The Barrett-Browning volume in the 21st Century Oxford Authors series offers a comprehensive selection of the works of one of the nineteenth-century's most famous poets. The revaluation of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's work by feminist scholars has made her an established (indeed standard) author in university syllabuses in Britain and in America. Yet the emphasis upon her contribution to a female tradition has tended to rigidify Barrett Browning's contribution to English literary culture in the nineteenth century, just as her popular image as ringleted-invalid-turned-romantic-heroine served sentimentally to eclipse her role as a literary pioneer. This edition complements or corrects these emphases by being the first edition dedicated to witnessing the progress and growth of the poet's creative direction - from her juvenilia through to her major achievements and beyond. In keeping with the aims of the series, the selection honours the original sequencing of the published works as the best means of indicating the contours of Barrett Browning's poetic career. Thus, following fairly limited selections from published juvenilia, The Battle of Marathon (1820) and 'An Essay on Mind' and Other Poems (1826) and from 'Prometheus Bound' and Miscellaneous Poems (1833), there are more extensive selections from 'The Seraphim' and Other Poems (1838), from Poems 1844 and from Poems 1850 including the full text of Sonnets from the Portuguese. Substantial excerpts from Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is followed by the full text of Aurora Leigh (1857) and by selections from the posthumous Last Poems (1862). These individual sections are supplemented by careful selections (also chronologically ordered) from the correspondence, including the courtship letters with Robert Browning, and, where applicable, from poetry unpublished in the nineteenth century. The edition comes with full scholarly apparatus (introduction, chronology, explanatory notes), though it follows the series policy of recording only significant variants between editions.
Josie Billington, Deputy Director, Centre for Research into Reading, Information and Linguistic Systems, University of Liverpool, Philip Davis, Director, Centre for Research into Reading, Information and Linguistic Systems, University of Liverpool
Josie Billington is a specialist in Victorian Literature who has published widely on nineteenth-century fiction and poetry. Her publications include
Faithful Realism (2002), (ed)
Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters (2006),
Eliot's Middlemarch (2008),
Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Shakespeare (2012), (ed)
Margaret Oliphant Novellas (2013). She is also engaged in interdisciplinary medical humanities research in the area of reading and health, with
Is Literature Healthy? (OUP, 2016).
Philip Davis is author of
Volume 8: 1830-1880: The Victorians in The Oxford English Literary History series (2002). His other works include
Sudden Shakespeare (1997),
Shakespeare Thinking (2007), and two biographies,
Bernard Malamud: A Writer's Life (OUP, 2007) and
The Transferred Life of George Eliot (OUP, 2017). He is general editor of a new series from Oxford University Press,
The Literary Agenda, on the future of literary studies in the twenty-first century, contributing his own volume
Reading and The Reader (2013) building on
The Experience of Reading (1991) and
Real Voices: On Reading (1997). He is editor of
The Reader magazine.
