'Nearly the best thing she has written is L[ady] Geraldine.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Caroline Clive Print: Book
'Reading Mrs Browning's published letters in 1900, Wilfrid Blunt was reminded of how much he admired her and her husband's poetry ...'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Wilfrid Blunt Print: Book
Letter H 49 (late November 1856)
?Mrs Brownings poem is the finest in the English language ? poem I mean ? (not drama) ? but it is a noble drama too ? ?
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: John Ruskin Print: Book
From the editor?s footnote to a letter sent in November 1856:
?In a letter to Miss Heaton, Rossetti was no less enthusiastic: ?No doubt you are revelling, as I am, in Aurora Leigh ? by far the greatest work of its author surely, and almost beyond anything for exhaustless poetic resource.? (Heaton collection: letters written to Ellen Heaton; sold in 1969; whereabouts unknown.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Dante Gabriel Rossetti Print: Book
Letter H 85 (Latter half of March 1860)
?Mrs Browning?s verse is capital, but would have been better in prose. It is spoiled for rhyme?s sake.?
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: John Ruskin Print: Book
Letter H88 (?Mid-April 1860)
?Mrs B. is entirely good. In fact Magnificent (except her rhyme to Modena ? needlessly offensive and ?band plays?) ? Finest moral poetry ever written.?
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: John Ruskin Print: Book
'[Helen Crawfurd] derived lessons in socialism and feminism from Carlyle, Shaw, Wells, Galsworthy, Arnold Bennett, Ibsen's Ghosts and A Doll's House, Dickens, Disraeli's Sybil, Mary Barton, Jude the Obscure, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Under the Greenwood Tree, Tennyson's The Princess, Longfellow, Whitman, Burns, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, George Sand, the Brontes, Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Helen Crawfurd Print: Book
'A letter from Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Arabel Barrett tells of a sixty-year-old woman who believed that her morals had been injured by reading "Aurora Leigh" ...'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: anon Print: Book
'We are reading Carlyle's "Cromwell" and "Aurora Leigh" again in the evenings. I am still in the "Oedipus Tyrannus", with Shelley's Poems and snatches of "Natural History".'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: George Eliot and G.H. Lewes Print: Book
'As to what they read [at the Gower Street School in the 1880s] -- and [...] Lucy Harrison [headmistress] read aloud to them untiringly -- it must be what went deepest and lifted highest -- Shakespeare, Dante in Cary's translation, Blake, Wordsworth, and [...] [Miss Harrison's] own favourites, Emily Bronte, Christina Rossetti, the Brownings, Coventry Patmore [...] A reading which all [...] [Miss Harrison's] pupils heard often, and never forgot, was from Alice Meynell's "Preludes" of 1875 -- the sonnet "To a Daisy"'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Lucy Harrison, headmistress, Charlotte Mew, and other pupils at Gower Street school Print: Book
'On her deathbed Lucy [Harrison] asked Amy [Greener, her lover] to read to her from Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "Caterina to Camoens" [...] It must have been painful for Miss Greener to read these words [about a dying woman's reconciling herself to the idea that her lover might love again] aloud in the whitewashed bedroom, among the plain oak furniture which her friend had knocked together.'
Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Amy Greener Print: Book
'I have lately read again with great delight Mrs Browning's "Casa Guidi Windows". It contains amongst other admirable things a very noble expression of what I believe to be the true relation of the religious mind to the Past.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: George Eliot [pseud] Print: BookManuscript: Unknown
'Many thanks for your delightful letter. I am glad you are in the midst of delightful scenery and Aurora Leigh.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Richard Reginald Harding Print: Book
'Browning was a little beyond her. Convinced that he was a great poet, she still found him a bore at times. Elizabeth Barrett Browning was a major disappointment: she thought "Sonnets from the Portuguese" were beautiful in emotion but simply not good sonnets'.
Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Edith Sitwell Print: Book
Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Arabella Moulton-Barrett [sister], 12 January 1851:
'Now I am going to speak to you about those sonnets [...] The truth is that though they were written several years ago, I never showed them to Robert till last spring .. I felt shy about them altogether .. even to him. I had heard him express himself strongly against "personal" poetry & I shrank back. -- As to publishing them, it did not enter my head. But when Robert saw them, he was much touched & pleased -- & [...] could not consent, he said, that they should be lost to my volumes: so we agreed to slip them in under some sort of veil, & after much consideration chose the "Portugese" [goes on to explain reasons for choice]'.
Century: 1800-1849 / 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Browning Manuscript: Unknown
'Looked at Mrs Browning's "last poems" in evening; not so good as I thought, depressing me with doubts of my own judgement.'
Unknown
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: John Ruskin
'Meeting held at 68 Northcourt Avenue
20th III 1935
Howard R. Smith in the chair
1. Minutes of last Meeting were read & approved
[...]
4. The Program of anonymous readings was then proceeded with[;] members reading in the
order in which they sat round the room. An interval of about 2 minutes at the end of each
piece was allowed for cogitation at the end of which the reader anounced the authors name &
the work from which he had read. Identification proved unexpectedly dificult[.] No one reading
was identified by everyone & the highest scorer only guessed eight authors & 4 & ˝ works
Reader Author Work
E. B. Castle Plato Phaedo
M. S. W. Pollard R. Browning Pictures in Florence
E. Goadby Saml. Butler Notes
M. E. Robson Flecker Hassan
R. H. Robson Belloc Eyewitness
E. C. Stevens M. Arnold Self dependance
E. D. Brain B. Shaw Pre. to Back to Methuselah
M. Castle T. Carlyle Sartor Resartus
A. Rawlings R. Browning Pheidippides
J. Rawlings G. Eliot Middlemarch
E. B. Smith Lewis Carroll Phantasmagoria
F. E. Reynolds Tennyson Locksley Hall
S. A. Reynolds E. B. Browning Lady Geraldine’s Courtship
H. R. Smith Chas. Kingsley Westward Ho
F. E. Pollard Shelley Prometheus Unbound'
Unknown
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Sylvanus A. Reynolds
