Elizabeth Barrett Browning.(Guide To The Year's Work)

This year's work on EBB brings the harvest of conferences and special journal issues marking the bicentenary of the poet's birth in 1806. The harvest includes scholarship on an increasing range of her output, including works little discussed in contemporary criticism, such as her 1826 poem "An Essay on Mind," works in her 1833 and 1838 collections, and the neglected but ambitious 1844 poem "A Vision of Poets." As might be expected, Aurora Leigh and the Sonnets from the Portuguese continue to attract considerable scholarly attention, while Poems Before Congress and other poems by EBB on Italian politics also figure prominently this year, together with the pedagogical and creative challenges posed by "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point." Poetic voice is a recurrent topic; other topics include EBB's engagement with Aeschylus and classical translation, with the tradition of the epigram, and with Shakespeare; her response to debates on modernity and to the periodical press; her impact on American women poets; and the new light cast by manuscripts on her poetic development.

The largest gathering of work on EBB to appear this past year is Elizabeth Barrett Browning 1806.2006: A Bicentenary Issue (VP 24 [2006]), guest edited by Beverly Taylor and Marjorie Stone. In their "Introduction" to this issue, entitled "'Confirm my voice': 'My sisters,' Poetic Audiences, and the Published Voices of EBB," Stone and Taylor publish for the first time an incomplete manuscript fragment by the poet beginning "My sisters! Daughters of this Fatherland / Which we call England" (pp. 394-395), using the fragment to demonstrate the challenges negotiated by the poet as she sought to insert her voice into a predominantly male tradition of public poetry in the 1840s. Taylor and Stone also contend that to "accommodate the amplitude" of EBB's poetry, its diverse "generic registers," and the "multiplicity of its effects," we "might do better to speak of the published 'voices'" of her poetry, arising in a period when "voice" itself emerged "as a powerful figure" (p. 392) for the origin of poetic utterance as new technologies transformed it into a print phenomenon. Like the array of papers presented in March 2006 at a conference at the Armstrong Browning Library also celebrating the bicentenary (some of them published in this special issue), the VP bicentenary collection ranges well beyond the feminist preoccupations of the path-breaking critics of the 1970s and 80s, who so fruitfully focused on such topics as EBB's representations of women and her expositions of the sexual double standard, women's legal disabilities, their limited access to education and employment, and the exploitation of prostitutes and seamstresses.

In "Telling it Slant: Promethean, Whig, and Dissenting Politics in Elizabeth Barrett's Poetry of the 1830s," the first essay in the issue, Simon Avery aptly observes that "we are now coming to recognize" EBB's writing "as important for our understanding of areas as diverse as the experiences of the nineteenth-century woman writer, developments in Romantic and Victorian poetic aesthetics, and the construction of the nineteenth-century vates figure. 'How shall we re-read thee? Let me count the ways'" (p. 405). Avery adeptly situates the poems from EBB's 1833 and 1838 volumes within the broader contexts of intellectual and cultural history, elucidating their varying strands of Whig, Promethean, and Dissenting politics, and interpreting them in the context of major Romantic as well as Victorian issues and themes, such as the aesthetics of the sublime. As he points out, much of the 1830's poetry does not seem to manifest the political engagement of 1820's works by EBB; in fact, the poet "appears to withdraw somewhat from direct commentary upon political issues," turning to "large mythic narratives, landscape poetry, and religious verse" (p. 406). Avery contends, however, that works such as EBB's 1833 translation of Prometheus Bound, "The Tempest" (1833), "The Deserted Garden" (1838), and "An Island" (1838) engage with key political issues in the period, including "reform and the extension of civil rights" as well as "authoritative power and structures of tyranny" (p. 410).

While Avery reads these oblique political engagements within the familiar developmental narrative of EBB's ascension to a more confident public and political voice, Stephanie Johnson challenges this trajectory in "Aurora Leigh's Radical Youth: Derridean Parergon and the Narrative Frame in 'A Vision of Poets.'" In a subtle Derridean analysis of the aesthetics of the "frame" in "A Vision of Poets"--a major work from Poems (1844) widely appreciated in the nineteenth century--Johnson reads the earlier work as more radical than Aurora Leigh in its subversions of Victorian poetics and gender politics. She also attentively explores the paradoxes that attend the embodiment and representation of the poet's voice in the poem: at once omni-present and disccmcertingly absent. While the female poet may seem absent from the poem's center, Johnson argues, the complex framing structure of the work exposes a "lack in the male narrative," and validates "the female poet" by directing her "to a path marked by self-empowerment rather than self-sacrifice" (pp. 426-427).

Formalist analysis is also important in Herbert F. Tucker's wide-ranging contribution to the special issue, "An Epigrammar of Motives; or Ba, for Short." In the "critic's contrarian mood" of "loyal opposition," Tucker sets out on an "expedition in ebbigrammatology" in which he tries EBB's "work against a standard of aphoristic concision," and attends to her not as "reformer or woman writer or evangelist or polemicist," but to the complicated ways in which she turns the "epigram" against itself (p. 445). Ranging from the beginning to the end of her writing career, Tucker wittily shows how the "dialectic that energizes epigrams" in her poetry and prose embodies a "constitutive ambivalence" about the compression and "fixation of meaning which it is the generic boast of the epigram to perform" (p. ...