Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Sarah Parker, Modern Language Review This volume is a comprehensive new edition of Elizabeth Barrett Brownings poetry that will prove indispensable for students and established scholars alike.

Marjorie Stone, Dalhousie University Judiciously selected and introduced by two established experts in Victorian Literature, this Oxford edition helpfully frames works written throughout Elizabeth Barrett Browning's career with excerpts from her letters, diary, and prefaces. The most authoritative selected edition to appear since the 2010 five-volume complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, its accessible one-volume format and clearly annotated texts make it a valuable resource for students, scholars, libraries, and general readers, given the widespread critical and popular interest in Victorian England's most internationally influential woman poet.


Clara Dawson, Notes and Queries [This edition] will broaden the scope for the teaching of Barrett Browning's poetry Extracts from 'The Seraphim' and 'Drama of Exile' will make it possible to study her religious poetry, a genre which has garnered renewed critical interest in Victorian poetry studies in the last five years There are a number of strengths to the volume, particularly in relation to teaching. The opening piece is a spirited essay by the fourteen-year-old Barrett, which is an excellent introduction to the precocious and vivacious young poet [the edition will] encourage students to read the letters in dialogue with the poems. At other points in the volume, there is a useful selection of letters providing a measure of context for Barrett Browning's poetry, such as letters illustrating her grief after the death of her brother in 1840.

Beverly Taylor, Victorian Review [T]he volume provides a solid selection of poems for the classroom and for scholars who wish to study poems as they were initially published.

Dr Josie Billington is a specialist in Victorian Literature who has published widely on nineteenth-century fiction and poetry - Faithful Realism (2002), (ed) Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters (2006), Eliot's Middlemarch (2008), Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Shakespeare (2012), (ed) Margaret Oliphant Novellas (2013) - and on interdisciplinary medical humanities research in the area of reading and health. Professor Philip Davis is author of The Victorians 1830-1880 in The Oxford English Literary History series (OUP, 2002), Sudden Shakespeare (1997) Shakespeare Thinking (2007) and the biography, Bernard Malamud: A Writer's Life (OUP, 2007). He is general editor of a new series from Oxford University Press, 'The Literary Agenda', on the future of literary studies in the twenty-first century, contributing his own volume Reading and The Reader (OUP, 2013) building on The Experience of Reading (1991) and Real Voices: On Reading (1997). He is editor of The Reader magazine.

Introduction Chronology A Note on the Selection and Ordering Part I: EARLY WORKS AND THE BARRETT FAMILY WRITINGS (1820-33) From The Battle of Marathon (1820) From (unpublished) 'Fragment of An Essay on Woman' (1822) From An Essay on Mind (1826) To My Father on His Birth-Day (1826) Song ('Weep as if you thought of laughter') (1826) Verses to my Brother (1826) Letter to Hugh Stuart Boyd (1828) Diary 1831-2 From Preface to translation of Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound (1833) From translation of Prometheus Bound (1833) A True Dream (1833) PART II: THE SERAPHIM AND OTHER POEMS (1838), CORRESPONDENCE 1841-5 From Preface From The Seraphim From The Poet's Vow From The Romaunt of Margret The Deserted Garden Death of Bro (1840), Letters (1841-45) SECTION III: POEMS (1844) Dedication: To My Father From Preface Past and Future Irreparableness Grief Tears Substitution Work and Contemplation Letter to John Kenyon from A Drama of Exile An Apprehension To George Sand: A Recognition The Soul's Expression from The Lost Bower The Lady's Yes The Cry of the Children Lady Geraldine's Courtship SECTION IV: The Courtship Correspondence (1845-6) From the letters of EBB and Robert Browning (January 1845- April 1846 SECTION V: POEMS 1850 Sonnets from the Portuguese A Denial (1856) The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point A Reed A Sabbath Morning at Sea A Woman's Shortcomings A Man's Requirements The Mask SECTION VI: CASA GUIDI WINDOWS (1851) Advertisement to the First Edition from Part I from Part II SECTION VII: AURORA LEIGH (1856) Dedication First Book Second Book Third Book Fourth Book Fifth Book Sixth Book Seventh Book Eighth Book Ninth Book SECTION VIII: LAST POEMS (1862) Bianca Among the Nightingales Mother and Poet A Musical Instrument Lord Walter's Wife Died My Heart and I The Best Thing in the World NOTES