2. Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 398. Subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text. [BACK]

3. Matthew Arnold, "The Buried Life," in Victorian Poetry and Poetics, ed. Walter E. Houghton and G. Robert Stange, 2nd edition (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1968) 446-47, line 21. Other poems referred to are included in the same volume. [BACK]

4. For a provocative discussion of theatricality and the buried life, see Nina Auerbach, Private Theatricals: The Lives of the Victorians (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990). "The process of living," for Victorians, she says "was the acting of a role; yet it also entailed a fear of performance" (4-5). [BACK]

5. Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851-1914 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990), 14. These social phenomena are discussed pertinently in relation to the rise of capitalism by Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man: On the Social Psychology of Capitalism (New York: Random House, 1976). On artists and changing market conditions, see Janet Wolff, The Social Production of Art (New York: New York University Press, 1984). [BACK]

6. Regenia Gagnier has discussed the commodification of the dandy and the late-Victorian society of the spectacle in Idylls of the Marketplace (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1986). [BACK]

7. Meredith Raymond and Mary Rose Sullivan, eds., Women of Letters: Selected Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Mary Russell Mitford (Boston: Twayne, 1987), 155. Subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text. For a thorough examination of the important influence of George Sand on English novelists and poets alike, see Patricia Thomsen, George Sand and the Victorians (London: Macmillan, 1977). [BACK]

8. Betty Miller, Elizabeth Barrett to Miss Mitford (London, J. Murray, 1954), 145, as quoted in Thomsen, p. 44. Subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text. [BACK]

9. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Harriet Waters Preston (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1900), 103. Subsequent quotations from Browning's other poems are also from this edition. [BACK]

10. Letter to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 2 April 1861, in Gordon Ray, ed., The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1946) 4:229. [BACK]

11. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, letter to W. M. Thackeray, 21 April 1861, in ibid. The exchange of letters is on 226-29. [BACK]

12. See Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy (New York: Random House, 1982); and Robert Gittings, Young Thomas Hardy (London: Penguin, 1978), for detailed descriptions of Hardy's initial sorties into the London literary world and his luck in impressing powerful men such as George Meredith and Leslie Stephen. [BACK]

13. As quoted in Laurence Lerner and John Holmstrom, eds., Hardy and His Readers (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1968), 23. [BACK]

14. Robert Gittings, introduction to The Hand of Ethelberta (New York: Macmillan, 1975), 21. [BACK]

15. Penny Boumelha, "A Complicated Position for a Woman: The Hand of Ethelberta, " in The Sense of Sex: Feminist Perspectives on Hardy, ed. Margaret R. Higonnet (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 244. [BACK]

16. Hardy's mother, Jemima Hand, Millgate reminds us, was not only a fatalist but also a fiercely determined woman who wished to move her family forward in the world. She, like Ethelberta's family, had been in service. Her ambitions for her eldest son, Thomas, resemble those of Ethelberta for herself But, perhaps even more significant, Jemima kept Hardy supplied with books, including Johnson's Rasselas, Dryden's translation of Vergil, and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress . See Peter Widdowson, Hardy in History (New York: Routledge, 1989), 157. Subsequent citations of Widdowson are given parenthetically in the text. [BACK]

17. Florence Emily Hardy, The Early Life of Thomas Hardy: 1840-1891, ghostwritten for and edited by Thomas Hardy (London: Macmillan, 1928), 134. [BACK]

18. John Goode, Thomas Hardy: The Offensive Truth (New York: Blackwell, 1988). [BACK]

19. Thomas Hardy, The Complete Poems, ed. James Gibson (New York: Macmillan, 1976), 85. [BACK]

20. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, letter to W. M. Thackeray, 21 April 1861, in Ray (as in note 10). [BACK]

21. In this closing assessment of Barrett Browning I do not underestimate the importance of her own creation or manipulation of her audience. Anne Thackeray Ritchie, for instance, who from her youth was a devoted admirer of Mrs. Browning, regarded her first as a mother and wife, and only second as a writer. In her widely appreciated Records of Tennyson, Ruskin, and Browning (London: Macmillan, 1892), 208, Ritchie notes that this mother bemoaned the loss (in boxes in transit) of her son's velvet suits more than that of the manuscript of Aurora Leigh . Moreover, by choosing to publish certain poems such as Sonnets from the Portuguese, Barrett Browning helped further the view that her career and domestic life were inseparable—and helped ensure that they were seen as a romance plot. Many reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic held Mrs. Browning in the highest esteem as wife, mother, and poet. For a summary of some of the more famous reviews, see Elizabeth Helsinger, Robin Sheets, and William Veeder, eds., The Woman Question (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), vol. 3, chapter 2. [BACK]