The Rebellion of a Dutiful Daughter: The Conflicted Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning

(Hardback)

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Born in 1806, Elizabeth Barrett Browning may be best known today for love sonnets such as How Do I Love Thee Let me Count the Ways and her romance with Robert Browning. But in her lifetime she was one of Britains most revered poets for her poems on social injustice, not love and was far more celebrated than her husband. Her circle included John Ruskin and Georges Sand, while Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allan Poe and George Eliot were great admirers. Although her family owned slave plantations in the West Indies, she was an ardent abolitionist, anti-colonialist and republican. She wrote poems about child labour and runaway slaves and in her verse novel Aurora Leigh created an innovative masterpiece of feminist writing. Yet privately, she submitted for decades to her fathers oppressive will. Finally escaping, she married in secret and moved to Italy in 1846, her father cutting all ties with her. But in Robert Browning she found someone who devoted himself to her and to her work. In The Rebellion of a Dutiful Daughter, Emer OSullivan brilliantly charts the conflicted life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who not only blazed a trail in modernising poetry but reshaped the role that women could play in society, ensuring that she remains as relevant today as she was then.

Reviews

PRAISE FOR THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF WILDE: Meticulously researched ... Emer O'Sullivan's brilliant book shows how Oscar was forced to be a bright, flamboyant and radical playwright and novelist so as to be able to take care of his mother and brother. -- Kaya Gen * Times Literary Supplement *
A remarkable piece of work. And the best non-fiction book I've read all year. * Sunday Independent *
Hugely readable ... O'Sullivan vividly evokes the cultural vitalities Oscar inherited from the house he was born into. -- John Sutherland * The Times *

Author Bio

Emer OSullivan graduated from Trinity College, Dublin, and has completed an MA in Life Writing and a PhD in Virginia Woolfs literature at the University of East Anglia, where she also lectured in English Literature. Her first book is The Fall of the House of Wilde. She lives in London.