Poetry, Network, Nation: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Expatriate Women’s Poetry

This article examines the concept of “network” in relation to Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Florentine circle of pro-Risorgimento women poets. Concentrating on Aurora Leigh’s relation to Theodosia Garrow Trollope’s Tuscan newspaper poetry, the essay argues that expatriate women poets represent an alternative history of Victorian poetry based on networks of print and sociability, and that their poetry forges a new model of public poetic agency as that network’s cultural effect.