[In the following review, David offers a positive assessment of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, calling it an “exemplary biography.”]

In Aurora Leigh, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's self-termed “novel-poem,” the misogynistic hero, Romney Leigh, observes that women “So sympathetic to the personal pang” are incapable “Of deepening, widening a large lap of life / To hold the world-full woe.” Therefore, he concludes, “this same world, / Uncomprehended by you, must remain / Uninfluenced by you.” In the world of the poem, Romney later learns the error of his patriarchal ways and in the world of Victorian publishing, Aurora Leigh established Barrett Browning as a phenomenally successful author: the first edition sold out in a week and the second in a month. Moreover, recent feminist examination of Barrett Browning's career has persuasively argued for a Victorian woman intellectual whose capacious mind ranged far beyond Wimpole Street to “hold” and to “influence” the wider social and political scene. Three of the four books under review may be said to continue the implicit rebuttal of Romney Leigh's misogynistic dismissal of woman's work.

Margaret Forster has produced an exemplary biography Elizabeth Barrett Browning, eminently readable and packed with fascinating detail. Dividing (inevitably) Barrett Browning's life into pre-Robert and post-Robert, Forster relies extensively and usefully upon the various editions of letters which have appeared since Gardner Taplin's standard biography was published in 1957 (The Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning). What emerges is a two-fold revision: the despot of Wimpole Street, Edward Barrett Moulton-Barrett, is rehabilitated to emerge as a fiercely loving, if obsessive, father, and his daughter, the delicate recluse, is redrawn to appear as a neurotic, self-willed girl who dramatized unexceptional adolescent female malaise into a self-imposed confinement of almost twenty years.

According to Forster, while still in the country as a young woman, Elizabeth Barrett “relished the peace of her own room at the top of the house and the long, lazy mornings when she stayed in bed reading and writing” (39). With the move to London, this mode of life became routine: a bed-sitting room was set aside for her in the Wimpole Street house, her brothers and sisters paid regular visits, Miss Mitford provided the adored Flush, and until a May Tuesday in 1845, Elizabeth Barrett thought about little else except “reading and writing.” Her father, consciously or not, abetted her reclusion and indulged her whims, assured in this way of her continued acquiesence in his domestic tyranny. As we know, Robert Browning changed all that and what could have proved a problem for Forster (a love-story immortalized on stage, screen, and Hallmark greeting cards) becomes genuinely moving, the clear-eyed narrative of two poets who “shared a love extremely rare” (371).

Part of the pleasure of Forster's book resides in the sort of thing one always wants in biography: small telling details of a lived existence. We learn, for example, that when she left for Europe with Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett secreted at the bottom of her one piece of luggage the forty-three sonnets she had written to him during their courtship; once in Italy, she lived primarily on food from trattorie, relishing garlicky chicken and chianti after twenty years of invalid food; in Paris, she bought (what else?) a maroon satin and velvet hat trimmed with purple flowers because Robert liked the color. Less comfortably, we learn that she suffered three miscarriages, one so awful the doctor had to pack her body in ice to stop the hemorrhaging; and we also learn that she selfishly exploited her underpaid and overworked maid, Wilson, whose loyalty was repaid by dismissal of her difficulty in managing the indulged Pen, and whose heart-rending experience of sending her own baby back to England was caused by Elizabeth's refusal to have him in the Browning household. In sum, Forster's fair-minded, never sensational approach reveals an immensely intelligent and difficult woman—wife, mother, major Victorian poet—whose will to influence the world through poetry prevailed over uncontrollable and self-created obstacles.