SOURCE: “Feminist Views of a Victorian Poet,” in Christian Science Monitor, Vol. 81, No. 136, June 9, 1989, p. 12

In the following review, Rubin contrasts Forster's biography of Browning with Dorothy Mermin's Elizabeth Barrett Browning: The Origins of a New Poetry.

The first woman poet to establish herself in the major tradition and the first Victorian poet: Dorothy Mermin makes large claims for Elizabeth Barrett Browning, but she is also aware of the problems that make Barrett Browning's poetry unappealing, even to readers who like other Victorian poets.

Born in 1806—she was six years older than her husband, Robert Browning, and three years older than Tennyson—Elizabeth Barrett Browning was determined from childhood to become a great poet: a “female Homer,” as she hoped. Mermin points out that Christina Rossetti's medievalizing ballads, Arthur Hugh Clough's verse novel, Algernon Charles Swinburne's poems of the Italian Risorgimento, were all anticipated in her works.

During...