Elizabeth Barrett Browning PDF
Preview Elizabeth Barrett Browning
EUZABETH BARRETI BROWNING Women Writers General Editors: Eva Figes and Adele King Published titles Jane Austen, Meenakshi Mukherjee Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Marjorie Stone Colette, Diana Holmes Ivy Compton-Burnett, Kathy Justice Gentile Emily Dickinson, joan Kirkby George Eliot, Kristin Brady Elizabeth Gaskell,Jane Spencer Doris Lessing, Margaret Moan Rowe Gertrude Stein, jane Palatini Bowers Edith Wharton, Katherine Joslin Virginia Woolf, Clare Hanson Women Writers Elizabeth Barrett Browning Marjorie Stone Macmillan Education ISBN 978-0-333-48859-1 ISBN 978-1-349-23803-3 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-23803-3 © Ma1jorie Stone 1995 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1995 978-0-333-48858-4 All rights reserved. For information, write: Scholarly and Reference Division, St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 First published in the United States of America in 1995 ISBN 978-0-312-12210-2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Stone, Ma1jorie, 1951- Elizabeth Barrett Browning I Ma1jorie Stone. p. em.-(Women writers) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-312-12210-2 I. Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 1806--1861-Criticism and interpretation. 2. Women and literature-England-Hist01)'-19th centUI)'. I. Title. II. Series. PR4194.S76 1995 821' .8--dc20 94-14198 CIP For my parents Sheila and Bill Parfitt and my story-telling grandmothers Contents Acknowledgements Vlll Editors' Preface Xl 2 Fighting on Her Stumps: The Woman, the Poet, the Myths 2 2 The Scene of Instruction: Romantic Revisionism 49 3 A Cinderella Among the Muses: Barrett Browning and the Ballad Tradition 94 4 Juno's Cream: Aurora Leigh and Victorian Sage Discourse 134 5 A Handmaid's Tale: The Critical Heritage 189 Note on Texts 229 Notes 230 Selected Bibliography 238 Index 244 Vll Acknowledgements I am grateful to the following libraries for permission to refer to and quote from Barrett Browning's manu scripts: the Armstrong Browning Library, Baylor University, Waco, Texas; the British Library; the English Poetry Collection, Wellesley College Library; the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations; the James Marshall and Marie Louise Osborn Collection, Yale University Library; and the Pierpont Morgan Library. I would like to thank the librarians in these libraries for their assistance. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Betty Coley of the Armstrong Browning Library and Scott Lewis of The Brownings' Correspondence for sharing their expertise regarding the Brownings, as well as to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for a grant supporting my research on Barrett Browning's manuscripts. A longer version of Chapter 3 appeared in Victorian Literature and Culture, 21 (1993). I would like to thank the editors for permission to reprint it. My editor, Adele King, and my colleagues at Dalhousie and elsewhere gave me many helpful suggestions. I would particularly like to thank Malcolm Ross, who read all of the manuscript, for his astute comments on structure; Cory Davies and Mary Arseneau for stimulating conversations and for read ing several chapters with a rigorous editorial eye; and my colleague and husband, Andy Wainwright, for helping me find a point of entry into the myths Vlll ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS surrounding Barrett Browning (and out of them again). Mervyn Nicholson and Ronald Tetreault helped me to see some of the many weaknesses in an early version of the chapter on 'Romantic Revisionism'. Patricia Monk generously shared her computer expertise and Julia Swan meticulously proof-read the manuscript. Most of all, I am indebted to Andy and our children for enduring life with someone possessed by 'EBB'. lX Editors' Preface The study of women's writing has been long neglected by a male critical establishment both in academic circles and beyond. As a result, many women writers have either been unfairly neglected or have been marginalised in some way, so that their true influence and importance has been ignored. Other women writers have been accepted by male critics and academics, but on terms which seem, to many women readers of this generation, to be false or simplistic. In the past the internal conflicts involved in being a woman in a male-dominated society have been largely ignored by readers of both sexes, and this has affected our reading of women's work. The time has come for a serious reassessment of women's writing in the light of what we understand today. This series is designed to help in that reassessment. All the books are written by women because we believe that men's understanding of feminist critique is only, at best, partial. And besides, men have held the floor quite long enough. EvA FIGES ADELE KING Xl
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