The Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning

FAIN: RQ-50139-05

University of North Dakota (Grand Forks, ND 58202-6059)
Sandra Donaldson (Project Director: November 2004 to April 2008)

Publication of a 5-volume edition of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poetry. (36 months)

Our project is to prepare a new edition of the works of the influential Victorian poet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, in a five-volume scholarly edition plus an electronic edition. Our aim is to present EBB's works in accurate accessible texts, annotated with information about context, composition, and publication. The last complete edition of her works was published in 1900 in an edition noted for its errors and omissions. When our edition is published, people will for the first time be able to read in one place accurate texts of all of EBB's works (we've identified more than 475 items to include). Scholars will have a reliable foundation to enable them to better analyze and interpret her works. All interested readers will thus meet a thoughtful, passionate writer who exemplifies the engaged intellectual, one who from her earliest days as a writer and thinker cared deeply about social justice. One of her first poems, "On the Cruelty of Forcement to Man; Alluding to the Press Gang," was written when she was eight years old, and one of her last, "The Forced Recruit at Solferino," was published eight months before her death. It is fitting, then, that the scholars participating in the project are an international group, working together as a team.