ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING

by Dorothy Hewiett ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A

A dispassionate, compassionate, scrupulously researched and sensitively rejected life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, which disciplines much of the romanticism so easily attached to this story and presents her as a poet in her own right, with a knowledgeable appraisal of her poems. But through the years of sequestered invalidism which had a partial hiatus after her marriage to Browning, the woman is also fully portrayed in the radiance of her intellect and the wide play of emotions- the easily aroused anxiety and anguish, the abiding allegiance to those she loved, the sharpened sensibilities. And this life has its timeless fascination; of the childhood years and the first illness which prompted her ""happy retirement"" in writing; of her devotion to her father, whose proud rigidity and ""self-exaltation as an instrument of God"" was to prove inflexible; of the death of Bro, the best beloved brother; of the release in poetry and the publication of the Poems in 1844; of the first exhilarating letter from Browning which was to bring him into her life, and the constraint of his impulsive, impatient courtship which eventually overrode her father's implacability- ""not stone... but as immovable as stone""; of the elopement and the flight to Italy and years there, the several miscarriages and then the birth of the boy, Penini; the appearance of Aurora Leigh in 1857; and the last years of failing health sustained by the constant of Browning's gentle care and reverential devotion.... A biography which brings warmth and dignity and stature to this life and contributes a literary perspective as well.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1952

Categories: NONFICTION