ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING AS A POET - A Newsletter Guide
According to the Poetry Foundation: “Among all women poets of the English‑speaking world in the nineteenth century, none was held in higher critical esteem or was more admired for the independence and courage of her views than Elizabeth Barrett Browning.”
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HER POETIC OUTPUT AND STYLE – INNOVATION, SONNETS & AURORA LEIGH
Elizabeth wrote forty‑four sonnets so secretly that her husband only learned of them three years after marriage (1849). Impressed by their beauty and technique, he insisted on their inclusion in the 1850 edition of Poems. To disguise personal references, they chose the ambiguous title Sonnets from the Portuguese. The sonnets gradually gained critical acclaim, making her famous.
Other Major Achievements: Her retranslation of Prometheus Bound was considered original, lively, and unconcerned with formal rules. She described Aurora Leigh (1857) as the romance she had “hankering after so long, written in blank verse, in the autobiographical form.” Dedicated to John Kenyon, she called it “the most mature of my works, and the one into which my highest convictions upon Life and Art have entered.” Feminist critics have lavished attention on Aurora Leigh for its portrayal of a woman achieving independence in a male‑controlled world.
Prolific Period (1841–1844): She wrote profusely in prose, poetry, and translation, making her a rival to Tennyson for poet laureate after Wordsworth’s death. Her two‑volume Poems (1844) turned her from a promising young poet into an international celebrity.
Controversial Themes: Her frank treatment of the “fallen woman” – especially in Aurora Leigh’s character Marian Erle – stunned female readers but won praise from Swinburne, Leigh Hunt, Walter Savage Landor, Ruskin, and the Rossetti brothers. Commercially, Aurora Leigh was her most successful work; by 1885 it had gone through nineteen editions.
Sonnet Experiments: Mrs. Browning experimented extensively with the Italian sonnet form (octet abba abba; sestet either cdcdcd or cdecde). Occasionally she used only four rhyme values (abcd) – an even stricter constraint than Petrarchan or Shakespearean forms. Her sonnets on grief, tears, work, and George Sand forced her to be less diffuse.
CRITICS ON ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING – THEN AND NOW
John Wilson (“Christopher North”): Declared there was beauty in all the poems, some “altogether beautiful.”
Edinburgh Review: “Such a combination of the finest genius and the choicest results of cultivation and wide‑ranging studies have never been seen before in any woman.”
Southern Literary Messenger (America): Called her “the Shakespeare among her sex” and placed her among the four or five greatest authors of all time.
Christian Examiner (Boston): Ranked In Memoriam (Tennyson) and Aurora Leigh as the two greatest poems of the age; Sonnets from the Portuguese as the finest love poems in English.
Virginia Woolf (1930): Deplored that Mrs. Browning’s poetry was no longer being read, especially Aurora Leigh, which she admired for its “speed and energy, forthrightness and complete self‑confidence.”
Ellen Moers (Literary Women): Aurora Leigh is “the epic poem of the literary woman herself.” From a feminist perspective, Mrs. Browning’s literary reputation remains secure.
TO GEORGE SAND: A RECOGNITION – TEXT & CONTEXT
True genius, but true woman! dost deny
Thy woman's nature with a manly scorn
And break away the gauds and armlets worn
By weaker women in captivity?
Ah, vain denial! that revolted cry
Is sobbed in by a woman's voice forlorn—
Thy woman's hair, my sister, all unshorn
Floats back dishevelled strength in agony
Disproving thy man's name: and while before
The world thou burnest in a poet-fire,
We see thy woman-heart beat evermore
Through the large flame. Beat purer, heart, and higher,
Till God unsex thee on the heavenly shore,
Where unincarnate spirits purely aspire!
Background: In Victorian society, women were confined to marriage and procreation. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, through poems like Aurora Leigh, challenged this enslavement. George Sand (pen name of Aurore Dupin) was a French writer who competed with Victor Hugo. While Browning venerated Sand, in this sonnet she reminds women not to forget their womanhood. Sand’s adoption of a male name and vocation could begin a denial of female characteristics. Browning challenges women to be proud of passion and emotion while striving for intellect.
Analysis: Morlier argues that “unsex” addresses an anti‑feminist cliché; Browning redefines it positively, even holy. The sonnet alludes to the Samson and Delilah story (and Milton’s version), redefining Samson as a controversial hero.
CRITICS ON “TO GEORGE SAND: A RECOGNITION”
Thomson: Although a woman may appear to deny her womanhood with “manly scorn,” she will always be a woman.
Stephenson: Browning celebrates Sand’s successes yet reminds that female emotion and passion are strengths, not weaknesses.
CENTRAL THOUGHT & POETIC TECHNIQUE
Browning describes Sand as “True genius, but true woman!” She considered Sand a “brilliant monstrous woman” and the only woman “not inferior to men.” Both were warm, emotional, radical, and moderately feminist. The theme parallels “To George Sand: A Desire” – breaking gender barriers – but uses a more dramatic tone, expressing the agony of achieving respect in a male‑dominated field. Vivid imagery portrays Sand’s triumph. Browning scolds that a woman’s rejection of her nature is a “vain denial”: “Thy woman’s hair, my sister, all unshorn / Floats back dishevelled strength in agony, / Disproving thy man’s name.”
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