Once again, publication of a new volume of The Brownings' Correspondence (Winfield, Kan.: Wedgestone, 2017) constituted a huge boon to EBB studies in the past year. Volume 25, edited by Philip Kelley, Edward Hagan, and Linda M. Lewis, covers the calendar year 1858, including the Brownings' two-month stay at Le Havre with RB's father and sister as well as EBB's siblings Arabella, George, and Henry (and Henry's wife), including a visit from Joseph Milsand. Brief stays in Paris bookended their time by the ocean, followed by their return to Florence and travel with American friends David and Sophia Eckley to Rome, where the Brownings took up residence for the winter.

Much of the year was dominated by illness, first a flu or "grippe" experienced by RB and their son, Pen, and then the recovery of EBB, who during consternation over her husband and son had ignored her own "lowering" state. She reported that her chest was not bad, but "the general vital powers have seemed hesitating" (p. 135). Chided by her physician that she may have sunk too low for full recovery, she dutifully followed his command to seek sea air. Enduring various contretemps over housing and rents and disappointment in other seaside towns that afforded too little privacy, the Brownings ended by spending most of their time at Le Havre, where they found comfortable accommodations for themselves and RB's relatives and access to the ocean (but no view) that permitted Pen and RB to swim. While EBB initially wrote upbeat descriptions of Le Havre and their activities, she eventually confided to Sophia Eckley that she hated the place, finding it ugly, smelly, and dull (p. 231). Although RB and others, including EBB herself, affirmed that her health improved greatly during their stay, she found life at the shore dreary: "I creep through smells &. shingles to the sea, & sit there" (p. 227). Both Brownings acknowledged they were unable to write with so many people about. As EBB described this time, "for the last three months I have done nothing, thought nothing, read nothing .. I have only heard talking" (p. 247). Paris, however, proved delightful, especially with Arabella's company for three weeks.

EBB was relieved that she was unable to travel to England this summer, and she in numerous letters expressed her love for Italy and longing to be there. Taxed by the strain and stress of seeing so many people at Le Havre, she longed for her quiet life in Italy, where she could "faint away into the Dim &. be quiet & silent, hiding [her] face in those dewy water-lilies of the Lethe river" (p. 220). Elsewhere, she characterized life in Italy more fulsomely, calling it "the paradise of the world" (p. 250) where she was "lifted up to the plane of ideal life" (p. 273). When Arabella called the Brownings "vagabonds" (p. 104), EBB expanded the concept to "vagabonds without a caravan" (p. 105), writing proudly, "I'm a vagabond--&. unEnglish" (p. 139), and "I think that moving from one country to another is excellent exercise for souls,--tending decidedly to their growth &. expansion" (p. 21). In the coming winter of 1839, they intended to travel to Egypt, a point reiterated frequently, but in the event they returned to Rome, perhaps because Rome seemed less expensive, perhaps because EBB's declining health made a trip to Egypt seem too taxing (p. 135). As EBB wryly wrote to Sarianna Browning, forecasting their failure to get to Egypt in either winter 1858 or 1859, "If I don't complain," RB "thinks me capable of riding a camel to Jerusalem through fifteen days journey of Desert--and if I do, he thinks it all over, & that there's not a chance of getting to Paris even by railroad" (p. 113).

EBB's attachment to Italy registers in her continuing absorption in the Italian war of independence. She closely followed events such as Orsini's failed attempt to assassinate Napoleon III, commented on the unscrupulousness of Mazzini ("He has lost us liberty"; p. 20), and deplored her English friend Jessie White Mario's subjection to Mazzini's influence. While describing herself as "a democrat to the roots of [her] nails hair," she nevertheless judged Napoleon III "the one noble man in Europe" because of his support of the Italian cause (p. 118). Her admiration of the French ruler colors her feelings for his nation. When she loses a purse in the Paris streets on her way to make some major purchases, the purse and money are eventually returned to her through an advertisement in the newspaper, "which would not have been done in any other metropolis in Europe. (See how the Imperial government raises the character of the nation!!!.)" (p. 282). Despite her passionate interest in the Italian Question, she reassures Sarianna, "a difference of politics would never make a difference of friendship with me," although "a difference in great moral questions" would (p. 136).

One benefit to us of the Brownings' time in Le Havre is their discovering the photographers there. EBB sat for her photograph for the first time, supplying an image engraved as the frontispiece to the fourth edition (1859) of Aurora Leigh. This endeavor, which RB organized from Italy through the help of William Michael Rossetti in London, connects to numerous references in the 1858 letters to photos, drawings, and paintings of EBB and RB, most of which prove disappointing to her.

Freedom from financial worries enhanced the Brownings' travels and daily life. Although RB still kept careful watch on their funds and asked their London publisher, Edward Chapman, to send late accounts and payments, EBB observed that the bequests from their dead friend John Kenyon enabled them to travel and live more comfortably: now, she wrote, "we have life-room" and can afford "pleasures embroideries of life" (pp. 164, 32). Beyond choosing greater comfort in travel, however, they did not really change their mode of living. EBB was both pleased and a little embarrassed when she wrote about Pen's birthday party, to which he had naively invited "aristocracy" and "democracy" (p. 67). No one but mama seemed concerned about his obliviousness to class distinctions.

On issues of religion, EBB explained why she could not settle on one church: though she believed some things espoused by many of them, she did not believe all the dogmas of any one and therefore remained eclectic. She declared that all churches need "a more vital hold of more scriptural dogmas" and "[m]ore light, light, light, everywhere" (p. 16). Her belief in spiritualism remained strong, for she regarded death as "a mere change of circumstances, a change of dress, a mere breaking of the outside shell and husk" (p. 203), although she increasingly spoke of individual mediums such as Daniel Dunglas Home as limited, flawed human beings. Comically, she made RB promise not to kick Home if he encountered him in a Florentine street, but by June she reported that the Brownings no longer argue about the spirits (p. 129).

EBB's letters evince interest in English literary gossip, commenting on the marital separations of the novelists Charles Dickens and Edward Bulwer Lytton. Although she acknowledged that she knew very little factual detail, she rued the Dickenses' separation for their children's sakes (pp. 164-165, 182) and sympathized with Dickens's wife over the removal of several of her children to live with their father. EBB writes admiringly of American artists whom the Brownings knew in Florence and Rome--Harriet Hosmer, Hiram Powers, and William Page--and comments humorously on Page's third wife, poking fun at her adoration of her husband as a wise man who will teach her everything (pp. 304, 312). EBB also writes wittily of her own adoration of her young son (age nine), reporting that he hopes English law will permit him to marry his mother when he is old enough (pp. 6-7) and that he has bragged to a young friend, "My mama is called Ba, because she's as good as a lamb" (p. 283).

Because so much of 1858 was consumed by visitors and travel, the Brownings write little about their poetry in these letters. Most interestingly, EBB comments that she is surprised that Aurora Leigh has been so closely "identified with 'the woman's question,'" which she claims "was only a collateral object with [her] intentions in writing" (p. 120). The year's letters quietly proclaim her increasing interest in women's issues, however. She admires Harriet Hosmer's independence, relating with relish Hatty's dispatching a man who frightens her in the street at ten p.m. by hitting him with her umbrella (p. 305). EBB recommends The English Woman's Journal, a new feminist periodical (the first in England) as a publishing outlet for Eliza Ogilvy (p. 35). Her burgeoning feminism is part of her increasing radicalism about social practices. Besides expressing her amusement at the young, third Mrs. Page's veneration of her husband, she criticizes conventional marriage arrangements by remarking that she subscribes to the wise "imprudent-marriage movement" that does not assign "a great weight to money" or security as the object of marriage (p. 15). She is especially iconoclastic in her critiques of English social life, politics, and patriarchy more generally. Critical of the "boy-brutality" encouraged by Anglo culture (p. 93), she criticizes the Cottrells' son, "encouraged by his father ... to be 'manly' Si 'English,'" "always talking at the top of his voice of knocking people down" (p. 94). EBB lacks enthusiasm for the shooting parties central to English society life ("but then I'm not 'English' ... &. am full of fancies"; p. 301), and she considers Robert Bulwer Lytton's ungraciousness to Isa Blagden "even below the par of the ordinary male creature" (p. 8). In the aftermath of the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857, she criticizes British policy in India, which she characterizes as "filling our pockets, and converting to Xtianity by the point of the bayonet" (p. 10).

Besides illuminating these topics with EBB's familiar candor and wit, this volume of The Brownings' Correspondence hints at her approaching death (just two and a half years away) in her waning energy. Her comment to Arabella on her health in April, before she recuperates strength at Le Havre, has a disconcerting prophetic resonance: "I have a horrible vibrating body--If I am uneasy in mind for half an hour, I am unwell,--& then, being unwell makes one uneasy again. It acts, & reacts" (p. 97). EBB is strikingly enthusiastic about RB's use of homeopathic medicines and muses that she would take them if her morphine were not an impediment. Although the sea air and other medical regimens temporarily improve her health, these letters never quite recapture the energy of earlier years.

The energy of the edition itself never flags, however. Under the leadership of Philip Kelley, editors continue to produce impeccably edited texts, invaluable explanatory and contextual notes, and important appendices. The first appendix of volume 25 provides an excellent lengthy biographical sketch of Harriet Hosmer, including delightful details from accounts of acquaintances such as Bessie Rayner Parkes. The narrative concisely recounts the now-familiar episode from 1854 when, in order to see the art holdings of a monastery that admitted no women, EBB, Hosmer, and Elizabeth Kinney disguised themselves as young male art students to accompany RB and Mr. McKinney there. Although EBB in men's clothing attracted attention by excitedly walking outside Casa Guidi, causing RB to cancel that outing, Hatty eventually got to see the artworks of the Certosa Monastery by wearing "a suit of Mr. Browning's clothes" (p. 335). The story of Hosmer and the Brownings does not end well. In the 1870s and 1880s, Hatty busied herself with blackening RB's reputation with regard to Hosmer's important patron Lady Ashburton, sharing with RB's American friends the William Wetmore Storys a letter from him that Hosmer expected would alienate them from RB.

This volume's second appendix includes as supporting documents letters between others that significantly mention the Brownings, offering especially interesting firsthand observations from people who met and knew them. Letters and diary entries by Sophia and Nathaniel Hawthorne, both of whom emphasize EBB's ethereality, are especially notable (esp. pp. 350-352). Others provide illuminating insights into the Brownings' behavior and relationship. A letter from Florence Hill to Octavia Hill, for example, describes an evening's discussion of the Married Women's Property Act, with EBB and Anna Jameson trying to persuade RB to sign the petition supporting it. Hill praises RB's "liberal ideas" on the topic and reports that he agreed to sign, concluding, "I think he does everything that his wife wishes" (p. 342). Another young woman, Ada Shepard, writing to her fiance, observed RB's attention to EBB as they hosted guests, remarking his "pride and love" "mingled" with "an expression of anxiety ... lest she should fatigue herself too much." Shepard coveted "that look of tender concern" that her own good health made unlikely she would ever see (p. 354).

Appendix 3 adds to the contemporary reviews of Aurora Leigh collected in volumes 23-24, including lengthy reviews from France, Italy, Australia, and the United States. The fourth appendix prints RB's account book for the first half of 1858, meticulously recording household and personal expenditures. Although he kept such records throughout their fifteen years in Italy, this is the only account book known to have survived. Aside from its biographical interest regarding the Brownings, this accounting illuminates the cost of living for expatriates in Italy at midcentury. As we have come to expect with this series, everything one could want is here. Volume 25 of The Brownings Correspondence attains the very highest standards of scholarship and is indispensable to students and critics of the Brownings.

Yopie Prins's Ladies' Greek: Victorian Translations of Tragedy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 2017) ranges over women's study of and writing in Greek in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in America as well as Britain. Prins demonstrates that contrary to widespread assumptions, many women in the nineteenth century studied Greek and translated it--sometimes in personal texts never intended for publication. This largely uninvestigated body of materials, including data on the performance of Greek tragedies at American women's colleges, revises our sense of Victorian women's learning and interests. The book specifically commands interest in this survey of the year's work on EBB because it pays substantial attention to her classical study and accomplishments. The book's introduction begins with EBB's "First Greek Ode," an ode to summer composed when she was thirteen in 1819, and Prins's close reading suggests EBB's innovative impulses in her formation of Greek words and the freshness of her poem. Attending to autobiographical materials including EBB's "Glimpses into My Own Life and Literary Character" (1819) and her Diary (from 1831-1832), as well as to EBB's use of classical motifs in Aurora Leigh and her translations of Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound (1831-1832), Prins gracefully moves between exemplary close readings and powerful overarching assessments of EBB's oeuvre. In the process, she illuminates a wide range of specific texts and EBB's poetic craft more generally, the poet's translation theory as well as her poetic methods, the nature and significance of specific biographical experiences (such as her relationships with her father and with H. S. Boyd and the effects of her physical suffering). Although EBB is just one of many women examined in this groundbreaking study of "ladies' Greek" in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the book will handsomely repay close attention from EBB scholars. Analyzing the 1833 translation of Prometheus Bound, for example, Prins advances technical study of EBB's poetics by keenly observing EBB's formal methods of conveying Io's tortured experience through "punctuation, repetition, exclamation, and interruption" along with the "contorted syntax" of Io's speech. At the same time, Prins observes EBB's audacity in departing from the classical edition preferred by her classical mentor, Boyd, to give her "own, more forceful reading of Io," heightening the "female pathos" of this victim of male oppression--a point important to ponder given that EBB would in 1845 retranslate Prometheus Bound because she judged her first translation to be too servile, too "literal," in adhering to Aeschylus's text. Prins's study rightly places EBB at the beginning of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women's participation in the tradition of classical tragedies, enriching our appreciation of EBB's contributions to and innovations on male tradition while underscoring her poetic achievements.

Anna Williams in '"The Dramatic Poet and the Unpoetic Multitudes': Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Allegorized Theatrical Commentary in Book IV of Aurora Leigh," VP 55, no. 3 (2017): 309-329, begins with EBB's expressed hostility to mid-nineteenth-century theater (expressed concisely in an 1842 letter to Mary Russell Mitford). Williams examines book 4 of Aurora Leigh in light of EBB's view that "the unpoetic multitude" "desecrates" high poetry when it is "translated" to the stage as performed drama, as evident in EBB's staging of the aborted wedding of Romney Leigh and Marian Erie in book 4- Williams's expertise in Victorian theater history gives authority to her analysis of EBB's separation of audience populations on the basis of wealth in the church of St. James's, which Williams likens to nineteenth-century playhouses. She argues most persuasively when she attributes the hostile eruption of the folks from St. Giles, when they learn that the bride Marian will not appear, to the formulaic plots of melodramas with which these laborers would have been familiar, plays in which the innocent heroine is often murdered by the wealthy villain who seduces her. Williams's discussion of a domestic melodrama that may have influenced Marian Erie's name (Michael Erie, the Maniac Lover, by Thomas Egerton Wilks, produced in 1839) is particularly tantalizing, but she leaves un-addressed the question of how EBB might have known of the play. Williams makes illuminating observations about Lord Howe's errors of fact and interpretation in alluding to Hamlet and King Lear, and she interestingly analyzes EBB's references to Greek drama throughout book 4- While the essay does not lead readers to very novel understandings of the poem's story and characters, it does suggest a great deal about EBB's nuanced views of genre and expands the list of subjects treated by her social satire.

Barbara Neri further associates EBB with drama, but in this instance by connecting her work with the twentieth-century playwright Tennessee Williams in her essay "Loving Thee Better after Death: Williams's Allusion to Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Her Sonnets from the Portuguese in A Streetcar Named Desire," Tennessee Williams Annual Review 17 (2018): 67-92. Deriving from two allusions to Sonnets from the Portuguese # XLIII in Streetcar, Neri's extensive research contributes to studies of Williams's early career, his reading, his interest in EBB, his reactions to Katharine Cornell portraying EBB in the fabulously successful play The Barretts of Wimpole Street, and marketing strategies for his play. Neri's contributions to EBB-influence studies are equally original and notable. Early in the essay, Neri reproduces a sonnet by Tennessee Williams that may be seen as a lightly comical tribute poem to EBB, and Neri has much to say about tensions within the Williams family that resonate in his Streetcar and express his affinities for EBB's own experience. Neri also illuminates EBB's relationship to Petrarch, Dante, and Camoens with regard to their female muses. This rich, complex, interesting essay thus looks backward at influences on EBB and forward to her influence on a major twentieth-century American dramatist.

A 2017 special issue of the Emily Dickinson Journal (vol. 26, no. 2) that focuses on literary celebrity includes two essays examining the American poet's uses of EBB in her own works invoking literary celebrity. Elizabeth Petrino's '"I went to thank Her--': Dickinson's Tributes to Literary Celebrities" (pp. 6-24), examining Dickinson's epistolary references and her three tribute poems to EBB, as well as her letters about George Eliot, clarifies Dickinson's complicated participation in the celebration of these British poets whom she admired. Dickinson's notices of EBB recognize that the construction of the Victorian poet's life and posthumous fame effectively overwhelmed her poetry. Similarly, Dickinson's letters about George Eliot show the American poet to be a literary fan whose veneration problematizes Eliot's relationship to her readers. In sum, Dickinson's writings indicate that her own reverence for her predecessors, much like the numerous memorializations flooding periodicals after their deaths--including the visual culture of photographs and cartes-de-visite--threatened to overwhelm attention to the very poetry that made Dickinson love them. Whereas biographical accounts and images created the illusion that readers and fans had an intimate personal relationship with the dead poet, Dickinson's poetry indicates that the poetry itself forged that relationship. In the same special issue, Paraic Finnerty's '"If fame belonged to me, I could not escape her': Dickinson and the Poetics of Celebrity" (pp. 25-48) further explores the impact of celebrity culture on her poetry. While the essay mentions EBB, it does not delve into Dickinson's poems or attitudes focused on her. Even so, critics exploring Dickinson's engagement with EBB may find Finnerty's essay useful.

Harriet Kramer Linkin briefly invokes EBB in her pedagogical essay about teaching a series of linked memorial verses extending from Mary Tighe to Felicia Hemans, Letitia Landon, Maria Jane Jewsbury, EBB, and Christina Rossetti. In "Landon the Equivocal Canonizer: Constructing an Elegiac Chain of Women Poets in the Classroom," Pedagogy 18, no. 2 (2018): 235-245, Linkin describes how these elegiac verses challenge students to discern networking references in Romantic women poets. While most of the discussion concentrates on Landon, Hemans, and Tighe, Linkin suggests how a teacher might profitably go on to consider works by EBB and Rossetti. Whereas the pedagogical exercise described might lead students to discern similarities and connections among the poetesses, what I would call EBB's uncomfortable fit in the sequence might prompt them to think about how EBB resists being a "poetess."

In apology for my belated notice of recent work on EBB published electronically on the BRANCH website, edited by Dino Felluga, I here recommend two extensive and wonderfully detailed essays on the reception history of EBB's work. Denae Dyck and Marjorie Stone, in "The 'Sensation' of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Poems before Congress (1860): Events, Politics, Reception," BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History, (1) ed. Dino Felluga (www.branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=denae-dyck-and-marjorie-stone -the-sensation-of-ehzabeth-barrett-brownings-poems-before-congress-1860 -events-politics-reception), execute a mammoth undertaking, fully analyzing the reviews of the last collection published in EBB's lifetime to distinguish its reception in diverse locations, chronological moments, and political contexts. Dyck and Stone masterfully build a nuanced overview, meticulously consolidating a persuasive rebuttal to the misleading but pervasive sense that the collection "was almost universally denounced." Dyck and Stone illuminate the reception not only of the collection as a whole but of important single works such as "A Curse for a Nation," "Napoleon III in Italy," "The Dance," and "A Court Lady." Their research provides a concise but finely detailed history of the late course of the Risorgimento, illuminates EBB's politics and aesthetics, clarifies the politics and aesthetic principles of various literary journals in the late 1850s, and illuminates relations between British and American publishing institutions and readerships at the time. This is the resource to consult on all these topics.

In an earlier BRANCH publication (posted in late 2015), Marjorie Stone provided a similarly detailed study of the reception history of EBB's Aurora Leigh. In "The Advent' of Aurora Leigh: Critical Myths and Periodical Debates," BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History, ed. Dino Felluga (www.branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=marjorie-stone-the -advent-of-aurora-leigh-critical-myths-and-periodical-debates), Stone refutes the widespread assumption that the contemporary reviews of EBB's major work were mostly negative. She carefully traces the diverse responses to the capacious poem, which engaged with "debates over poetry and poetics, the nature of the realist novel, class divisions and social reform, women's rights, religion, and the politics of nations." Given its innovative hybrid genre and its modern, controversial subject matter, the poem in fact elicited competing assessments that reflect differing patterns in Britain, America, and Europe. Before attending to the body of nineteenth-century reviews, many of them previously neglected, Stone provides a rich context for the poem, especially in discussing EBB's international fame at the time of its publication and the contemporaneity of the poem's controversial content, especially its engagement with many facets of "the Woman Question." Far more than a survey of reception history, this piece is indispensable for its detailed analysis of reactions to Aurora Leigh's politics, religion, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, and aesthetic controversies.

From the newest volume of The Brownings' Correspondence to Stone's and Dyck's exemplary studies on reception history, EBB--and today's scholars--have been exceedingly well served in the materials surveyed here.

(1). BRANCH is an extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net (accessed 19 August 2018).