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The original Writers and Their Work volume on Elizabeth Barrett Browning, written by the key EBB critic of the period, Alethea Hayter, was published in 1965. Only 29 pages in length and drawing upon some of the insights developed in Hayter's earlier book-length study, Browning: A Poet's Work and Its Setting (1962), the Writers and Their Work Mrs volume offered a swift overview of EBB's career and some specific points on language and prosody, before closing with a telling assessment of the perceived status of EBB's poetry at that time:
Her poetry is very much out of favour with the academic critics and historians of literature. You will not find it among the set books in British university courses in English literature, nor in the latest … anthologies. No edition of the collected works is in print in Britain … [and her] memory is kept alive at present more by the unending series of plays, films and musical comedies concerned with her private life than by readers of her poetry.
It is still too soon to say whether her fame as a poet will ever return. She may have to wait two hundred years, as Ford and Webster did till Charles Lamb brought them back to life.
Interestingly, Hayter's phrasing here recalls Virginia Woolf's humorous but poignant assessment of EBB in her 1931 essay on Aurora Leigh:
fate has not been kind to Mrs Browning as a writer. Nobody reads her, nobody discusses her, nobody troubles to put her in her place. … In short, the only place in the mansion of literature that is assigned her is downstairs in the servants’ quarters, where, in company with Mrs Hemans, Eliza Cook, Jean Ingelow, Alexander Smith, Edwin Arnold, and Robert Montgomery, she bangs the crockery about and eats vast handfuls of peas on the point of her knife.
In the three decades between Woolf and Hayter's analyses, then, little seemed to have shifted. EBB, the once internationally renowned and highly-influential poet, had been firmly pushed to the margins of literary history, her status as writer of some of the most powerful and innovative poetic works of the nineteenth century erased by both the general modernist backlash against Victorian literature and the processes of early twentieth-century canon formation.
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