Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Stone, Marjorie

Surveying canonical transformations in the forty-four years since establishment of the journal Victorian Studies, Edward H. Cohen notes, as one significant change, that there are now "almost as many" bibliography entries each year on Elizabeth Barrett Browning as Robert Browning ("'Victorian Bibliographies'" VS 44 [2002]: 630). This year's essay covers a full-length study, several books with substantial sections and/or essays on EBB, assorted articles, and a major new web resource mounted by the Armstrong Browning Library. While work on Aurora Leigh continues to appear, it no longer dominates the scene. Casa Guidi Windows and Sonnets from the Portuguese figure prominently once again, but critics are increasingly considering lesser known works as well. Political, national, and religious identities are attracting as much, if not more interest, than gender issues; other topics include EBB's response to Felicia Hemans and Letitia Landon, trans-Atlantic abolitionist networks, genre, sculpture, metrics, and connections between Flush and fascism.

Among new books, this year has brought Simon Avery and Rebecca Stott's wide-ranging study, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (2003), published in the same Longman series as John Woolford and Daniel Karlin's Robert Browning (1996). Avery and Stott describe themselves as "particularly interested in Barrett Browning's relations to, and participation in, nineteenth-century intellectual history, her engagement with key social and political debates of the period, and her examination of the power relations and struggles" within both society and the individual (p. 20). Although their book is a collaborative production, the chapters are solo compositions, not co-written analyses. Clearly, however, the two authors have complementary views. Avery notes Deirdre David's reading of EBB as "conservative and essentially anti-feminist" (p. 17) in his introductory survey of changing critical approaches. But the poet and intellectual who emerges from Avery and Stott's book is cast in a more heroic mold. She is an iconoclast, an innovator, and a politically engaged liberal reformer. In Avery's words, she is "a strong, powerful, dissenting thinker who frequently resisted established ideologies" (p. 40); in Stott's, she is "a woman in full possession of her 'poetic I' from the moment she ventured into print as a young girl," an author who is "consistently ambitious and audacious" (p. 66).

One of the most significant contributions of this book is the attention its co-authors give to the Whig politics and the non-conformist religious discourses that shaped both EBB's youthful formation and her mature writing. Avery emphasizes the politics, in particular, in treating the formative years of the "Poet Laureate of Hope End." He makes very good use of H. Buxton Forman's edition of Hitherto Unpublished Poems (1914), and The Brownings' Correspondence to demonstrate the Whig sympathies and political activism of the Barretts (including Samuel Barrett, EBB's paternal uncle, who became a Whig Member of Parliament for Richmond in Yorkshire in 1820). A brief treatment of the Barretts' colonial connections with slavery under the rubric of "Skeletons in the Family Closet" is more problematic. This section relies principally on Julia Markus' popular biography Dared and Done (1995), with its thesis concerning mixed blood in EBB's father's line of the Barretts. Avery only too aptly describes this as "rather a tentative theory" (p. 40). Unfortunately, however, it is not presented as such by Markus in her otherwise innovative biography of the Brownings as a literary couple. For a critique of Markus' claims and speculations, readers should see Richard S. Kennedy's "Disposing of a New Myth: A Close Look at Julia Markus' Theory About the Brownings' Ancestry" (BSN 26 [2000]: 21-47), covered in the 2001 "Year's Work" essay (p. 33).

Much more original and substantial than the account of "Skeletons in the Family Closet" is Avery's illuminating analysis of EBB's first three published earlier volumes within their historical and political contexts. What emerges from this approach, in the case of the first, The Battle of Marathon (1820), is a work more interesting than the merely imitative juvenile epic other critics have dismissed: "Pope's Homer done over again ... or rather undone"--as the poet herself described it. Avery stresses both the creativity of the poem's strategic choice of topic, and its political resonance in the context of the events leading up to the Greek War of Independence. Similarly, Avery reads An Essay on Mind (1826), the young poet's ambitious "comparative assessment of the disciplines of history, science, philosophy and poetry," as a work in which "Barrett suggests how intellectual flexibility and freedom of the mind can lead to liberal political thought and how this, in turn, can help bring about physical freedom from oppressive regimes" (p. 57). This reading explains why Byron looms so large in the philosophical verse essay as the "Mont Blanc of intellect," among the ranks of philosophers such as Locke and Newton. It also leads nicely into Avery's interpretation of EBB's interest in Prometheus, in her 1833 volume Prometheus Bound, as a "version of the liberal hero," akin to Byron and Rhigas Pheraios, the Greek revolutionary represented in "Riga's Last Song," included in the 1826 volume.

The dissenting and non-conformist dimensions of EBB's politics and poetic practice are similarly underscored by Stott in her multifaceted chapter on Aurora Leigh. Arguing that it is a text resonating with the "Victorian non-conformist sage discourse" of Carlyle and Harriet Martineau (p. 206), she observes that Aurora Leigh is a "dissenting poem in its emphasis on social and political reform, in its impassioned claim for a public role for poets (male and female) as moral troth-seekers, in its commitment to the testimony of individual conscience over moral orthodoxy and in its impassioned challenges to orthdoxies of all kinds" (p. 207). Both Avery and Stott emphasize the Carlylean strands of EBB's thought: Avery in considering the conceptions of the hero and of hero-worship at work in Casa Guidi Windows and Poems Before Congress, and Stott in analyzing the apocalyptic metaphors of contagion, waste, and "ooze" associated with representations of the poor in Aurora Leigh. Stott places more emphasis on EBB's differences with Carlyle, noting that she "was no uncritical borrower" of tropes such as the image of "ooze" he used to describe the "thirty thousand wretched women" in prostitution in London. What Carlyle presents as "ooze," EBB presents as a "social wound" (p. 194)--and in Aurora Leigh we find reference to eighty thousand, not thirty thousand, London prostitutes, one might add.

In between their treatments of the earlier works and Aurora Leigh, Avery and Stott include chapters considering EBB's participation in debates about poetry and the poet's role; her political poems of the 1840s; her experimentation within a range of genres; the epistemology and the ethics of love she unfolds in poems about love and marriage; and the political debates in her works on Italian subjects. Avery's treatment of the 1840s political poems includes previously neglected works and a suggestive interpretation of the "purposeful pairing" (p. 98) of "Crowned and Buried" (on Napoleon) and "Crowned and Wedded" (on Queen Victoria) in the 1844 Poems. As in the case of Robert Browning's pairings of works such as "My Last Duchess" and "Count Gismond," these purposeful pairings by EBB deserve more attention than they have received. Avery also fruitfully reads "The Cry of the Children" together with "The Cry of the Human," while his chapter on EBB's Italian works lucidly positions these poems within the complex political history of the Risorgimento. Stott, for her part, enhances critical appreciation of the Swedenborgian dimensions of EBB's representations of love and marriage, both in the love poetry and in Aurora Leigh. She also provides a synthesizing overview of EBB's contribution to Victorian debates on poetry and poetic identity, emphasizing (refreshingly) how much her struggle to find a voice as a poet was shared by male poets of the period. Stott's chapter on genre tests E. Warwick Slinn's claims concerning its social and ideological dimensions against EBB's experiments chiefly in "the sonnet, the ballad and the epic" (p. 116). Less attention is given to the dramatic monologue (a pity, given the importance of the form and EBB's contribution to its development), although Stott is attentive throughout the book to the poet's use of dramatic voices. A more notable absence in this otherwise comprehensive study is the relative inattention given to the majority of the works in Last Poems (1862), even though one might argue that this posthumous volume contains some of EBB's best poems ("A Musical Instrument," for example). Yet, given the size of EBB's oeuvre, critics necessarily must make choices. Avery and Stott's book also comes with a detailed chronology which, in the spirit of their approach, tracks EBB's life in conjunction with major cultural, social, political, and economic events of the period.

The conjunctions of politics and culture that form a principal focus for Avery and Stott are also central to three essays on EBB in a groundbreaking collection edited by Alison Chapman and Jane Stabler, Unfolding the South: Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers and Artists in Italy (2003). One of these, Richard Cronin's "Casa Guidi Windows: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Italy and the Poetry of Citizenship," also appears in his book Romantic Victorians (2001), and thus was covered in last year's survey. The other two essays are by Isobel Armstrong and Alison Chapman.

Armstrong's "Casa Guidi Windows: Spectacle and Politics in 1851" (pp. 51-69), is richly interdisciplinary in weaving together developments in the history of architecture, physics, optical technologies, and Italian politics to explore the poetics and politics of the window in Casa Guidi Windows. She argues that the window functions as a liminal space mediating between subject and object, the bourgeois room and the public street, the individual and the collective, the spectator and the spectacle (or the spectator as spectacle). The political implications of these mediations are addressed in part through a striking contrast between the interactive space of the Florentine window and the windows of "the newly Haussmannised and impersonal boulevards of Paris" (p. 57). After exploring the "indeterminate generic status" of the window as "peepshow, theatre, diorama, lens, picture, [and] frame" (p. 57), Armstrong turns to a broader reticulation of images in Casa Guidi Windows relating to light and "light painting" (or photography), the new physics of wave theory, the new "physiological optics," and changing epistemologies. In Casa Guidi Windows, we encounter "individual vision" within a "communality organized as an interactive field," Armstrong observes. Thus, in EBB's "risk-taking metaphors, bodies intervene in the body politic" (p. 64). This phase of her argument leads to a particularly thought-provoking analysis of the oppositions between art as "dead effigy and as light released from matter" (p. 59), in relation to the poem's complex continuum of past, present, and prophecy. What is most suggestive about this analysis is the way in which it connects apparently disparate passages, such as the resonant representations of Michelangelo's powerful statues, "Night" and "Day," and the often cited lyrical description of the Arno shooting its "arrowy undertide" beneath the four bent bridges of Florence (p. 60). Further developing her analysis of the dead effigy/ living light opposition, Armstrong more generally considers the "convergence of idealist and materialist strategies of symbol" in the poem. This convergence is illustrated by a suggestive contrast between the "imperialist economic project" of the Crystal Palace in Part II of the poem, and the representation of an ideal church, "symbolising the universal diffusion of light," in Part I--a passage that has been hitherto largely overlooked (p. 66). Armstrong acknowledges that earlier analyses by Helen Groth and Leigh Coral Harris stimulated her thinking about Casa Guidi Windows. Her own layered and nuanced reading is apt to have a similarly catalytic effect.

Alison Chapman's "Risorgimento: Spiritualism, Politics and Elizabeth Barrett Browning" in Unfolding the South (pp. 70-89) intriguingly analyzes the connections between "two seemingly unrelated enthusiasms" that "gripped" the poet from "the early 1850s until her death in 1861": "spiritualism and Italian politics" (p. 70). Pointing out that the devastating "Peace of Villafranca coincided with the dramatic cessation" of EBB's spiritualist experiments with Sophia Eckley, Chapman analyzes passages in the correspondence that reveal EBB connecting her disillusionment with the political situation to her personal disillusionment with Sophie--sardonically termed "speckly Eckley" by Robert Browning (p. 71). Victorians noted this connection between politics and spiritualism in EBB's life and/or writings as well, as Chapman observes. William Howitt attributed the defense of the emperor Napoleon III in Poems Before Congress to its author being "'biologised by infernal spirits,'" while Harriet Martineau, in a veiled allusion, suggested that EBB was as apt to misconceive the character of persons "whom she supposed she thoroughly knew," as well as public figures like Louis Napoleon (p. 74). The "strange and disturbing series of dreams" that EBB experienced in 1859, in which Italy appears as a masked "mystic woman" in white, figure in the connection Chapman posits, together with the importance of (apparent) manifestations of Dante's hand in the poet's famous 1855 seance with the medium Daniel Home (pp. 76-78). She also argues that some spirit drawings made by Sophia Eckley bear a resemblance to Benjamin Robert Haydon's profile sketch of Keats, who in turn was strongly associated by EBB with her dreams of Italy, given his burial in the Cimitero Anticattolico in Rome (pp. 83-86). Concluding with a suggestive analysis of "Napoleon III in Italy," Chapman's essay explores EBB's "dream" of Italy in relation to this work and an unpublished fragment on Italy earlier cited in relation to Aurora Leigh in my own book, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1995).

Both the "Introduction" to Unfolding the South and the essays on other writers, artists, and subjects provide an illuminating set of contexts and points of comparison for understanding the Brownings' Italian years. In their introduction, Chapman and Stabler consider the cultural impact of Madame de Stael's Corinne, or Italy on constructions of Italy, the "disturbing legacy" of the "gendered portrait" of Italy "as 'a woman in distress'" (p. 6), and alienating as well as creatively liberating experiences of Italy on the part of British women. Most of the contributed essays make reference to EBB: among them, Stabler's on British women travellers in Italy and the Catholic Church (pp. 15-34), Esther Schor's on Theodosia Garrow Trollope and Frances Power Cobbe (pp. 90-109), Pamela Gerrish Nunn's on visual representations of the Italian cause by women (pp. 110-136), Jan Marsh's on the artist Marie Spartali Stillman (pp. 159-182), Catherine Maxwell's on Vernon Lee (pp. 201-221), and Angela Leighton's on representations of the Renaissance in Victorian aestheticism (pp. 222-238). More importantly, taken together these essays effectively counteract the tendency to construct Italy through EBB's works and eyes in studies of British women writers, contributing to a more multifaceted understanding of its real and imagined history, from the perspective of several different genres and art forms.

One inaccuracy concerning the Brownings in the introduction to Unfolding the South needs to be noted. Chapman and Stabler observe that, "although deeply committed to the cause of popular Italian liberation, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning had only a passing acquaintance with the few Italians who worked as their servants" (p. 12). However, many letters indicate that the Brownings had more than a "passing acquaintance" with their Italian servants. Moreover, working with materials published before 2000, Piergiacomo Petrioli's "The Brownings and Their Sienese Circle" (see the 2002 "Year's Work," pp. 279-280) indicates that the Brownings' friends and acquaintances in Italy included, among others, Enrico Nencioni (the first reviewer of the two English poets in Italy's most important literary magazine); Carlo Matteucci, a Pisan Professor of Philosophy and later an Italian senator; and the poet-patriot Francesco Dall'Ongaro. These friendships and connections are documented in greater detail in Scott Lewis' indispensable edition of The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Her Sister Arabella (2002), a resource no doubt not yet available before Unfolding the South went to press (also covered in the 2002 "Year's Work," pp. 276-279). "We are great friends, he & I," EBB wrote to Arabella of Dall'Ongaro, describing one of the Venetian poet's visits (2:487). Other letters, and Lewis' annotation, indicate that Masimo D'Azeglio called on the Brownings in 1859 in Rome (2:399). D'Azeglio, a Prime Minister of Piedmont, and subsequently Piedmontese ambassador to England, had earlier quoted Casa Guidi Windows in an 1852 address to the Piedmont Chamber of Deputies (2:397). And, as Denis Mack Smith's biography, Mazzini (1994) shows, Browning also met one of the most famous Italian patriots socially on several occasions in England--not surprisingly, given Mazzini's regular weekly visits with the Carlyles.

EBB's works are a focus of attention as well in another book centrally concerned with English constructions of Italy during the period of the Risorgimento, Matthew Reynolds' The Realms of Verse, 1830-1870: English Poetry in a Time of Nation Building (2001). Reynolds' engaging introduction, describing a meeting between Garibaldi and Tennyson in 1864-cordial, but also something less than a full meeting of two minds--reflects the depth of historical research that informs his study throughout. He approaches Casa Guidi Windows within the context of a long tradition of British literary representations, analyzing "the English cultural formation 'Italy'" as "Italianism," a "variant of orientalism or colonial discourse" with some significant differences, however, from colonialisms of varying kinds (p. 81). Significantly, in relation to EBB, he also notes how Byron was "incorporated into Risorgimento myth-making" by Mazzini and others (pp. 82-83)--although his references to Mazzini tend to depict him more as a mere propagandist than as the charismatic visionary and prolific propagandist Denis Mack Smith's biography recovers. Hence, it is not surprising that the Mazzinian strains of EBB's thought in Casa Guidi Windows remain relatively uninvestigated here. Reynolds underscores the political uncertainty of the historical events that gave rise to Casa Guidi Windows in 1847, questioning earlier criticism that sees it as responding to a revolutionary "'wave of liberalism,'" in Julia Markus' terms (p. 90). He also persuasively counters critics who have seen Part I of the poem as "idealistic" or "unrealistic" by arguing that such a charge does not take account of the poem's genre as prophecy (p. 91). In his apt (and one might add, Mazzinian terms), it is a work of "resolute idealism" in the face of the official British lack of support for Italian liberation (p. 100). EBB's "policy of enthusiasm had a special aptness in a time of revolution," Reynolds observes, but he nevertheless concludes that the idealism of Casa Guidi Windows "was a dead end for poetry about politics" because it lacked impartiality and what Henry James terms "'a sense of proportion'" (pp. 101-102). This analysis of the ideal and the real chimes with Armstrong's discussion of "idealist and materialist strategies of symbol" in the poem, although the two critics come to very differing conclusions about the success of these strategies. One of the most original and illuminating aspects of Reynolds' consideration of Casa Guidi Windows is his insightful and adept analysis of the "pulse" of its verse form. It is written, he points out, "in a variant of terza rima" recalling Dante (p. 93), but one handled to create diverse effects of sound attuned to sense and rhetorical effect in differing sections of the poem. He further notes how integral political metaphors are to some of EBB's writings on rhyme, a connection developed at greater length in Margaret M. Morlier's astute work on the "politics of rhyme" in EBB's work (see the 2001 "Year's Work," p. 27). Since EBB's experiments with meter and rhyme are still often misunderstood, despite well-informed explications of these experiments dating back several decades (Alethea Hayter's and Fred Manning Smith's), Reynolds' attention to this subject in Casa Guidi Windows is particularly valuable.

The Realms of Verse also includes a chapter on "The Scope of Narrative in Aurora Leigh," in which Reynolds presents it as a "narrative focused on individuals which develops comparisons between marriage and political unity in remarkably subtle and enquiring ways" (p. 108). Pointing out the many echoes of Casa Guidi Windows in the first two books of Aurora Leigh, he suggests that "Aurora and Romney should be thought of as figures of their respective nations, like their counterparts in the work's most important source," Corinne (p. 110). Aurora Leigh, however, presents "the compatibility and even mutual disposition of national dispositions which, in Corinne, are condemned to separation" (p. 111). In his thought-provoking reading of the ending, Reynolds finds Aurora Leigh "more circumspect about national unity than Casa Guidi Windows" in its focus on a personal sphere that is not overtly political (p. 126). Reynolds' treatment of these relations between Casa Guidi Windows and Aurora Leigh opens up a subject that has been surprisingly neglected. This chapter again includes a perceptive analysis of the cadences of EBB's verse, especially the Italian handling of vowels and the intensification of "linguistic Italianness" that Reynolds discerns after Aurora's move to Italy (pp. 120-121)--although, as he subsequently notes, it is striking that she "has no feeling of communion with the Italians at large, or indeed any Italian" (p. 126). The most surprising feature of this discussion of Aurora Leigh is that here, as in Reynolds' treatment of Casa Guidi Windows, there is no reference to the integral relations between gender and nation: a connection that Corinne certainly brings out, as Chapman and Stabler's introduction to Unfolding the South suggests. There is also very little reference to the large body of feminist scholarship on Aurora Leigh, leading to generalizations that hardly seem accurate: for example, that "critics who have noticed the pattern of imaginative interrelation between Italian politics and Barrett Browning's personal life have generally viewed it with disdain" (p. 107). That said, Reynolds' study is an important contribution to EBB studies through its original, comparative analyses of two of her major works in conjunction with those of other Victorian writers such as Tennyson and Arthur Hugh Clough.

In relation to EBB, Italy, and discourses of nation, the appearance of a new Italian translation of Aurora Leigh by Bruna Dell-Agnese, published by the Casa Editrice Le Lettere in Florence (2002) is notable. Dell-Agnese lists in her bibliography a translation of Aurora Leigh done in prose in 1908, but her own is in poetic form. (Unfortunately, my grasp of Italian is too rudimentary to permit assessment or appreciation of her translation.) Despite the new work on Italian-English literary connections in Reynolds' The Realms of Verse and Chapman and Stabler's Unfolding the South, linguistic and national boundaries still tend to create "two solitudes" for English-speaking and Italian scholars. Leigh Coral Harris' article, cited by Isobel Armstrong (see above), is one of the few studies to consider the Italian reception of Casa Guidi Windows together with its British reception. Sandra Donaldson's 1993 annotated bibliography includes a good number of works by Italian critics up to 1990, and EBB's works continue to attract scholarly attention in Italy, with a thesis by Silivia Gallina, "L'Italia Nella Vitae Nell'Opera Di Elizabeth Barrett Browning," completed at Turin (2000/2001). However, much more dialogue between English-speaking and Italian scholars is called for, judging by the lack of attention to this Italian scholarship in most English criticism on EBB, and the parallel absence of references to studies of EBB after 1980 in the postscript and bibliography to Dell-Agnese's translation. Such a critical dialogue seems particularly needed in a period when we see developing the kind of internationalism that EBB herself invokes so powerfully in the "Preface" to Poems Before Congress.

An essay of my own in Women and Literary History (2003), edited by Katherine Binhammer and Jeanne Wood, turns to two examples from EBB's work to critique the textual segregations created when literary histories are organized along the axes of nationality, gender, genre, race, and historical periodicity. Entitled "The Search for a Lost Atlantis: Feminist Paradigms, Narratives of Nation, and Genealogies of Victorian Women's Poetry and Anti-Slavery Writing," the essay draws on the work of Mary Poovey, Homi Bhabha, and Pierre Vidal-Naquet to explore the appeal of the Atlantis myth and of associated paradigms privileging insularity in both feminist literary histories and in narratives of nation. I argue against the segregation by gender underlying some influential genealogies of Victorian women's poetry by considering the importance of earlier male as well as female poets to EBB, as illustrated by her neglected contribution to English literary history, the long essay on "The Book of the Poets." The obstacles created by a more complex set of textual segregations, involving race, gender, genre, and nationality, are illustrated by briefly considering overlooked textual echoes, trans-Atlantic trajectories and abolitionist networks linking "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point" to Frederick Douglass' 1845 Narrative of his life as a slave, and to the 1862 British edition of Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.

Along with discourses of "nation-building," to use Reynolds' apt term, religious discourses are another area in which scholarship on EBB has been increasingly active. Cynthia Scheinberg's path-breaking Women's Poetry and Religion in Victorian England: Jewish Identity and Christian Culture (2002), in the Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, is one of the most important new studies on this subject. Arguing that Victorian women "used poetry as a site to do the theological work from which they were excluded in most Victorian religious institutions" (p. 3), Scheinberg engages in a comparative analysis of "the two most famous Christian woman poets" of the period, EBB and Christina Rossetti, and two of its "most famous Jewish women poets," Grace Aguilar and Amy Levy. As she points out, this is "more than an act of canon revision," because her study also explores the "anti-Judaic and anti-Semitic assumptions that structure so much of Christian Victorian poetic discourse" (p. 5). Scheinberg's extended discussion of EBB (pp. 62-105) begins with a probing analysis of the latent anti-Semitism in R. H. Home's representation of the poet in A New Spirit of the Age as, in EBB's own words, a "'Hebraic monster'" (p. 62). She then proceeds to show how the poet created "a prophetic female poetic identity through reference to Jewish identity and 'the Hebraic' throughout her poetry" (p. 66), although ultimately her works indicate her re-positioning this "idealized Hebraic identity" within a hegemonic "Christian framework" (p. 68). What drew EBB and other Victorian women poets to Old Testament Jewish figures such as Miriam, Deborah, and Esther, Scheinberg argues, was their embodiment of "a certain sexual autonomy as well as political/religious authority" (pp. 68-69). Drawing on her own expertise in Hebrew, Scheinberg's chapter analyzes EBB's display of her knowledge of Hebrew to "construct herself as a serious scholar" and "a poet with a serious theological mission" (p. 67)--as in the 1844 poem, "A Vision of Poets." She includes a perceptive reading of female agency in the completely neglected 1838 poem, "The Virgin Mary to the Child Jesus," then concludes with an analysis of the ending of Aurora Leigh. This sophisticated reading of the poem demonstrates how "Barrett Browning enacts a complex narrative of conversions which extricates her ideal Christian woman poet from the potential 'monstrosity' of her Hebraic roots," even as she speaks in the "transfigured terms" of a Hebrew text (p. 85).

Scheinberg's approach to EBB stands in productive contrast to Simon Avery and Rebecca Stott's construction of the poet as an iconclastic dissenting thinker. While acknowledging that EBB's Christianity was "quite anti-institutional" (p. 6), she underscores the respects in which Aurora Leigh and other works nevertheless embodied a hegemonic (and heterosexual) religious discourse. Her contrast between Amy Levy's radical portrayal of the Magdalen and EBB's more conventional representation of Marian Erle (p. 224) similarly foregrounds EBB's relative orthodoxy. At the same time, Avery and Stott's emphasis on EBB's specifically non-conformist contexts and beliefs suggests how much is passed over in Scheinberg's strategic (and amply justified) decision to focus on more general contrasts between Jewish and Christian traditions. Both studies concur, however, in seeing EBB as falling within a vatic tradition of the poet as priestess, a conclusion Reynolds comes to as well in reading Casa Guidi Windows as a work of prophecy.

While Scheinberg explores EBB's appropriation of Hebraic traditions and female figures as a mode of gaining spiritual and intellectual authority, Julie Melnyk investigates the possibilities for empowerment in identification with Christ in "'Mighty Victims': Women Writers and the Feminization of Christ" (VLC 31 [2003]: 131-157). Tracking the increasingly feminized images of Christ that appeared in a wide range of nineteenth-century writings (poetry, novels, hymns, religious magazines, and biographies), Melnyk points out that the "spiritual and moral authority" women sought through identifying with such images often led to disempowerment and "political quiescence" (p. 132). Melnyk's survey includes a brief mention of the feminized representation of Christ in The Seraphim (1838), although she does not address the Promethean dimensions or strategies of subversion other critics have identified in this lyrical drama on the Crucifixion (p. 140). She finds EBB coming "closer to realizing the empowering potential of women's identification with Christ" in A Drama of Exile (p. 146), but it is not until Aurora Leigh, in her view, that the poet finds "a way to translate" this identification into "temporal power" (p. 147). This is done through splitting the characteristics of Christ between Romney and Aurora, and making Romney the one who endures suffering, while Aurora becomes the one who acts "as teacher and Savior" (p. 150). Melnyk concludes that EBB in Aurora Leigh and Josephine Butler in her Personal Reminiscences of the "crusade" against the Contagious Diseases Act are the two Victorian women writers "who best succeeded in turning an identification with Christ into political empowerment" (p. 153).

An exclusive focus on either Jewish or Christian religious traditions in EBB's poetry does not, of course, accommodate the importance of the classical tradition for her or its impact on the complex, syncretic spirituality and sense of the sacred her poetry reflects. This is a point brought out in a very fine essay by Steve Dillon exploring the "imagery associated with poetic articulation" and poetic vocation in EBB's poetry, "Barrett Browning's Poetic Vocation: Crying, Singing, Breathing" (VP 39 [2001]: 509-532). "From The Seraphim to Aurora Leigh, Barrett Browning repeatedly and self-consciously studies the moment when a human voice breaks out in a cry," Dillon points out (p. 509). He finds a paradigmatic instance of this cry in Ovid's Metamorphoses, in the "originary cry" or "ai ai" of Apollo lamenting the death of his beloved young man, Hyacinth, and inscribing his grief on the petals of a flower in a moment of mourning that is also a moment of artistic creation (pp. 510-511). The cries in EBB's poetry have this elemental and creative dimension, Dillon suggests, though they take many forms and are shaped by many traditions, including the psalms of the Hebrew poets, the Greek Christian poets, seventeenth-century religious poetry, and the "Pythian shriek" of Apollo in Keats's Hyperion. Ranging with great facility throughout her major and lesser known writings, he explores the "inarticulate cries" of the Earth and her creatures in A Drama of Exile (p. 517); Christ's despairing cry on the cross in The Seraphim (a cry that recurs in many of her poems); "The Cry of the Children" (and children's cries in other, more neglected works); the slave's vain cry to a figure of God cast in the image of her white masters in "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point"; and the cry of "patriot men" in Casa Guidi Windows. He also subtly investigates the distinction between crying to and crying out (p. 516), and EBB's recurrent distinction between "crying" and "singing," as in Casa Guidi Windows where she chooses "not to cry, but to sing over and through the cries" (p. 521), or in Aurora Leigh, where the motif of breathing is added to crying and singing (p. 520). In treating the motif of breathing, Dillon suggests that Aurora's name involves "an airy Petrarchan pun in near relationship to aura--Greek and Latin for 'breeze,' and mythologically, daughter of Aurora." (He also mentions a possible Swedenborgian echo in "aura.") Overall, this is a highly original article, casting new light on the "rhapsodic," "spasmodic," and vatic elements in EBB's poetry and relating these to the articulations fundamental to language and poetic creation. It is also a moving essay, in part because the cry is inseparable from our deepest human feelings and aspirations, in part because Dillon writes with pithy eloquence.

The probability of a "Petrarchan pun" in Aurora's name is increased both by EBB's unpublished translations of some of Petrarch's poems, and the sophisticated revisions of "Petrarchism" that Mary B. Moore charts in her poems in Desiring Voices: Women Sonneteers and Petrarchism (2000). Appearing in the "Women and Literature" Series edited by Sandra M. Gilbert, Moore's book contributes to a better understanding of Petrarch, as well as the tradition of European women sonneteers inspired by his example, from the Renaissance up to the Modernist period. Petrarch tends to be constructed as a kind of androcentric straw man in some feminist treatments of the sonnet tradition, but Moore's study suggests the extent to which characteristics associated with the Victorian "double poem," to use Isobel Armstrong's influential term, may appear in the self-reflexive divided subjectivity of his lyrics. In the chapter on "Indeterminacy and the Economy of Love in Sonnets from the Portuguese," Moore focuses on EBB's use of "strategies of revision that evoke Petrarchism to frame, explore, and ultimately master issues of gender and poetic subjectivity." These strategies include a "linguistic indeterminacy very like Petrarch's," "images of liminality," the representation of the poetic subject as an "aged and unlovely woman," the use of "economic and political metaphors," and transgression of the boundaries of the sonnet form's "body" (p. 25). Unfolding these strategies in insightful close readings, Moore also considers Vittoria Colonna as a possible "foremother" for EBB's sonnet sequence (p. 165), and explores the liminality of the subject's position in the sonnets to George Sand.

Like Moore in some respects, Natalie M. Houston is interested in the complex subjectivity associated with the sonnet form in "Affecting Authenticity: Sonnets from the Portuguese and Modern Love" (SLI 35 [2002]: 99-121). Noting the persistent convention of "a performance of affectation of authenticity" in the sonnet tradition, Houston explores "the tension between sincerity and artifice" in Victorian writings about the sonnet that made it "a kind of microcosm for debating the function of poetry in modern life" (p. 99). As she points out, both "the Sonnets from the Portuguese and Modern Love have frequently been read as more or less directly revealing their author's life stories" (p. 100). Houston argues, to the contrary, however, that both sequences "self-consciously" demonstrate that "authenticity in a sonnet sequence is always constructed" (p. 100). Framing her analysis with a useful and succinct overview of Victorian critical discourse about the sonnet, she considers both EBB's revision of Petrarchan conventions and the means through which she created an "'authenticity effect'" (pp. 106-108). The allusions to the courtship letters in Sonnet XXVIII, for example, invoke "layers of apparent documentation only to remind us that emotional experience can never be documented, whether in sonnet form or any other text" (p. 110). Houston's article appears in a special issue of Studies in the Literary Imagination, "Inauthentic Pleasures: Victorian Fakery and the Limitations of Form." This issue includes another article, C. D. Blanton's "Impostures: Robert Browning and the Poetics of Forgery," that will also be of interest to some EBB scholars because it opens with a sophisticated analysis of the notorious Thomas Wise forged editions of some of her works, among them the "Reading" edition of the Sonnets from the Portuguese and a pamphlet edition of "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point."

In "Sonnet Kisses: Sidney to Barrett Browning" (EIC 52 [2002]: 126-142), Erik Gray is also interested in inauthentic authenticity, or what he describes as the paradoxical insistence on a "heartfelt and spontaneous emotion" in sonnet sequences that simultaneously deploy the "most codified and imitative of all lyric conventions" (p. 126). Exploring this paradox, he analyzes the nature and function of the kiss in sonnet sequences from the "stolen" kiss of Sonnet 74 in Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella to what he sees as the "difficult and fumbling affair" of the three kisses (hand, head, and mouth) represented in Sonnet 38 of the Sonnets from the Portuguese. This "awkwardness," he argues, combined with "morbidity," is characteristic of "Victorian Petrarchanism" because the Renaissance sonnet sequence, "already an unusually self-conscious genre," becomes "overdetermined" and "defunct" in its Victorian repetitions. It is a "dead body" that needs to be revived (p. 132). In Sonnet 38, a "courtly gesture kissing the lady's hand--is made uncomfortably real, as Browning's kiss leaves the speaker's hand 'more clean and white.'" In other words, Gray quips (with a slightly forced sprezzatura, and a literality more pronounced than that in EBB's metaphor), "Browning's kiss has apparently removed ink-stains from Barrett's writing hand" (p. 138). The wit is subtler in his inventive analysis of the "plethora of plosives" in the exuberantly playful Sonnet 37 (with its Pagan image of a porpoise "safe in port" with "gills a-snort"). These plosives leave "the reader's lips constantly pursed" in preparation for the "climactic triple kiss" in Sonnet 38, he suggests. In support of this reading, Gray cites scientific research that indicates "alliteration on the letter 'p' is more popular (and perhaps more pleasurable) than any other"; he also alludes to Mrs. General's refrain in Dickens' Little Dorrit, "Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes and prism" (p. 139)--although Mrs. General's prim plosives would seem to contradict his argument about the pleasurable nature of the letter "p." That said, this is a pleasurable article to read in itself (and one that furnishes ample material for classroom repartee). Rather perversely, however, Gray seems not to have considered that EBB (especially in Sonnet 37) may have been "porpoisely" witty and erotic herself, and not simply the aged, morbid, awkward, acutely self-conscious speaker he constructs to exemplify the "sober concerns of Victorian [sonnet] sequences" (p. 140).

In "Sentimental Confrontations: Hemans, Landon, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning" (ELN 40 [2002]: 29-47), Derek Furr considers another kind of tradition in analyzing the two poems EBB wrote to Letitia Landon (the first, simultaneously a poem to Felicia Hemans) in conjunction with Landon's own "Stanzas on the Death of Mrs. Hemans." Furr argues against the grain of recent interpretations of EBB as a poet who, in Angela Leighton's resonant terms, writes "against the heart." According to him, the "connections among these poems cast Landon as Barrett's primary precursor and Hemans as a spiritual role model and suggest that Barrett identified with her precursors' sentimentality. She felt their poetry and found herself in it." More broadly he claims that all three poets are "bound together, fundamentally, by their appreciation for a poetry of sentiment": a poetical mode unappreciated by modern readers determined "to deny their sentimentality" (pp. 30-31). Furr perceptively analyzes many of the intertextual echoes connecting Landon's poem to Hemans' "Bring Flowers," and EBB's two poems in turn to both Hemans' and Landon's work. He also introduces a new poem into the mix in arguing that EBB's "A Sabbath on the Sea," first published in the annual The Amaranth in 1839, responds to (and critiques) Landon's "Night at Sea." EBB's second poem to Landon, the elegy "L.E.L.'s Last Question" (also first published in 1839, in the Athenaeum) has long been recognized as alluding to "Night at Sea." However, the connection Furr posits between "Night at Sea" and "A Sabbath on the Sea" is not considered in earlier treatments of this chain of linked poems: Dorothy Mermin's Elizabeth Barret Browning: The Origins of a New Poetry (1989), and my own "Sisters in Art" (VP 32 [1994]: 339364), focusing on Christina Rossetti's addition to the chain. Furr's definition of sentimentality is assumed rather than explicit, and his generalizations about Hemans, Landon, and EBB do not take into account the diverse range of each author's works. On the basis of other poems, one might easily argue that EBB saw Byron as her primary precursor (or Milton, or Wordsworth, depending upon the poem). Nor does Furr's categorization of Hemans easily accommodate the complex poet concerned with issues of nation and empire that critics such as Tricia Lootens (in her PMLA article) and Gary Kelly (in his Broadview edition of Hemans' poetry) have helped us to recover. That said, Furr's closing suggestion that critics should more fully investigate EBB's "investments in the rich tradition of sentimentalism" is well worth heeding (p. 45).

Furr points out that EBB's first poem to Landon was entitled "Stanzas Addressed to Miss Landon" when it first appeared in the September, 1835 New Monthly Magazine, but that it was later re-titled, "Mrs. Hemans" (pp. 29, 38). In fact, the change in title is more layered than he suggests (a point I mention because the shifting titles tend to generate some confusion). Evidently recognizing that her poem was as much an elegy to Hemans as an address to Landon, EBB changed the title in her 1838 volume to the convoluted, "Stanzas on the Death of Mrs. Hemans. Written in reference to Miss Landon's poem on the same subject." In her 1850 Poems, she altered the title again to "Felicia Hemans: To L.E.L., referring to her monody on that poetess." (This revision along with others in the text is evident in the printer's proofs for the 1850 Poems.) In her 1856 Poems, "that poetess" appears as "the poetess." The change from "Mrs. Hemans" to "Felicia Hemans" at a time when EBB was increasingly being identified as "Mrs. Browning" is of particular interest, along with the substitution of "L.E.L." for the "Miss Landon" of the 1838 volume.

Changes of this kind underscore the value of the important new scholarly web resource mounted by Philip Kelley and the archivists and librarians of the Armstrong Browning Library, The Brownings: A Research Guide (http://www.browningguide.org/). One of the most helpful aspects of this online Guide is that it provides a searchable, updated version of the comprehensive catalogue first published in 1984, The Browning Collections: A Reconstruction, together with online checklists of materials relating to The Brownings' Correspondence, and reviews of their works. The online version of The Browning Collections provides a very efficient means of finding information about many of EBB's published poems (including the date and place of first publication), as well as information about manuscripts, the books in the Brownings' library, visual representations of the Brownings, and memorabilia associated with them. For example, one can confirm from the Guide that the 1839 "A Sabbath on the Sea" discussed by Furr is the poem (or a version of it) later re-titled "A Sabbath Morning at Sea." One can also learn that the manuscript title of "A Sabbath Morning at Sea" in two surviving drafts was "The Morning at Sea," and that another manuscript is dated "1839" after the title. Both the alternative manuscript title and the date support Furr's argument that this poem responds to Landon's "A Night at Sea." The ABL Research Guide is especially important given the expertise it draws upon, since there is a good deal of inaccurate information concerning EBB on the web, even in some articles or sites written and/or created by scholars. (A link on one website brought up a portrait of George Eliot, not a portrait of EBB, though usually the errors are less visible than this.) The Brownings: A Research Guide does not provide information on the multiple revisions EBB made in successive published versions of many of her poems. This is information that will be provided, however, in the comprehensive, scholarly edition now being prepared by a team of scholars headed by Sandra Donaldson.

Connections between the visual arts and EBB's poetry are often neglected, in the attention to its verbal and textual aspects. An article by Michele Martinez, "Sister Arts and Artists: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh and the Life of Harriet Hosmer" (FMLS 39 [2003]: 213-226), brings welcome attention to metaphors of sculpture in EBB's Aurora Leigh, together with an illuminating glimpse of the history of women artists and one particularly fascinating figure, Harriet Hosmer. Hosmer is perhaps best known by scholars working on the Brownings for her plaster life-cast, The Clasped Hands of Mr. and Mrs. Browning. But Martinez reminds us of the fame that the sculptor earned for her statues of heroic women such as Zenobia, and she explores in detail a possibility previously noted by critics only in passing: that Hosmer's occupation and unconventional emancipated life among the Anglo-Italians in Rome and Florence are reflected in EBB's portrait of Aurora as an independent woman artist. The numerous "sculptural conceits and analogies" in Aurora Leigh not only embody a "revision of a Byronic mode that celebrated male artists and viewers," according to Martinez; they also constitute "a commemoration of Hosmer" (p. 215). She additionally notes a revisionary allusion to Byron in Frances Power Cobbe's praise of EBB's novel-epic as "perhaps the least 'Angelical' work in the language," with its "forked lightning revelations of character" (p. 217). Another interesting question taken up by Martinez is "why EBB and other women's-movement writers" such as Cobbe viewed sculpture "as the highest of the sister arts and the closest in kinship to poetry."

The work that Cobbe described in such dramatic terms would, of course, over the next century be largely forgotten, and its author would become chiefly known as the daughter of Mr. Barrett, Browning's wife, the author of "How do I love thee," and the owner of a charming dog named Flush. Anna Snaith's "Of Fanciers, Footnotes, and Fascism: Virginia Woolf's Flush" (MFS 48 [2002]: 614-636) engages in a compelling new reading of the novel that Woolf wrote in response to this metamorphosis in EBB's reputation. "Barrett Browning's writing, her life, her reputation, and of course her dog, Flush, are behind much of Woolf's thinking throughout the 1930s," Snaith observes, laying the ground for her argument that in Flush, "Woolf plays out her ideas on the reception of women writers and the links between other discourses of control" (pp. 614-615). Rather than dismissing this best-seller (it sold 19,000 copies in the first 6 months) as a kind of "joke" on Lytton Strachey, a parody of Eminent Victorians (p. 618), Snaith argues that Woolf's research for it led her to examine "the politics of relegation," excluding women, animals, and working-people. She persuasively shows how Woolf's concerns about this "politics" of exclusion and control were heightened by the fascism she saw among some of her associates and contemporaries (p. 618). Snaith's penetrating and original essay includes an analysis of the "politics in location" in Flush, involving not only an opposition between the middle-class comfort of Wimpole Street, and the dog-thief slums of Whitechapel, but also between Italy and England (p. 620). Although it is primarily concerned with Woolf, EBB scholars will find much here of interest as well.

I conclude by briefly noting the comprehensive new critical resource, A Companion to Victorian Poetry (2002), edited by Richard Cronin, Alison Chapman, and Antony H. Harrison. This indispensable Companion includes numerous essays that reframe investigations of EBB's works in stimulating ways. Most notably, Herbert F. Tucker's essay on "Epic"--a tour de force in scope, erudition, and compression--considers religious, working-class, Spasmodic, and "post-national" epics, finding Aurora Leigh to be paradigmatic of the Victorian national epic's "flight abroad" (p. 30). Richard Cronin's "The Spasmodics" underscores the connections between Spasmodic epics and their metaphors and Aurora Leigh in treating the "radical innovation" EBB effected by transforming "the Spasmodic hero into a woman" (p. 303). Observing that "E.B.B. was the most various and experimental of the major Victorian poets" in his essay on "Lyric" (p. 74), Matthew Rowlinson reads "The Cry of the Children" and "A Curse for a Nation" not primarily as political poems but as lyric "utterances mediated by print" (p. 77), embodying a paradoxical negotiation of speech and silence. Alison Chapman, in "Sonnet and Sonnet Sequences," considers how EBB "revives the Petrarchan sonnet to forge a complex new dynamics between active and passive, subject and object, speaker and addressee" (p. 108); Chapman also considers "The Soul's Expression" (pp. 101-102), a kind of signature sonnet for EBB that has been too long overlooked. In "Verse Novel," Dino Felluga draws on Bakhtinian theory in analyzing EBB's "self-conscious" use of this hybrid form in Aurora Leigh to critique the "domestic ideology" embedded in the bourgeois novel (pp. 174-175). Linda H. Peterson's essay on "Domestic and Idyllic" similarly notes EBB's tendency to eschew the domestic in favor of "heroic, philosophical and religious verse" (p. 47). Finally, among more extended treatments of EBB, Lorraine Janzen Kooistra suggestively approaches "A Romance of the Ganges" and "A Musical Instrument" from the perspective of the visual arts in "Poetry and Illustration."