English, Irish, Scottish Women - Literary Biography, Literary Figures - Women's Biography, British Poets - Literary Biography
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Overview
Barbara Dennis's much-needed study provides a new and illuminating perspective on Barrett Browning, focusing on her crucial early years at Hope End, near Ledbury. Drawing on previously neglected material from Barrett Browning's diaries and her unpublished notebook of 1822-1824, Dennis reveals an active and inquisitive young woman, delighting in exploring the Herefordshire countryside and often critical of authority. A precocious poet, Elizabeth published her first poem, The Battle of Marathon, at fourteen; her second poem An Essay on Mind brought her critical recognition, and friendships that were to remain important to her throughout her life, including that with Hugh Boyd, for whom she developed an intense infatuation. But Elizabeth's life at Hope End was not only one of books: we learn of her love for her family, especially her brother Bro, whose tragic early death made it too painful for her ever to return to Hope End after the family's move to London, and her early happy relationship with her father, who affectionately dubbed her 'the Poet Laureate of Hope End' and encouraged her ambition.Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
Elizabeth Barrett Browning's life reads like a novel, more dramatic and compelling than the poet's own work suggests. This biographical study, on the other hand, tries to cram itself and the poet within the narrow boundaries of the Welsh-English border region where Barrett Browning spent her youthful years at Hope End, the "Indian Gothic" mansion her father designed and built in 1809. Arranging the scholarly book thematically rather than strictly chronologically, Dennis, a professor of Victorian studies in Wales, takes pains to give credit for the works from Barrett Browning's London and Italian fame to those formative "Hope End Years." Born in 1806, she was intellectually and artistically precocious, publishing famed poems in her teens. The remoteness of Hope End and her father's authoritarianism, however, helped keep her socially isolated. The first man with whom she developed a friendship outside her family circle was her married, blind tutor, Hugh Boyd. Letters and poems present her regard for him with all the expected propriety, while her diary at age 25 reveals a mad schoolgirl crush. "Where the letters are balanced, dispassionate, witty, the diary... rages with anguished questioning and the torments of jealousy and suspected slights." Mentions of the dependence of the poet on laudanum and of her family's finances on slavery are incomplete, but the author well details Barrett Browning's relationships with Boyd, Mary Mitford, her father, her favorite brother and husband Robert Browning. Photos. (Oct.)Library Journal
Although famed for her invalid life on Wimpole Street and her dramatic elopement with the poet Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning spent the first 25 years of her life at her father's isolated mansion, Hope End, in Herefordshire, near the Welsh border. Dennis (Charlotte Yonge, Novelist of the Oxford Movement, 1823-1901, EdwinMellen, 1992) uses unpublished notebooks from this vital era to trace the development of Browning's creative philosophy and show the origin of later poetry and novels. Thwarted by her father's refusal to give her a formal education, Browning relied on self-taught skills and contemporary novels and poetry to form her uniquely passionate and personal literary voice that still captivates readers today. Although Dennis covers the writer's entire life in this slim volume, the emphasis is on the pre-Browning years through a close analysis of her notebooks and published writings. With ten plates, bibliography, and a foreword and afterword, this work is for specialized literature collections.Shelley Cox, Southern Illinois Univ., CarbondaleBook Details
Published
June 30, 1994
Publisher
Bridgend, Mid Glamorgan : Seren, c1996.
Pages
148
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9781854110992