Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Selected Writings (21st-Century Oxford Authors) - Softcover

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

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. (Marjorie Stone, Dalhousie University)

[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. (Clara Dawson, Notes and Queries)

[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. (Beverly Taylor, Victorian Review)

This volume in the 21st Century Oxford Authors series offers students and readers a comprehensive selection of the work of the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861). Accompanied by full scholarly apparatus, this authoritative edition enables students to study Barrett Browning's work within the rich context of her life and writing career.

The revaluation of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's work by feminist scholars has made her an established author in university syllabuses in Britain and in America. Yet the reception of Barrett Browning as a writer within an explicitly female tradition has tended to limit the appreciation of her wider contribution to English literary culture in the nineteenth century, just as her popular image as a ringleted romantic heroine served sentimentally to eclipse her role as a literary pioneer. This edition complements or corrects these emphases by being the first edition dedicated to witnessing the progress and growth of the poet's creative direction―from her juvenilia through to her major achievements and beyond.

The selection of works presented here appear in the order in which they were originally published, enabling students and readers to experience the contours of Barrett Browning's poetic career. Thus, following selections from published juvenilia, The Battle of Marathon (1820) and 'An Essay on Mind' and Other Poems (1826) and from 'Prometheus Bound' and Miscellaneous Poems (1833), there are more extensive selections from 'The Seraphim' and Other Poems (1838), from Poems 1844 and from Poems 1850 including the full text of Sonnets from the Portuguese. Substantial excerpts from Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is followed by the full text of Aurora Leigh (1857) and by selections from the posthumous Last Poems (1862). These individual sections are supplemented by careful selections (also chronologically ordered) from the correspondence, including the courtship letters with Robert Browning, and, where applicable, from poetry unpublished in the nineteenth century.

Explanatory notes and commentary are included, to enhance the study, understanding, and enjoyment of these works, and the edition includes an Introduction to the life and works of Barrett Browning, and a Chronology.