Damsels, Dulcimers, And Dreams: Elizabeth Barrett's Early Response to Coleridge (Critical Essay‪)‬

When Elizabeth Barrett famously complained in 1845 to Henry Chorley at she look[ed] everywhere for Grandmothers and [found] none," she neglected to mention that her early reviewers seemed as eager as she to find an appropriate genealogy for her poetry. (1) To read nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century critical views of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poetry is to see her compared to everyone from Chaucer to Tennyson, and with particular gusto to earlier nineteenth-century writers, especially Byron and Wordsworth. From early reviews of Elizabeth Barrett's work to Dorothy Mermin's groundbreaking book to Marjorie Stone's indispensable 1995 study of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, many critics have noted her connections to the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but there has been little sustained examination of those connections, as there has been with Barrett Browning and other Romantic writers. (2) While Barrett herself wrote a noted essay in praise of Wordsworth, her critical opinions of Coleridge were shared primarily in much more personal venues. Barrett Browning recalled reading Coleridge enthusiastically while yet a girl at Hope End; later, I will argue, Coleridge becomes a shared mentor figure for Barrett and Mary Russell Mitford. But to Hugh Boyd, her much older male mentor, Barrett wrote in 1843, in relation to Wordsworth, "yet I said & say in an under-voice, but stedfastly, that Coleridge was the grander genius" (BC, 7:123). Whence this strongly-felt conviction--and why must it be restricted to an "under-voice"? A complicated nexus of gender, genre, and physical frailty attracts Barrett to Coleridge and his major poems in ways that both empower and endanger her own ambitions of poetic fame. She seems, in her early publications, to court comparison with male poets writing in "masculine" genres, while seeing in none of the many women writers she read reason enough to align herself with them as her literary "Grandmothers," though she claims to long for such a female literary model. Coleridge, however, allows her to have it both ways: in both her correspondence and her poetry of the 1830s and 1840s, she assumes and celebrates Coleridge's "masculine" status as a Romantic genius, yet she recognizes and embraces "feminized" elements of his poetry, poetics, and public image that reflect and validate her own experience. In a manner of speaking, Coleridge, then, becomes the liminal literary "Grandmother" that Barrett can never overtly acknowledge as such.