ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING: CROSS-DWELLING AND THE REWORKING OF FEMALE POETIC AUTHORITY

Extract

IN A WELL-KNOWN LETTER EXCHANGE of 1861, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, then aged fifty-five, responded to William Makepeace Thackeray’s rejection of one of her poems. In his capacity as Editor of the Cornhill magazine, the famous novelist and man of letters had seen fit to exercise his censorship prerogatives on material he considered highly inappropriate for his audience. This letter exchange, which may serve as a metonymy for the ideological crises in which Barrett Browning’s career was positioned from beginning to end, forcefully exposes not just literary values in crisis, but also authorship in crisis. In particular, the exchange exposes an enforced split between roles of the analytical poet and the domestic lady, a separation of roles which Barrett Browning’s career both publicly exposed and dramatically reworked, but could not entirely evade.¹