Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-61) was the first major woman poet in the English literary tradition. Her significance has been obscured in this century by her erasure from most literary histories and her exclusion from academic anthologies. Dorothy Mermin's critical and biographical study argues for Barrett Browning's originative role in both the Victorian poetic tradition and the development of women's literature.

Barrett Browning's place at the wellhead of a new female tradition remains the single most important fact about her in terms of literary history, and it was central to her self-consciousness as a poet. Mermin's study shows that Barrett Browning's anomalous situation was constantly present to her imagination and that questions of gender shaped almost everything she wrote. Mermin argues that Barrett Browning's poetry covertly inspects and dismantles the barriers set in her path by gender and that in her major works—Sonnets from the Portuguese, Aurora Leigh, her best political poems, "A Musical Instrument"—difficulty is turned into triumph, incorporating the author's femininity, her situation as a woman poet, and her increasingly substantial fame.

Mermin skillfully interweaves biography and close readings of the poems to show precisely how Barrett Browning's life as a woman writer is a part of the essential meaning of her art. Both her personal and her literary achievements are exceptionally well documented, especially for her formative years. Mermin makes extensive use of the poet's early essays, a diary covering most of her twenty-sixth year, and the enormous number of letters that have survived. Ranging from her earliest ambitions through her long periods of discouragement and illness to her happy married life with Robert Browning, this comprehensive study of Elizabeth Barrett Browning is essential reading for students of the Victorian period, English literature, and women's studies.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning believed that "Christ's religion is essentially poetry—poetry glorified." In Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Spiritual Progress, Linda M. Lewis studies Browning's religion as poetry, her poetry as religion. The book interprets Browning's literary life as an arduous spiritual quest—the successive stages being a rejection of Promethean pride for Christ-like humility, affirmation of the gospels of suffering and of work, internalization of the doctrine of Apocalypse, and ascent to divine love and truth.

Lewis follows this religious crusade from the poet's childhood to her posthumous Last Poems--including such topics as her Bible reading, her introduction to the Greek church fathers and the English Protestant reformers, the theological debates in which she participated, her quarrel with the theology of Paradise Lost, and her scandalous involvement in mesmerism and Swedenborgianism. Using insights from contemporary feminist thought, Lewis argues that Browning's religious assumptions and insights range from the conventional to the iconoclastic and that women's spirituality is, for Browning as well as for other Victorian women writers, separate from orthodox patriarchy. Lewis demonstrates that Browning's political and social ideology--often labeled inconsistent and illogical—really makes sense in light of this spiritual quest, which leads her to confront her God "face to face."

Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Spiritual Progress examines not only Browning's most admired works, such as Sonnets from the Portuguese and Aurora Leigh, but also her large body of political works and her important early poems—The Seraphim and A Drama of Exile. This intertextual book compares Browning's ideology to that of feminists such as Margaret Fuller, Harriet Martineau, and Florence Nightingale; influential conservatives such as Thomas Carlyle; and those most esteemed of Victorian poets, Alfred Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning.

Concluding with an examination of religion as a central focus of Victorian women poets, Lewis clarifies the ways in which Browning differs from Christina Rossetti, Felicia Hemans, Dora Greenwell, Jean Ingelow, and Mary Howitt. Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Spiritual Progress maintains that Browning's peculiar face-to-face struggle with the patristic and poetic tradition—as well as with God—sets her work apart.  

In Little Songs: Women, Silence, and the Nineteenth-Century Sonnet, Amy Christine Billone analyzes the bond between lyric poetry and silence in women’s sonnets ranging from the late eighteenth-century works of Charlotte Smith, Helen Maria Williams, and Anna Maria Smallpiece to Victorian texts by Elizabeth Barrett, Christina Rossetti, Isabella Southern, and other, lesser-known female poets. Although scholars acknowledge that women initiated the sonnet revival in England, Little Songs is the only major study of nineteenth-century female sonneteers.

 

Billone argues not that women’s sonnets overcame silence in favor of lyrical speech during the nineteenth-century sonnet revival, but rather that women simultaneously posited both muteness and volubility through style and theme. In opposition to criticism that stresses a modern shift from compensatory to non-consolatory poems of mourning, Billone demonstrates how women invented contemporary elegiac poetics a century in advance.

 

Adding to critical interest in the alliance between silence and literature, this book offers a complex study of the overwhelming impact that silence makes, not only on British women’s poetry, but also on the development of modern poetry and intellectual inquiry. Ultimately, Little Songs illustrates how the turn away from the kind of silence that preoccupied nineteenth-century women poets introduced the start of twentieth-century thought.

Explores liturgical practice as formative for how three Victorian women poets imagined the world and their place in it and, consequently, for how they developed their creative and critical religious poetics.

This new study rethinks several assumptions in the field: that Victorian women’s faith commitments tended to limit creativity; that the contours of church experiences matter little for understanding religious poetry; and that gender is more significant than liturgy in shaping women’s religious poetry.

Exploring the import of bodily experience for spiritual, emotional, and cognitive forms of knowing, Karen Dieleman explains and clarifies the deep orientations of different strands of nineteenth-century Christianity, such as Congregationalism’s high regard for verbal proclamation, Anglicanism’s and Anglo-Catholicism’s valuation of manifestation, and revivalist Roman Catholicism’s recuperation of an affective aesthetic. Looking specifically at Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and Adelaide Procter as astute participants in their chosen strands of Christianity, Dieleman reveals the subtle textures of these women’s religious poetry: the different voices, genres, and aesthetics they create in response to their worship experiences. Part recuperation, part reinterpretation, Dieleman’s readings highlight each poet’s innovative religious poetics.

Dieleman devotes two chapters to each of the three poets: the first chapter in each pair delineates the poet’s denominational practices and commitments; the second reads the corresponding poetry. Religious Imaginaries has appeal for scholars of Victorian literary criticism and scholars of Victorian religion, supporting its theoretical paradigm by digging deeply into primary sources associated with the actual churches in which the poets worshipped, detailing not only the liturgical practices but also the architectural environments that influenced the worshipper’s formation. By going far beyond descriptions of various doctrinal positions, this research significantly deepens our critical understanding of Victorian Christianity and the culture it influenced.

If Victorian women writers yearned for authorial forebears, or, in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s words, for “grandmothers,” there were, Gail Turley Houston argues, grandmothers who in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries envisioned powerful female divinities that would reconfigure society. Like many Victorian women writers, they experienced a sense of what Barrett Browning termed “mother-want” inextricably connected to “mother-god-want.” These millenarian and socialist feminist grandmothers believed the time had come for women to initiate the earthly paradise that patriarchal institutions had failed to establish.

 

Recuperating a symbolic divine in the form of the Great Mother—a pagan Virgin Mary, a female messiah, and a titanic Eve—Joanna Southcott, Eliza Sharples, Frances Wright, and others set the stage for Victorian women writers to envision and impart emanations of puissant Christian and pagan goddesses, enabling them to acquire the authorial legitimacy patriarchal culture denied them. Though the Victorian authors studied by Houston—Barrett Browning, Charlotte Brontë, Florence Nightingale, Anna Jameson, and George Eliot—often masked progressive rhetoric, even in some cases seeming to reject these foremothers, their radical genealogy reappeared in mystic, metaphysical revisions of divinity that insisted that deity be understood, at least in part, as substantively female.