Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Shakespeare

For most of the twentieth century the exuberant

fluency of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's art was not regarded as worthy of

serious attention. Even the evidence for the swiftness of her wit, thought and

composition remains more impressionistic and anecdotal than firmly proven.

Through close attention to original manuscript material, Josie Billington

argues that Barrett Browning's fast, fine and excitedly vigorous and agile

imaginative intelligence is Shakespearean, both in its power, and in the

creative drive and dynamic to which it gives rise.

 Billington contends that for Barrett Browning, as

for Shakespeare, writing was demonstrably a creative event not a second-order

record of experience, and that Barrett Browning's characteristic habits of

composition, and her creative procedure, resemble in significant ways those of

the poet she valued most highly. A fascinating study of both writers' analogous

creative dispositions, minds and modes.