Search results for ""author elizabeth barrett browning""

'How do I love thee? Let me count the ways'Elizabeth Barrett Browning was a poet of passion, wit and conscience. She was also a woman who wrote to speak the truth about everything she knew - and she knew just what it was like to be a thinking woman in a society that wanted women to be weak. The eldest of twelve children, she wrote poetry from the age of eleven, and became a highly successful poet in her lifetime - and remains very much loved today.She was also a strong advocate for human rights, campaigning to abolish slavery and child labour, and her three-part poem A Curse for a Nation is a powerful polemic against the slave trade.'I heard an angel speak last night, and he said "write! Write a nation's curse for me, and send it over the western sea" '

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The love affair between two of the Victorian era's most famous poets is one of passion, tragedy, illness, and ultimately, endurance. Collected here are their love letters, which capture their courtship, their blossoming love, and their forbidden marriage.This is the story of one of history’s great love affairs.The relationship between Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning began in his admiring her poetry. His audacious first letter moves from loving her books to loving her. She was alarmed by his "extravagance", and worried that he might substitute lioness-worship for real feeling. Much of her hesitation came from knowing that love can bring injury as well as boon. She had suffered such injury. The fullness of their love is revealed in these letters.

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The text is accompanied by both explanatory annotations and textual notes. "Backgrounds and Contexts" includes thirty letters or letter excerpts by Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning that trace Aurora Leigh’s inception, evolution, and publication. Seven contemporary documents—on the "woman question," prostitution, socialism, and poetic theory—place the text historically. "Criticism" collects twenty-five assessments of Aurora Leigh from the period 1899–1993. A wide range of opinion is provided by George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Ellen Moers, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Angela Leighton, Deirdre David, Dorothy Mermin, and Margaret Reynolds, among others. A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.

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Aurora Leigh is the foremost example of the mid-nineteenth-century poem of contemporary life. This verse-novel is a richly detailed representation of the early Victorian age. The social panorama extends from the slums of London, through the literary world, to the upper classes and a number of superb satiric portraits: an aunt with rigidly conventional notions of female education; Romney Leigh, the Christian socialist; Lord Howe, the amateur radical; Sir Blaise Delorme, the ostentatious Roman Catholic; and the unscrupulous society beauty Lady Waldemar. However, the dominant presence in the work is the narrator, Aurora Leigh herself. From early years in Italy and adolescence in the West Country to the vocational choices, creative struggles, and emotional entanglements of her first decade of adult life, Aurora Leigh develops her ideas on art, love, God, the Woman Question, and society. This is the first critically edited and fully annotated edition for almost a century. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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With an Introduction and Notes by Dr Sally Minogue Elizabeth Barrett Browning was such an acclaimed poet in her own lifetime that she was suggested as a candidate for the Poet Laureateship when Wordsworth died in 1850. Yet today we have only a limited knowledge of her considerable life’s work as a poet, in part because of a lack of representative but accessible editions of her work. Readers will find here not only her well-known sonnet sequence of love poems, Sonnets From the Portuguese, but also lesser known sonnets, some in praise of the cross-dressing bohemian writer George Sand, others to contemporary poets and artists. Her religious and spiritual poetry echoes that of the Metaphysical poets. A different voice emerges in her social and political protest poems, such as ‘The Cry of the Children’ and ‘The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point’. Her experimental ballads allowed her to develop a distinctive way of writing about women within an apparently conventional form. In the outstanding work of her maturity, Aurora Leigh, the woman’s voice takes centre stage. This ‘novel-poem’ is full of verve and interest, with a female poet-hero who casts a caustic eye on life and on her fellow men – and women. We all think we know the story of Elizabeth Barrett Browning – the mysterious illness which enclosed her in her room, her over-loving but imperious father, and her romantic, secret marriage to the poet Robert Browning and their life together in Italy. But this comprehensive selection of her poetry tells the real story of her sustained creative life as a poet, which began with her childhood poetic ambitions and ended only with her death. All the major aspects of her poetry are represented in this accessible edition which is well-annotated and contextualised, with a wide-ranging introduction which covers Barrett Browning’s poetic and intellectual life as well as her personal one. Recent critical re-readings, including major feminist reassessments, of her poetry are covered in the introduction, with helpful suggestions for further reading.

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Although Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Benjamin Robert Haydon never met, their lively and topical conversation, initiated in 1842, continued unabated until 1845, about a year before the painter’s suicide. It was a somewhat lopsided correspondence in which ninety-four letters written by Haydon, most of which have not been published before, received fewer replies from Miss Barrett, twenty-eight of which are included in this book. Judging from the contents of the letters, the epistolary friendship was truly meaningful to both. To Miss Barrett, Haydon was “my dear kind friend”; he was far more effusive, addressing her as “you Ingenious little darling invisible” and “my dearest dream & invisible intellectuality.”In spite of Haydon’s frequent pleas for a meeting, Miss Barrett never agreed to receive him. However, as the correspondence progressed, they exchanged more and more confidences and each recognized the other as a responsive and sympathetic listener. With complete candor Haydon admitted at one point that egotism was the basis of his pleasure in the correspondence; “I never ask what you are doing,” he wrote, “but take it for granted what I am doing must be delightful to you.”Evincing warmth and poignancy, the letters range over a variety of colorful subjects covering art, literature, current events, and gossip. The Elgin Marbles and Queen Victoria are discussed, and the correspondents air opposing views on mesmerism and Napoleon versus Wellington. After a thoughtful introduction which provides background information on Miss Barrett and Haydon, Willard Pope presents the letters—carefully annotated with identifying information on people, places, and current events—in chronological order.

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Most of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poetry has been unavailable to new readers, in spite of a growing appreciation of her innovativeness as a poet—and it spite of her onvious importance for any feminist reading of nineteenth-century English poetry. With the publication of this book, a major portion of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's wok returns to print.The poems selected here includ early verse published in 1826, when the poet was twenty, as well as the last poems she wrote before her death in 1861. Her religious verse appears alongside lively ballads, examples of her social-reforming and political verse, and generous selections of her love poetry, including the whole of the Sonnets from the Portuguese.The volume illustrates Elizabeth Barrett Browning's development as a poet and reveals her contribution to feminist literature. Innocent-seeming ballads, beloved in the Victorian period for their sweetness and condemned thereafter for their cloying sentimentality, here emerge as subversive articulations of the plight of women. "Few heard what Elizabeth Barrett Browning said [in her time]," Margaret Forster writes. "Today, with ears more finely attuned, we can hear her clearly."

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One of the leading poets of the nineteenth century, Elizabeth Barrett Browning had a profound influence on her contemporaries and on writers that followed her. This edition provides a rich and varied selection of Barrett Browning's poetry, including relatively neglected material from her early career and works never before included in editions of her poetry. The edition is comprehensively annotated and includes a critical introduction; detailed headnotes for each poem also provide the reader with a deep understanding of the historical, biographical, and literary contexts in which the poems were written.The extensive appendices include reviews and criticism and material on factory reform and slavery, as well as religion and the Italian Question.

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