Elizabeth Barrett Browning‪.‬

Surveying canonical transformations in the forty-four years since establishment of the journal Victorian Studies, Edward H. Cohen notes, as one significant change, that there are now "almost as many" bibliography entries each year on Elizabeth Barrett Browning as Robert Browning ("'Victorian Bibliographies'" VS 44 [2002]: 630). This year's essay covers a full-length study, several books with substantial sections and/or essays on EBB, assorted articles, and a major new web resource mounted by the Armstrong Browning Library. While work on Aurora Leigh continues to appear, it no longer dominates the scene. Casa Guidi Windows and Sonnets from the Portuguese figure prominently once again, but critics are increasingly considering lesser known works as well. Political, national, and religious identities are attracting as much, if not more interest, than gender issues; other topics include EBB's response to Felicia Hemans and Letitia Landon, trans-Atlantic abolitionist networks, genre, sculpture, metrics, and connections between Flush and fascism. Among new books, this year has brought Simon Avery and Rebecca Stott's wide-ranging study, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (2003), published in the same Longman series as John Woolford and Daniel Karlin's Robert Browning (1996). Avery and Stott describe themselves as "particularly interested in Barrett Browning's relations to, and participation in, nineteenth-century intellectual history, her engagement with key social and political debates of the period, and her examination of the power relations and struggles" within both society and the individual (p. 20). Although their book is a collaborative production, the chapters are solo compositions, not co-written analyses. Clearly, however, the two authors have complementary views. Avery notes Deirdre David's reading of EBB as "conservative and essentially anti-feminist" (p. 17) in his introductory survey of changing critical approaches. But the poet and intellectual who emerges from Avery and Stott's book is cast in a more heroic mold. She is an iconoclast, an innovator, and a politically engaged liberal reformer. In Avery's words, she is "a strong, powerful, dissenting thinker who frequently resisted established ideologies" (p. 40); in Stott's, she is "a woman in full possession of her 'poetic I' from the moment she ventured into print as a young girl," an author who is "consistently ambitious and audacious" (p. 66).