Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Energies of Fandom

Abstract

In letters written just after the publication of her remarkable “novel-poem” Aurora Leigh (1856), Elizabeth Barrett Browning tracked what these days we would call the poem’s buzz. The letters reflect her excitement and apparent mystification about the poem’s reception. In a letter to her sister Arabella dated 10–18 December 1856, she wrote that the poem is “taken up with favour with certain persons, to the amount of a mania;” in a letter to Anna Jameson dated 2 February 1857, she reported on the “extravagant” fan mail she received, and jokingly marveled at the spectacle of “quite decent women taking the part of the book in a sort of effervescence which I hear of with astonishment.”¹ Some of these women indeed wrote directly to Barrett Browning to thank her for “‘help’—for new views of ‘love, truth, and purity,’” as she informed Julia Martin in a letter dated 10 March 1857.² Influential readers were vocal in their enthusiasm: John Ruskin wrote to Robert Browning assuring him “all the best people shout with me, rapturously” in praise of the poem.³ While reviews in the major periodicals were mixed, the passionate response the poem aroused in many individual readers is striking—as is Barrett Browning’s surprised, delighted and sometimes bemused fascination with the “extravagances” of her readers.⁴