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  • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
  • Marjorie Stone (bio)

"After all it must be Rome, by the sunshine—and life is not more gloomy & uncertain than a thousand years ago. What a compliment by the way, to our wonderful nineteenth century, which pants & reels under the great lights of the Future, recoiling sometimes from them because they are strange & new!" This year brings Volume 20 of The Brownings' Correspondence opening with the Brownings in Rome, prompting EBB's reflections on present, past, and "Future" (p. 14). A new monograph on EBB and Shakespeare by Josie Billington reflects the continuing interest in matters of poetic form evident in several publications. Religion and cosmopolitan networks are also prominent themes, as in books by Karen Dielman and Christopher M. Keirstead that deal substantially with EBB on these respective subjects. Other topics include maternity and mother-want, infanticide, representations of time, and sewing as material culture and figurative thread (all in Aurora Leigh with "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point" as well in the case of infanticide), and EBB in relation to portraiture, Carlyle, Trollope, Flush, Romantic Hellenism, and blindness. Much of this scholarship, treating diverse poems throughout the poet's career as well as her essay on "Greek Christian Poets," enhances understanding of the "new EBB," as Alison Chapman describes her in reviewing the 2010 Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (hereafter WEBB): a writer "embedded within her complex intellectual, literary, and cultural networks: provocative, politicized, experimental, and modern" (see the 2011 "Year's Work"). A fictional work on the Brownings suggests, however, that older versions of EBB in which mythic biography trumps the "new EBB" remain very much alive.

The Brownings' Correspondence, Volume 20 and Contexts for Aurora Leigh

Covering the period from November 1853 to November 1854, Volume 20 of the Correspondence (Wedgestone Press, 2013), edited by Philip Kelley and co-editors (Scott Lewis, Edward Hagan, Joseph Phelan, and Rhian Williams), resembles Volume 19 in so far as letters make little explicit reference to Aurora Leigh, even though EBB described herself as "hard at work," "very much engaged just now in a poem of considerable length" (pp. 65, 286). Nevertheless, references to subjects and contexts relevant to Aurora Leigh pervade these letters, which, as usual, include many either published for the first time, or formerly available only in part or in assorted periodicals. Several letters suggest how her experience of Rome—"a palimpsest Rome—a watering place written over [End Page 343] the antique" (p. 214)—contributed to the "double vision" of past and present, and the commitment to the contemporary central to Aurora Leigh. In a letter to Eliza Ogilvy, for instance, EBB comments that she would never "under any circumstances" have "thrown [herself] back into the past in Rome" as she might have done when "very much younger" because her "[c]hariot wheels" had "caught fire with running fast on the modern roads!" (p. 114).

Other letters suggest how much her participation in networks of female artists in Rome, continuing after the Brownings' return to Florence at the end of May, 1854, contributed to her representation of a professional woman writer. The network included the "house of . . . emancipated women" inhabited by the sculptor Harriet Hosmer, "very clever & very strange," and her partner "Miss Hayes, the translator of George Sand, who 'dresses like a man down to the waist'" (p. 42). It also included the Kemble sisters, Adelaide (Mrs. Sartoris) and Fanny, celebrated for their stage accomplishments: Fanny having "come back to her old name" after her unhappy marriage to an American slave-holder (p. 146). "We see a good deal of the Kembles here," EBB told Mary Mitford of her life in Rome, describing Fanny as "looking magnificent still" (p. 142). A particularly interesting newly published letter to Anna Jameson describes "Mrs. Sartoris" in terms that speak to conflicts between "woman" and "artist" that EBB explores in Aurora, as she describes Adelaide revealing her "yearnings towards her great lost public career" after marriage, when "the artist . . . revived in the woman" and she began to feel "like a healthy person whose feet & hands are tied" (p. 327). Accounts of another "intolerable" type of "English provincial pattern" society in Rome with a "decency and...

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