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2 results

  • 4 - Love by Post

  • from Part II - Private Lives
  • Michael Wheeler, University of Southampton
  • Book:
    The Year That Shaped the Victorian Age
    Published online:
    08 December 2022
    Print publication:
    22 December 2022, pp 113-148

  • Summary

    The private letters exchanged between Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett provide a dramatic contrast to the open letters discussed in Part I, the tone of which tends to reflect the robust nature of the political debates associated with three public scandals. The confidential letters exchanged between two highly gifted and sensitive poets explore themes, such as liminality, and contain symbols, such as those of sight and blindness, of a kind that also features in their poetry. These letters are intimate, focused and exclusive, gradually relaxing in style as mutual trust grows between the lovers and a long series of nuanced exchanges establishes a private set of shared associations and references. All this is made possible through the security of the uniform penny post that was so fiercely defended during the Mazzini scandal. References to the mechanics of letter writing, descriptions of the rooms in which the writers sit and references to delays in the delivery of letters ground the correspondence in the material culture of the day, enhancing a sense of immediacy and sometimes of synchrony.

  • 8 - England: literature and culture

  • from II - National developments in literary criticism
  • Edited by M. A. R. Habib, Rutgers University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    07 February 2013, pp 172-187

  • Summary

    The critical performances of Martineau, Jameson, Fuller and Eliot, like those of de Staël and Sand, were inevitably marked by gender consciousness, because of nineteenth-century preconceptions about women as writers and intellectuals. The mid-century literary critic had an understandably complex relationship with the category of lady writer, which carried with it the expectation of difference and the assumption of inferiority. Martineau's Autobiography and Biographical Sketches are notable for their often sharp and self-serving comments on fellow writers, snapshots in a daguerreotyped age. Shakespeare was the figure who attracted the most critical attention during the Victorian period. His plays were, like novels, read aloud in domestic circles. Fuller was at her best in her longer works, which accommodated her learned, personal and often digressive style. In Woman in the Nineteenth Century, Fuller saw gender differences as both fixed and fluid.