Definition
In her youth, the precocious girl who signed her poetical manuscripts “Elizabeth Barrett Barrett” or simply “EBB” eagerly sought female precursors to support her aspirations, finding formative influences in Mary Wollstonecraft and others. By her death, Elizabeth Barrett Browning was a foundational figure herself for women writers in Britain, North America, and Europe. EBB was famous not only for the epic verse novel Aurora Leigh (1856), the first extended portrait of the woman writer in English poetry, but also for reframing the masculine amatory sonnet tradition in Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850), and for generically diverse works in her four progressively expanded collections of Poems(1844–1856). Her works range from modern ballads, dramatic monologues, and lyrics with female subjects, to revisionary religious lyrical dramas, accomplished classical translations, antislavery poems, essays, and Anacreontic drinking songs. After her marriage to fellow poet Robert...
References
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Stone, M. (2020). Barrett Browning, Elizabeth. In: The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women's Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02721-6_82-1
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