Two Way Mirror The Life Of Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Author : Fiona Sampson
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 1324002964
Total Pages : 291 pages
Book Rating : 4.63/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Two-Way Mirror: The Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning written by Fiona Sampson and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2021-08-17 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the 2022 Plutarch Award Longlisted for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography A Washington Post Best Book of 2021 “An elegant act of rehabilitation.”—New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice A "nuanced and insightful" (New Statesman) portrait of Britain’s most famous female poet, a woman who invented herself and defied her times. "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways." With these words, Elizabeth Barrett Browning has come down to us as a romantic heroine, a recluse controlled by a domineering father and often overshadowed by her husband, Robert Browning. But behind the melodrama lies a thoroughly modern figure whose extraordinary life is an electrifying study in self-invention. Born in 1806, Barrett Browning lived in an age when women could not attend a university, own property after marriage, or vote. And yet she seized control of her private income, defied chronic illness and disability, became an advocate for the revolutionary Italy to which she eloped, and changed the course of cultural history. Her late-in-life verse novel masterpiece, Aurora Leigh, reveals both the brilliance and originality of her mind, as well as the challenges of being a woman writer in the Victorian era. A feminist icon, high-profile activist for the abolition of slavery, and international literary superstar, Barrett Browning inspired writers as diverse as Emily Dickinson, George Eliot, Rudyard Kipling, Oscar Wilde, and Virginia Woolf. Two-Way Mirror is the first biography of Barrett Browning in more than three decades. With unique access to the poet’s abundant correspondence, “astute, thoughtful, and wide-ranging guide” (Times [UK]) Fiona Sampson holds up a mirror to the woman, her art, and the art of biography itself.

Author : Mameve Medwed
Publisher : Harper Collins
ISBN 13 : 0061860131
Total Pages : 403 pages
Book Rating : 4.33/5 ( download)

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Download or read book How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life written by Mameve Medwed and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What do a chamber pot, a famous poet, a family feud, and a long-ago suitor all have in common? Elizabeth Barrett Browning might have written about the length and breadth of love, but Abby Randolph has given up on all that, preferring to spend her time between her cluttered "needs work" apartment and an overcrowded antiques mart optimistically named Objects of Desire. Yet Abby can't help but wonder what happened to her earlier passionate self . . . Then the Antiques Roadshow comes to town, and Abby joins thousands of Boston's hopefuls at the crack of dawn, artifact in hand. But there, among the carousel horses and bedraggled stuffed animals, Abby's rather squalid piece of porcelain gets the star treatment. And from the moment the show airs, everything changes—friendships, her career, love affairs, even the way she views herself and others—as life comes rushing back at Abby Randolph full force.

Author : Julia Markus
Publisher : Knopf
ISBN 13 : 030783297X
Total Pages : 384 pages
Book Rating : 4.79/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Dared And Done written by Julia Markus and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2013-05-08 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Riveting and brilliant work of biography. The story of two great English poets, Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, whose work was immediately recognized and adored by their contemporaries, whose courtship ranks with the great love stories of all time -- and in whose marriage romance was not merely sustained but intensified. We enter their story through the sealed Victorian world of the Barretts of Wimpole Street: Elizabeth, at thirty-nine, a poet of international fame, a child prodigy who had grown to be a middle-aged spinster, a woman for whom romantic love seemed not to be possible, confined by illness, morphine, and the tyranny of her father, scion of rich Jamaican slaveholders, rum and sugar traders. It is to this fortress that Robert Browning, already an admired young poet and playwright, already a devotee of Elizabeth's, lays siege. ("I love your verses," he had written Elizabeth in his first letter to her, long before they met. "I love your verses with all my heart -- and I love you too.") And miraculously Elizabeth let life in. Julia Markus chronicles their extraordinary courtship, their marriage in secret (Browning to Elizabeth: "How you have dared and done all this ... for my only sake?"), and their radiant honeymoon in Italy. Markus shows us how the political events of the times inspired the great dramatic monologues of Robert's middle years and how Italy's stormy reunification inspired Elizabeth's later work. We come to see Elizabeth as an artist with a fierce and final confidence in poetry and its effect on the poets' lives. We see husband and wife celebrate the birth of their son, Robert Wiedemann "Pen" Barrett Browning (Browning to her sisters: "I sate by [Elizabeth] as much as I was allowed, and I shall never forget what I saw, tho' I cannot speak about it"). We see them among their artist/writer friends: in London with Tennyson, Thackeray, Rossetti, and others; in Rome with William Story, the American lawyer, poet, sculptor; with Harriet Hosmer, the stonecutter, who was one of the models for Aurora Leigh; with Charlotte Cushman, the American actress, who held readings of Elizabeth's novel in verse. We see Elizabeth in Paris meeting her heroine George Sand, whose society of socialists and theatrical types Robert described as "ragged Red." We come to understand Elizabeth's dependence on the ever-present drug in her life ("I should not be alive except by help of my morphine") and her constant battle with depression. And we see Elizabeth, encouraged by a woman with whom she was infatuated, move from interest to obsession with spiritualism, a cause that became the only source of serious dissension between the Brownings. We follow the course of their rich marriage, from the beginning when each saw the other as a brilliant poet, a compassionate and strangely similar heart, through the years in which they discovered each other's differences, each remaining a complex and thrilling human being to the other. To tell their story, Markus for the first time makes use of much of Elizabeth's unpublished correspondence, amid a wealth of other documents. She delves fully into the Brownings' Creole background and shows how it affected their lives and their work (Elizabeth was the first of the Jamaican Barretts to be born in England in many generations). Brilliantly interweaving the Brownings' own words with her authentic and perceptive narrative, Julia Markus brings these two great poets -- their marriage, their work, their times -- alive as never before.

Author : Margaret Forster
Publisher : Random House
ISBN 13 : 1446443515
Total Pages : 571 pages
Book Rating : 4.14/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Elizabeth Barrett Browning written by Margaret Forster and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-09-30 with total page 571 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, written with reference to Browning correspondence only recently available, argues that the poet was a strong and determined woman largely responsible for her own incarceration in Wimpole Street. The author traces her life from her early childhood and adolescence and explores her marriage. She draws a picture of early Victorian family life and aims to show that Elizabeth was a considerable and dedicated poet, self-willed, witty and courageous. Forster has also edited the companion volume "Selected Poems" of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and is author of several other biographies.

Author : Fiona Sampson
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1681778211
Total Pages : 368 pages
Book Rating : 4.11/5 ( download)

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Download or read book In Search of Mary Shelley: The Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein written by Fiona Sampson and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2018-06-05 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Coinciding with the 200th anniversary of the publication of Frankenstein in 1818, a prize-winning poet delivers a major new biography of Mary Shelley—as she has never been seen before. We know the facts of Mary Shelley’s life in some detail—the death of her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, within days of her birth; the upbringing in the house of her father, William Godwin, in a house full of radical thinkers, poets, philosophers, and writers; her elopement, at the age of seventeen, with Percy Shelley; the years of peripatetic travel across Europe that followed. But there has been no literary biography written this century, and previous books have ignored the real person—what she actually thought and felt and why she did what she did—despite the fact that Mary and her group of second-generation Romantics were extremely interested in the psychological aspect of life. In this probing narrative, Fiona Sampson pursues Mary Shelley through her turbulent life, much as Victor Frankenstein tracked his monster across the arctic wastes. Sampson has written a book that finally answers the question of how it was that a nineteen-year-old came to write a novel so dark, mysterious, anguished, and psychologically astute that it continues to resonate two centuries later. No previous biographer has ever truly considered this question, let alone answered it.

Author : Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 238 pages
Book Rating : 4.XR/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Book of the Poets written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning and published by . This book was released on 1877 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Fiona Sampson
Publisher : Random House
ISBN 13 : 1448138671
Total Pages : 71 pages
Book Rating : 4.78/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Coleshill written by Fiona Sampson and published by Random House. This book was released on 2013-03-07 with total page 71 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Deep in limestone country, at the corner of Wiltshire, Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire, lies the village of Coleshill. This haunting new collection from Fiona Sampson is a portrait of place, both real and imaginary; a dreamscape with its roots deep in the local soil. The poems hum with an evocative music of their own: there are hymns of the orchards, verses for walkers, songs for bees. These are slices of life and states of mind; poems of grief, fears and maledictions, but also of renewal, resurrections and the promise of spring. Coleshill emerges as a “parish of sun / and shade”; its darkness and light perfectly balanced. From the T.S. Eliot and Forward Prize shortlisted poet comes a deep, interrogative collection of astonishing clarity and power.

Author : Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 88 pages
Book Rating : 4.20/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Lady Geraldine's Courtship written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning and published by . This book was released on 1870 with total page 88 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Elizabeth Berg
Publisher : Ballantine Books
ISBN 13 : 0345423097
Total Pages : 242 pages
Book Rating : 4.92/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Joy School written by Elizabeth Berg and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 1998-03-24 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this exquisite new novel by bestselling writer Elizabeth Berg, a young woman falls in love -- and learns how sorrow can lead to an understanding of joy. Katie, the narrator, has relocated to Missouri with her distant, occasionally abusive father, and she feels very much alone: her much-loved mother is dead; her new school is unaccepting of her; and her only friends fall far short of being ideal companions. When she accidentally falls through the ice while skating, she meets Jimmy. He is handsome, far older than she, and married, but she is entranced. As their relationship unfolds, so too does Katie's awareness of the pain and intensity first love can bring. Beautifully written in Berg's irresistible voice, Joy School portrays the soaring happiness of real love, the deep despair one can feel when it goes unrequited, and the stubbornness of hope that will not let us let go. Here also is recognition that love can come in many forms and offer many different things. Joy School illuminates, too, how the things that hurt the most can sometimes teach us the lessons that really matter. About Durable Goods, Elizabeth Berg's first novel, Andre Dubus said, "Elizabeth Berg writes with humor and a big heart about resilience, loneliness, love and hope. And the transcendence that redeems." The same will be said of Joy School, Elizabeth Berg's most luminous novel to date.

Author : Virginia Woolf
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 9780192833280
Total Pages : 196 pages
Book Rating : 4.86/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Flush written by Virginia Woolf and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1998 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This story of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's cocker spaniel, Flush, enchants right from the opening pages. Although Flush has adventures of his own with bullying dogs, horrid maids, and robbers, he also provides the reader with a glimpse into Browning's life. Introduction by Trekkie Ritchie.