Abstract
What could a stronger awareness of the presence of Scripture and theological reflection in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s life and work contribute to our understanding of her poetic achievement? In this essay I suggest that knowledge of her engagement with biblical and theological texts can help to enrich our understanding of Barrett Browning’s poetry. Most scholars have tended to approach her verse with an interest in its feminist, aesthetic, and political aspects,1 but its religious and theological aspect has not received an equal amount of attention. Work on her biography and her poetry often appears to underplay the influence of Christian spirituality as well as intellectual engagement with the Bible and theological literature on her thought.2 However, in Barrett Browning’s writings and in her life, spirituality and theological reflection held a central place; in her essay on English poetry we read that “[n]ature is where God is. Poetry is where God is.”3 In what follows I explore the importance of Scripture and theological thought in Barrett Browning’s life and work implicit in these lines, and furthermore show her “creative and original engagements with religious texts and theology.”4
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Notes
Sandra Donaldson’s excellent introduction in Critical Essays on Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. Sandra Donaldson (New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1999), offers a thorough overview of Barrett Browning scholarship up to the present (1–14).
Alethea Hayter (Mrs. Browning. A Poets Work and Its Setting [London: Faber and Faber, 1962]), however, and more recent scholars such as Linda M. Lewis (Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Spiritual Progress. Face to Face with God [Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998]); Jerome Mazzaro (“Mapping Sublimity: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese,” in Critical Essays, 291–305); and Cynthia Scheinberg (Women’s Poetry and Religion in Victorian England: Jewish Identity and Christian Culture [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002]) have focused on the strong Judeo-Christian influence in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s life and work. According to Hayter, “Mrs Browning’s religious faith . . . always pervaded her opinion on every subject, but it was so little obtruded that her critics have made some wild guesses about it. Her French and Italian biographers . . . have attributed to her an entirely idiosyncratic religion. She was a pantheist, a demonist, an Essene, a Cabbalist, certainly a pagan of some sort…Some recent biographers…have felt that she couldn’t really have believed in all that nonsense about the will of God and the sacredness of suffering, and have sought for some more piquant psychological explanation behind her piety” (Mrs. Browning, 27–28).
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, The Book of the Poets, in The Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke, 6 vols. (1900; reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1973), 6:296; see 6:240–311; hereafter CW. I owe this reference to Barbara Neri.
In the correspondence Barrett Browning kept with the Reverend William Merry from 1843 to 1844 on predestination and salvation by works, she identifies herself quite clearly as a Congregationalist: “I am not a Baptist—but a Congregational Christian,—in the holding of my private opinions” (The Brownings’ Correspondence, ed. Philip Kelley, Ronald Hudson, and Scott Lewis, 14 vols. [Winfield, Kansas: Wedgestone Press, 1984–98], 8:150; hereafter BC.
Margaret Forster, Elizabeth Barrett Browning: A Biography (London: Vintage, 1998), 49.
Peter Dally, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. A Psychological Portrait (London: Macmillan, 1989), 12.
See Glennis Stephenson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Poetry of Love (Ann Arbor: UMI Press, 1989), 16–17.
Ibid., 17.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Diary by E. B. B.: The Unpublished Diary of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1831–32, ed. Philip Kelley and Ronald Hudson. (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1969), 19.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Notes on the Greek Christian Fathers, around 1831, unpublished document 1 (Armstrong Browning Library, Baylor University, Waco, Texas).
Alison Milbank, Dante and the Victorians (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 1.
Dorothy Mermin, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The Origins of a New Poetry (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989), 88.
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© 2004 Jude V. Nixon
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Wörn, A.M.B. (2004). “Poetry is Where God is”: The Importance of Christian Faith and Theology in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Life and Work. In: Nixon, J.V. (eds) Victorian Religious Discourse. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403980892_11
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