Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Dr Josie Billington is a specialist in Victorian Literature who has published widely on nineteenth-century fiction and poetry. Her publications include Faithful Realism (2002), (ed) Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters (2006), Eliot's Middlemarch (2008), Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Shakespeare (2012), (ed) Margaret Oliphant Novellas (2013). She is also engaged in interdisciplinary medical humanities research in the area of reading and health, with Is Literature Healthy? (OUP, 2016). Professor Philip Davis is author of Volume 8:1830 -- 1880: The Victorians in The Oxford English Literary History series (OUP, 2002). His other works include Sudden Shakespeare (1997), Shakespeare Thinking (2007), and two biographies, Bernard Malamud: A Writer's Life (OUP,2007) and The Transferred Life of George Eliot (OUP, 2017). He is general editor of a new series from Oxford University Press, 'The Literary Agenda', on the future of literary studies in the twenty-first century, contributing his own volume Reading and The Reader (2013) building on The Experience of Reading (1991) and Real Voices: On Reading (1997). He is editor of The Reader magazine.

Introduction
Chronology
A Note on the Selection and Ordering
Part I: EARLY WORKS AND THE BARRETT FAMILY WRITINGS (1820-33)
From The Battle of Marathon (1820)
From (unpublished) 'Fragment of An Essay on Woman' (1822)
From An Essay on Mind (1826)
To My Father on His Birth-Day (1826)
Song ('Weep as if you thought of laughter') (1826)
Verses to my Brother (1826)
Letter to Hugh Stuart Boyd (1828)
Diary 1831-2
From Preface to translation of Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound (1833)
From translation of Prometheus Bound (1833)
A True Dream (1833)
PART II: THE SERAPHIM AND OTHER POEMS (1838), CORRESPONDENCE 1841-5
From Preface
From The Seraphim
From The Poet's Vow
From The Romaunt of Margret
The Deserted Garden
Death of Bro (1840), Letters (1841-45)
SECTION III: POEMS (1844)
Dedication: To My Father
From Preface
Past and Future
Irreparableness
Grief
Tears
Substitution
Work and Contemplation
Letter to John Kenyon
from A Drama of Exile
An Apprehension
To George Sand: A Recognition
The Soul's Expression
from The Lost Bower
The Lady's Yes
The Cry of the Children
Lady Geraldine's Courtship
SECTION IV: The Courtship Correspondence (1845-6)
From the letters of EBB and Robert Browning (January 1845- April 1846
SECTION V: POEMS 1850
Sonnets from the Portuguese
A Denial (1856)
The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point
A Reed
A Sabbath Morning at Sea
A Woman's Shortcomings
A Man's Requirements
The Mask
SECTION VI: CASA GUIDI WINDOWS (1851)
Advertisement to the First Edition
from Part I
from Part II
SECTION VII: AURORA LEIGH (1856)
Dedication
First Book
Second Book
Third Book
Fourth Book
Fifth Book
Sixth Book
Seventh Book
Eighth Book
Ninth Book
SECTION VIII: LAST POEMS (1862)
Bianca Among the Nightingales
Mother and Poet
A Musical Instrument
Lord Walter's Wife
Died
My Heart and I
The Best Thing in the World
NOTES