The Afterlives of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
This is a postprint! The Version of Record of this manuscript has been published and is available in a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 31:1 (2016), 83-107, http://www.tandfonline.com, DOI: 10.1080/08989575.2016.1092789. The Notable Woman in Fiction: The Afterlives of Elizabeth Barrett Browning Julia Novak Abstract: Drawing on gender-sensitive approaches to biographical fiction, this paper examines fictional representations of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, from Carola Oman’s Miss Barrett’s Elopement to Laura Fish’s Strange Music. With a focus on their depiction of her profession, the novels are read as part of the poet’s afterlife and reception history. This work was supported by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) under Grant T 589-G23. “Let it be fact, one feels, or let it be fiction; the imagination will not serve under two masters simultaneously,” Virginia Woolf wrote in her review essay “The New Biography.”1 While her observation was addressed to the biographer, Woolf herself demonstrated that for the novelist it was quite permissible, as well as profitable, to mingle fact and fiction in the same work. Her biographical novella of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel, Flush: A Biography, provides an imaginative account of not only the dog’s experiences and perceptions but also, indirectly, those of its famous poet-owner, whom critic Marjorie Stone introduces as “England’s first unequivocally major female poet” (3). Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s professional achievements as well as her personal history secured her public status as a literary celebrity, which lasted, in varying forms, well beyond the nineteenth century and inspired several other biographical fictions before and after Woolf’s canine biography.
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