Although Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s experience of love undoubtedly informs the female speaker’s curative restoration in Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850), the series also shows the conscious deliberation of a Victorian poet engaged in the task of renovating generic imperatives to release feminine subjectivity — which had been invalidated by t…[Read more]

Death pervades the juvenile poetry of Ann and Jane Taylor. Despite their commitment to the pedagogy of death, however, a singular lack of spiritual content or religious consolation distinguishes their first and, in many ways, their most famous works, Original Poems for Infant Minds (1804-1805) and Rhymes for the Nursery (1806). At the same time,…[Read more]