Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Last year in her review essay for this journal Dorothy Mermin welcomed the growing tendency to approach EBB from a range of different angles. While the focus on gender issues in her works is "perhaps unavoidable" and "certainly not undesirable," Mermin observed, "still, it would be nice to see critics thinking more of her more often as she would herself have liked, in a category other than that of a 'woman poet'" (p. 412). The material under review this year continues to expand the contexts within which EBB's works are approached. Class issues, poetic technique, religion, literary genealogies, and the politics of nation feature prominently in recent scholarship, although in many instances consideration of these subjects proves to be imbricated, as in the past, with the analysis of gender. There are promising new lines of investigation here, but also some instances where the work done might have been extended or deepened by building more fully on existing scholarship. For this reason, as well as others prompted by the material under review, this survey begins on a retrospective note.

Among the scholarship one would like to see fuller use of is Mermin's own book, Elizabeth Barrett Browning: The Origins of a New Poetry (1989). More than a decade after its publication, this remains the most comprehensive and indispensable study on EBB. Combining detailed textual analysis with literary biography, it is also the book that most fully integrates EBB's writing within the larger field of nineteenth-century literature through its interwoven references to Wordsworth, Robert Browning, Tennyson, Arnold, the Rossettis, and many other authors. Although she emphasizes EBB's position at the "wellhead of a new female tradition," Mermin simultaneously considers her works in the context of important themes and traditions in Victorian literature--the response to Romanticism, religious doubt, experiments with form and genre, innovations in amatory verse, and political debates, to name only a few. Thus, even though her own work has itself helped to shape the tendency to approach EBB as a "woman poet," it provides ample and suggestive grounds for investigating the poet's large and variegated body of writings from other angles.

Sandra Donaldson's edition of Critical Essays on Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1999) offers similar grounds for new perspectives in future scholarship, while also encouraging a retrospective analysis of EBB's place in literary and cultural history as we enter a new century and millennium. Handsomely produced by G. K. Hall in the same series that includes Mary Ellis Gibson's Critical Essays on Robert Browning, this anthology brings together twenty-two essays published between 1962 and 1997. The materials gathered here reflect the expertise in EBB's reception history that Donaldson earlier demonstrated in her 1993 compilation, Elizabeth Barrett Browning: An Annotated Bibliography of the Commentary and Criticism, 1826-1990, also from G. K. Hall. The contents are judiciously chosen and organized, on the whole. Donaldson manages both to map the changing reception of EBB as the academy and the canon were altered by the twentieth-century women's movement, and to bring together essays treating a range of her works from a variety of critical perspectives.

Donaldson's anthology indicates one reason why gender has tended to be so "unavoidable" a subject in EBB's case. As she points out in her introductory essay, this issue more than any other contributes to the dramatic extremes evident in the reception history of the poet's works. Donaldson also reminds us that contributions to studies of EBB and especially Aurora Leigh during the 1970s and 80s came from several prominent critics instrumental in shaping feminist literary criticism from a "wider theoretical perspective": among them, Ellen Moers, Cora Kaplan, Sandra Gilbert, Michèle Barrett, Rachael Blau DuPlessis, and Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi (p. 8). Understandably, essays on Aurora Leigh outnumber those on other works in this collection. Donaldson includes Kaplan's groundbreaking "Introduction" to her 1978 Women's Press edition of EBB's novel-epic, together with the section on Aurora...