices in representing the oeuvre, the cultural currency of EBB as manifested on the internet, and the aesthetic power of the poetry as it is experienced in the classroom. Fish demonstrates EBB's force as a continuing catalyst for creativity, examining the ethical and social functions of art, exploring writers' responsibility and imaginative capacity to give voice to the experience of women of color, and sharing three sections of her own forthcoming novel, Strange Music, partly inspired by "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point" and the economic entanglements of the Barrett family in Jamaican slavery.

Showing that EBB had clearly read economists such as Adam Smith, Lana Dalley sheds new light on Aurora Leigh by interpreting it in the context of the mid-Victorian discourse of political economy. Dalley demonstrates, in particular, that EBB surely had the "ear" of nineteenth-century women writers in the field. Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, Bessie Raynor Parkes, Frances Power Cobbe, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, and Clara Collet all cited Aurora Leigh as a key literary expression of their economic vision, predicated on the tenets of a classical economic theory that they strategically modified to address women's material needs and concerns. Elizabeth Woodworth reframes the overtly political Poems before Congress 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 this 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 Poems before Congress expresses a naive and unreflective hero worship of Napoleon III. Analyzing the multiple voices that speak in the collection, 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.

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. 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." 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, while Robert Browning utilized the figure of Pan to revise "the politics and dynamics of the classical and romantic chase, as well as the art which encodes the sexual encounter."

Paralleling our own use in this "Introduction" of the fragment "My sisters," three of this volume's essays turn to unpublished manuscripts--in one case, to the private voice of her Diary--to illuminate EBB's published works. While Woodworth referentes an unpublished letter by Robert Bulwer Lytton in analyzing EBB's response to Napoleon III, Barbara Neri draws on 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. Making resonant associations between the baroque qualities and striking metaphors of EBB's much analyzed sequence and work by two Iberian writers in particular, Neri suggests 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. (27) Finally, in her investigation of EBB's medievalism, her kinship with the medieval trobairitz (female troubadour) tradition and the nineteenth-century preoccupation with Joan of Arc, Clare Broome Saunders similarly turns to archival material, in this case an extended unfinished poem about a woman sculptor entitled "The Princess Marie" earlier transcribed by Philip Sharpe. Like "My sisters," "The Princess Marie"--one of the most substantial of the works that EBB left incomplete and unpublished--explores the challenges facing women artists when they cross from the personal to the public spheres.

"The archive has always been a pledge, and like every pledge ... a token of the future," as Derrida paradoxically observes in Archive Fever. (28) In the case of EBB, this is doubly the case because a surprisingly large body of her manuscript remains are still unmined a century and a half after her death. Scholarly investigations have faced severe obstacles created by the wide dispersal of the Brownings' collections--including not only their poetry manuscripts and correspondence, but also their personal library, artworks, and other possessions--at a 1913 Sotheby's auction following their son's death intestate. This dispersal into many public and private collections sometimes even resulted in the dismemberment of individual poem manuscripts, a point touched on by Tricia Lootens with regard to "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point."

All of the essays collected here document the myriad ways in which EBB's poetry and spirited, extensive correspondence speak to readers still, two hundred years after her birth. Together, these essays also evoke the depth and breadth of her involvement in and impact on some of the most influential movements and issues of the nineteenth century. They analyze the intricacies of her relationships with earlier writers, including Shakespeare, Romantic poets, Portuguese writers, and the European tradition of "king-poets" so memorably captured in "A Vision of Poets," as well as the subtle ways in which EBB's published voices became intertwined with the voice of her poet-husband after her death or with the voices of other women poets and writers on the Victorian "woman question." Far from reifying her as a historical curiosity, however, the essays reveal that her power derives from the fact that her poetry resonates for twenty-first century audiences. As her work continues to give rise to new creative expression in the form of novels, performance art, and music, as well as to criticism among a new generation of scholars represented by several contributors here, it reminds us that, in Ezra Pound's words, "'Literature is news that STAYS news." (29) The poet who defined art as "not either all beauty or all use," but as "essential truth which makes its way through beauty into use" would no doubt have concurred, (30) even if, in other respects (on politics, most notably), she and Pound would have hardly agreed. EBB laid claim to future readers by writing poetry that addressed her moment while transcending it. In her words again, "poetry is not confined to the clipped alleys, no, nor to the blue tops of 'Parnassus'": "Poetry is where we live and have our being" (Letters, ed. Kenyon, 2:158).

Notes

(1) Except for formal documents such as her marriage certificate, Elizabeth Barrett Browning customarily signed her maiden name as Elizabeth Barrett Barrett or used abbreviated variations of this name. She published her earliest work anonymously or signed by her initials EBB, often using this designation in signing unpublished manuscripts and her correspondence. She used "Elizabeth B. Barrett" in publishing her third volume of poetry (1838), the first to bear her name, and "Elizabeth Barrett Barrett" on the title page of the next collection, Poems (1844). After she married Robert Browning in 1846, she published as "Elizabeth Barrett Browning" and thus maintained her characteristic signature initials. To honor her authorial self-designation, and to avoid confusing shifts between her maiden and married names, we refer to her as EBB in this essay and in our selected, annotated edition of her poetry, forthcoming from Broadview Press.

(2) Now in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, the notebook is identified by Philip Kelley and Betty Coley, The Browning Collections: A Reconstruction with Other Memorabilia (Waco, Texas: Wedgestone Press, 1984), as Berg pocket notebook IV (D1400); the poem fragment (D563) appears on f. 42v. The manuscript draft is here published for the first time with the generous permission of the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, the New York Public Library.

(3) W[illiam] Holman Hunt, Pre.Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1905), 1:159. Joan of Arc was the only other woman in this list, headed by Jesus Christ, and followed by 52 male writers, scriptural authors, artists, scientists, and political figures, plus the anonymous "Early English Balladists" and the "Author of Stories After Nature." Like Tennyson, Boccaccio, Raphael, and four others, "Mrs. Browning" received a star. Robert Browning was one of twelve given two stars; Shakespeare and the author of Job were given three stars, and Jesus Christ was given four. Other figures listed, including Byron and Milton, were allotted no stars. William Michael Rossetti observes that he and his brother Dante Gabriel were "spellbound" by many works in EBB's Poems (1844), that they read them "half-a-hundred times over" in the "two or three years" following their publication, and that Dante Gabriel knew some by heart and could "repeat them with great exactness" (Some Reminiscences of William Michael Rossetti, 2 vols. [1906; repr. New York: AMS Press, 1970], 1:232).

(4) "There is no living poet of either sex who can prefer a higher claim than Mrs. Elizabeth Barrett Browning," the Athenaeum observed ("Our Weekly Gossip" [June 1, 1850], p. 585). EBB inferred that the nomination was made by the Athenaeum's literary critic, H. F. Chorley, but it was in fact made by its editor, T. K. Hervey, as Scott Lewis notes; see The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Her Sister Arabella, ed. Scott Lewis, 2 vols. (Waco, Texas: Wedgestone Press, 2002), 1:320, 325n6; this edition is hereafter cited as LTA. Alfred Tennyson won the post after the 1850 publication of In Memoriam.

(5) See LTA 2: 397n 14. Writer and patriot Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi (1804-73) also praised the poem, despite its pointed criticisms of his temporary rule as a revolutionary dictator in Florence (see LTA 1: 460n24, and Casa Guidi Windows, Part II, I. 136, The Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke, 6 vols. [New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1900]; this text is subsequently cited as CW).

(6) EBB's Poems (1844) "had a more general and hearty welcome in the United States than any English poet since the time of Byron and company," according to the editorial obituary commemorating her death in Harper's Magazine 23 (1861): 555. On the Russian translation of "The Cry of the Children," see Patrick Waddington, "Russian Variations on an English Theme: The Crying Children of Elizabeth Barrett Browning," SBHC 21 (1997): 94-131. In France, EBB's works were treated by the critic Joseph Milsand, among others; see The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Mary Russell Mitford, 1836-1854, ed. Meredith B. Raymond and Mary Rose Sullivan, 3 vols. (Waco, Texas: Armstrong Browning Library of Baylor University, 1983), 3:336n6; and LTA 1:424n15. On the Italian reception of her works, see Dominic James Bisignano, "The Brownings and Their Italian Critics," Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1964.

(7) Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book, ed. Thomas J. Collins and Robert D. Altick (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2001), Book 1, 1. 834, p. 35.

(8) Margaret Linley, "Conjuring the Spirit: Victorian Poetry, Culture, and Technology," VP 41 (2003): 539; see Eric Griffiths, The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); Yopie Prins, "Voice Inverse," VP 42 (2004): 43-59.

(9) Published in the January 1827 issue of the Jewish Expositor, and Friend of Israel, the journal of the London Society for Promoting Christianity Among the Jews.

(10) Virginia Woolf, "'Aurora Leigh,'" in The Second Common Reader, ed. Andrew McNeillie (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), p. 203. As Simon Avery remarks, while Robert Browning was saluted as a "key progenitor of literary modernism," EBB became either a "fairy-tale princess or madwoman in the basement" (The Brownings, Lives of Victorian Literary Figures II [London: Pickering and Chatto, 2004], p. xxiii). On EBB's reception history and the factors that shaped it, see Marjorie Stone, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (New York: St. Martin's, 1995), chap. 5; Tricia Lootens, Lost Saints: Silence, Gender, and Victorian Literary Canonization (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1996), chap. 4; Sandra Donaldson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning: An Annotated Bibliography of the Commentary and Criticism, 1826-1990 (New York: G. K. Hall, 1993); and the "Introduction" in Simon Avery and Rebecca Stott, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (London: Longman, 2003).

(11) John W. Cunliffe, "Elizabeth Barrett's Influence on Browning," PMLA 23 (1908): 169-183; cited by Marjorie Stone, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, pp. 208-209.

(12) See Antony J. Cuda, "Eliot's Quotation from Elizabeth Barrett Browning's 'Shadows for My Company,'" N&Q 51 (2004): 164-165.

(13) This lack is being remedied by an international team of scholars headed by Sandra Donaldson now preparing a comprehensive scholarly edition of EBB's poems, scheduled to appear from Pickering and Chatto in 2008.

(14) "Criticai Introduction," Aurora Leigh, ed. Margaret Reynolds (Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 1992), pp. 9-10. See Ellen Moers, Literary Women: The Great Writers (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1976); Cora Kaplan, "Introduction," Aurora Leigh and Other Poems (London: Women's Press, 1978); Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979).

(15) Wherer] presumably for Where'er.

(16) kirk at] written above uncanceled temples.

(17) The remainder of the poem is written vertically on the page, crossing the right half of the foregoing lines.

(18) worked & work] written above canceled are wrought withal.

(19) Followed by a canceled partial line: That my voice may not.

(20) After this line, there appears another, aborted line with only one word, either "Now" or possibly "Not." The manuscript is difficult to read at this point because of the cross-stitch of text created by EBB's insertion of ll. 17 to 28 vertically in the right margin. See note 17 above.

(21) Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act III, scene 2, l. 82 (New York: Signet Classics, 1963).

(22) The phrase comes from Sarah Ellis, Women of England (London, 1838), pp. 149-150.

(23) For Victorian discussions of the power of women's "influence," see Sarah Lewis, Woman's Mission (London, 1839; Boston, 1840), and John Ruskin, "Of Queen's Gardens," Lecture II of Sesame and Lilies (lecture 1864, pub. 1865), in The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols. (New York: Longmans, Green, 1903-12), 18:109-144.

(24) In the semi-autobiographical essay about "Beth," which probably dates from the same period as the notebook fragment "My sisters!," EBB records her girlhood scorn of women's "littlenesses called delicacies"; Beth, in contrast, "could run rapidly & leap high" (The Brownings' Correspondence, ed. Philip Kelley, Ronald Hudson, and Scott Lewis, 15 vols. to date [Waco, Texas: Wedgestone Press, 1984- ], 1:361; subsequently cited as BC).

(25) On EBB's correspondence and collaborations with dramatist, essayist, and poet Richard Hengist Horne (1802-84), see BC 4:317-320.

(26) Julia Markus, ed., Casa Guidi Windows (1977); Cora Kaplan, ed., Aurora Leigh and Other Poems (London: The Women's Press, 1978).

(27) Like Laura Fish, Neri, who is a performance artist as well as a critic, demonstrates the continuing impact of EBB on creative expression today, through her multi-media and dramatic work in "The EBB Project." For more information, see her website, www. barbaraneri.com.

(28) Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 18.

(29) Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (New York: New Directions, 1960), p. 29.

(30) The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. Frederic G. Kenyon, 2 vols. (London, 1897), 2:383.