Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Shakespeare: Translating the Language of Intimacy‪.‬

The poet who famously bemoaned her lack of literary grandmothers was not lacking in gratefully acknowledged male forebears, particularly Shakespeare and Homer, whom she describes as the "colossal borderers of the two intellectual departments of the world's age ... the antique and modern literatures." (1) But her relationship with those figures, as she acknowledges through Aurora Leigh's encounters with earlier poets, has to be carefully managed, the possibility of her dependent and derivative status scrupulously recognized: That such encounters are effected through her father's "Books, books, books" (1: 832) underlines the perils of the female poet's seeking to claim a part within a literary history told mainly through its published male poets.