Elizabeth Barrett Browning is perhaps the most famous and well received female poet of the nineteenth century. She was an iconoclast, known for her courageous and transgressive views.
Her liberal and progressive ideas have surfaced in much of her poetry. In The Runaway Slave At Pilgrim's Point, she writes down about one of the social issues that plagued her times, that of slave trade. Such poetry was heavily charged with political as well as religious ideas. Indeed, she was also an eminent religious writer, as can be seen in many of her works like A Musical Instrument.
When one reads all of her poetry, one finds that an ambivalent picture arises. Elizabeth Barrett Browning also wrote about the treatment of women in the nineteenth century. Heavily influenced by the work of Mary Wollstonecraft, whose controversial book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) set the tone for later feminist writings, many of her own works saw the recurrent themes of exploration of “The Woman Question”. In poems like The Romance of the Swan’s Nest and The Romaunt of the Page, she criticizes the way women are peripheralized in society.
Some of Browning's poems have their own ClassicNotes. Click the links to access our guides for the following poems:
Sonnet 24 (Let the world's sharpness, like a clasping knife)
