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Finalist for the 2022 Plutarch Award Longlisted for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography A Washington Post Best Book of 2021 “An elegant act of rehabilitation.”—New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice A "nuanced and insightful" (New Statesman) portrait of Britain’s most famous female poet, a woman who invented herself and defied her times. "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways." With these words, Elizabeth Barrett Browning has come down to us as a romantic heroine, a recluse controlled by a domineering father and often overshadowed by her husband, Robert Browning. But behind the melodrama lies a thoroughly modern figure whose extraordinary life is an electrif...
First published in 1972. Browning was a keen observer and dramatic recorder of nineteenth-century European culture; his poetry reflects a wide range of intellectual, religious and artistic issues of his day. Roy E. Gridley shows here that during the six decades of Browning’s active writing career (1832-89), his poetry is a record and an interpretation of the changing modes of thought, feeling and expression of nineteenth-century life. Browning was a ‘romantic’ who, by virtue of his realistic and often revolutionary poetry, became a ‘modern’, and had considerable influence on writers such as Yeats, Eliot and Pound. While surveying the whole of Browning’s life and work, Gridley focuses closely on the more famous poems, examining them as documents that give the general reader a deeper appreciation of the richness and diversity of life in Victorian Europe.
Taking an original approach to Robert Browning's poetics, Britta Martens focuses on a corpus of relatively neglected poems in Browning's own voice in which he reflects on his poetry, his self-conceptualization and his place in the poetic tradition. She analyzes his work in relation to Romanticism, Victorian reactions to the Romantic legacy, and wider nineteenth-century changes in poetic taste, to argue that in these poems, as in his more frequently studied dramatic monologues, Browning deploys varied dramatic methods of self-representation, often critically and ironically exposing the biases and limitations of the seemingly authoritative speaker 'Browning'. The poems thus become devices for ...