Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Shakespeare 'This is Living Art'

For most of the twentieth century the exuberant fluency of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's art was not regarded as worthy of serious attention. Even the evidence for the swiftness of her wit, thought and composition remains more impressionistic and anecdotal than firmly proven. Through close attention to original manuscript material, Josie Billington argues that Barrett Browning's fast, fine and excitedly vigorous and agile imaginative intelligence is Shakespearean, both in its power and in the creative drive and dynamic to which it gives rise. Billington contends that for Barrett Browning, as for Shakespeare, writing was demonstrably a creative event not a second-order record of experience, revealing that Barrett Browning's characteristic habits of composition, and her creative procedure, resemble in significant ways that of Shakespeare. A fascinating study of both writers' analogous creative dispositions, minds and modes.

Josie Billington teaches in the School of English, University of Liverpool, UK.