Rebecca Stott - Elizabeth Barrett Browning

General EditorAndrew Sanders, Professor of English, University of Durham

Studies in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Literature is an exciting series of lively, original and authoritative critical studies aimed at the student and general reader. Each hook takes as its subject an author, genre or a single text. Some titles guide students through the perplexing cross-current of critical debate by offering fresh and forthright reappraisals of their subject. Others offer new and timely studies which are of importance and value to the student. The series avoids critical identity or tight ideological approach, allowing the authors to explore the subject in their own way, taking account of recent changes in critical perspective.

Published titles

• Forms of Speech in Victorian FictionRaymond Chapman
• Henry Fielding: Authorship and AuthorityIan A. Bell
• Utopian Imagination and Eighteenth-Century FictionChristine Rees
• Robert BrowningJohn Woolford and Daniel Karlin
• Wilde Style: The Plays and Prose of Oscar WildeNeil Sammells

Simon Avery and Rebecca Stott

First published 2003 by Pearson Education Limited

Published 2014 by Routledge

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ISBN 13: 978-0-582-40470-0 (pbk)

DOI: 10.4324/9781315838496

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Any writer on Elizabeth Barrett Browning has to decide what name to use when referring to her. Christened Elizabeth Barrett Moulton-Barrett, the full name she never used in print, she published her first works under the initials E.B.B., expanded this to Elizabeth B. Barrett with the publication of The Seraphim, and Other Poems in 1838, and then, following her marriage to Robert in 1846, signed herself Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Some studies of the poet have chosen to refer to her as Elizabeth Barrett Browning regardless of whether or not she was married at the time, while at least one has referred to her predominantly as Mrs Browning throughout (). In this study, however, we have chosen to use Barrett when discussing her pre-1846 works and Barrett Browning when discussing her post-1846 works. Sometimes this leads to a slippage between the two names in a single chapter, as in the chapter on the 1840s when Elizabeth Barrett publishes Poems in 1844 and Elizabeth Barrett Browning publishes the expanded Poems of 1850, or in the wider-ranging chapters on the development of her poetics or her use of different genres. Nevertheless, we feel this is necessary in order to keep consistency. As Dorothy Mermin has argued, this is a poet who clearly recognises the importance of names and naming in her poetry and the imposed or self-elected identities which this signifies (Mermin, 1989: 378). It seems only right, therefore, to be exact when referring to the poet herself.

At the time of writing there is no complete edition of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's works in print except the Wordsworth Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, edited by Karen Hill, which has no notes or scholarly apparatus and places the poems published in The Seraphim, and Other Poems (1838), Poems (1844) and Poems (1850) together so that it is difficult to trace the correct order of publication. Aurora Leigh is available in complete version in Cora Kaplan's 1978 Women's Press edition or, more recently and with extensive notes, annotations and background documents, in Margaret Reynolds edition published by Norton. A number of selected editions of Barrett Browning's works edited by Malcolm ).

Throughout this study we have used as our base texts Reynolds edition of Aurora Leigh and the comprehensive, although now out of print, Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, edited by Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke (New York: Thomas Y. Cromwell, 1900, reprinted 1973). We have therefore followed the punctuation and layout of individual poems as they are established in these editions. However, for each quotation we have given line numbers so that the extracts can be easily traced in other editions.

Writers on Elizabeth Barrett Browning are extremely fortunate in having a huge number of letters to work from which are both insightful in themselves and important as contextual material for the study of the poetry. As Henry Chorley wrote of them in the nineteenth century:

Her letters ought to be published. In power, in versatility, liveliness and finesse; in perfect originality of glance, and vigour of grasp at every topic of the hour; in their enthusiastic preferences, prejudices and inconsistencies, I have never met with any, written by man or woman, more brilliant, spontaneous and characteristic.

(Quoted in : 205)

This mammoth publication project is currently being undertaken by Wedgestone Press under the editorship of Philip Kelley, Ronald Hudson and Scott Lewis. To date, fourteen volumes of The Brownings Correspondence (covering both Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning's correspondence) have been published, totalling 2,716 separate letters and this is only up until December 1847. Like all Barrett Browning scholars, we are greatly indebted to this ongoing work and have taken most of the quotations from Barrett's letters during this period from this edition. Citations within the text (e.g. BC