Major Literary Figures - ENG 350 Resource Guide

Written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “The Cry of the Children” (1843) calls attention to the appalling working conditions and exploitation of child mine workers in England during the latter part of the Industrial Revolution. The poem was first published in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine and was later included in Browning's 1844 collection Poems.

ELIZABETH BARRETT was born on 6 March 1806 at Coxhoe Hall in Durham. She was the eldest of the twelve children of Edward Moulton Barrett and his wife Mary. When she was three years old, the family moved to Hope End in Herefordshire, and she spent the next twenty-three years of her life in this minareted country house overlooking a lake and deep in a wooded park.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s principal biographer, Gardner Taplin, believes that “It is the quality of her life even more than her artistic achievements which will live” (The Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1957). The reasons for this fact, he believes, are to be found “in her fulfillment as [a woman], in her courageous and impassioned protests against injustice to individuals and subject peoples, and in her broad, generous, idealistic, Christian point of view.”

British poet who believed passionately that poetry should engage in the issues and problems of its day.

When William Wordsworth died in 1850, Elizabeth Barrett Browning had achieved sufficient fame and renown so that she was thought a deserving successor to him as Britain's poet laureate.

Browning was one of the most respected woman poets of the Victorian age. Her work is known for its formal iconoclasm, impetuosity of tone, and political content.

Many poems have been written about love: its nature, its causes, its effects, its beginnings, its endings—but Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese is unique in the history of English literature for the means by which the sonnets were eventually published for all the world to read.

In a now famous letter of 1845 Elizabeth Barrett BROWNING lamented the seeming lack of a tradition of English women poets that she could look back to and engage with. "England has had many learned women," she argued, "and yet where are the poetesses? ... I look everywhere for grandmothers and see none."

This article emphasizes the multigeneric quality of Browning’s epic and the advantages of presenting its successive layers. The poem functions as a veiled autobiographical narrative of development, a fast-paced novel plot centering on gender and class relationships, and a closet drama utilizing features of the contemporary stage.

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Aurora LeighAurora Leigh blends the genres of poetry and the novel and is, at the same time, a bildungsroman (a novel that traces the development of a young person to maturity) or, more properly, a Künstlerroman, in which a young artist struggles to create an artistic identity despite adverse conditions. The work is innovative both in its blend of poetry and the novel form and in its focus on a woman as an artist.