Review by Choice Review
Editor Forster is less a feminist critic than a popularizer of moderate, "great-woman" feminism (cf. Significant Sisters, CH, Jul '85). We may assume that she is aiming at the reader she knows: someone who is adjusting well to women's rights, who reads some poetry (knows at least the EBB of the Sonnets from the Portuguese), and is ready to confirm just how lovely a woman-poet can be and still be ahead of her time. For Johns Hopkins's sake, one hopes their market research shows many such readers: they, at least, will not be disappointed. As for students, scholars, and teachers of English poetry who have watched Elizabeth Barrett Browning become, over the past 15 years, the touchstone-figure of a divided theoretical feminism (see, most recently, Deirdre David's Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy, 1987; Helen Cooper's Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Woman and Artist, CH, Dec '88), their disappointment is bound to be huge. The need was for a new single-volume collection, with line numbers and notes and apparatus and critical context--a real working text. Here instead is a circumspect gift-book selection, elegantly printed in a beautifully copyedited text, to be sure, but without notes or bibliography (though with brief introduction and forewords to poem-groups as they were published in EBB's lifetime). It includes every last one of the love sonnets (but no "George Sand"), omits Part 2 of Casa Guidi Windows (though Markus's 1977 scholarly edition is out of print), and has "Lady Geraldine's Courtship" but no Aurora Leigh. Forster's editorial grounds for her choices are not wholly convincing. For general readers and lower-division undergraduates. F. Alaya Ramapo College of New Jersey
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
