Elizabeth Barrett Browning

• Published in: Victorian poetry 2020-09, Vol.58 (3), p.321-330
• Main Author: Taylor, Beverly
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: British & Irish literature; British English; Browning, Elizabeth Barrett (1806-1861); Christianity; English literature; Literary criticism; Plot (Narrative); Poetry; Religion; Rossetti, Christina (1830-1894); Victorian period; Women
• ISSN: 0042-5206; 1530-7190; 1530-7190
• DOI: 10.1353/vp.2020.0019

Because any new volume of the Correspondence constitutes the highwater mark in a year's publications on EBB, I offer the following forecast of this volume's contents to reassure Browning scholars that a little wait will be handsomely repaid. Underscoring women's conventional detachment from serious issues (as well as the pope's failure to institute serious reforms), she jests about the pope's issuing an edict forbidding the wearing of crinolines in St. Peter's and other Catholic churches (p. 53). Protesting the strictures of multiple religions, she explains, "all of you swaddle tightly, & are afraid of too much healthy movement" (p. 311). [...]if Christianity is ever to develop it will not respect frontiers" (p. 101). Continuing her long-standing complaints against English failure to support Italy's independence as a nation-state, she criticizes England's preoccupations with its own dignity, English enmity toward France, her homeland's "insular warping" (p. 113), and, with special ire, "the English invasion mania" and the rifle clubs or volunteer militia units formed in anticipation that Napoleon III will invade England (pp. 62, 58, 82-83).