India Kuykendall
India Kuykendall
Ms. Baker
AP English IV
March 9, 2015 Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Thesis: “How Do I Love Thee?”(Sonnet 43), “If Thou Must Love Me” (Sonnet 14), and Aurora Leigh are three of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s most famous, admired, and passionate works. They all are used to explore and challenge traditional Victorian women.
I. Introduction
II. Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Life
a. Childhood
b. Personal life
c. Career
III. Significant works
a. How Do I Love Thee (Sonnet 43)
b. If Thou Must Love Me (Sonnet 14)
c. Aurora Leigh
IV. How Do I love thee
a. Metaphor
b. Imagery
c. Repetition
d. Symbolism
V. If Thou Must Love Me(Sonnet 13)
a. Theme
b. Characterization
c. Style
d. Rhyming
VI. Aurora Leigh
a. Suspense
b. Narrator
c. Diction
d. Foreshadowing
VII. Conclusion
India Kuykendall
Ms. Baker
AP English IV
March 8, 2015
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Elizabeth Barrett Browning constructed some of the most passionate, classical, admiring works of literature during her time. In her writings, she devotedly brought to light several social issues such as child labor, slavery and oppression of women. Elizabeth wrote countless poems but she was best known, and remembered for her poem How Do I Love Thee? Browning profoundly changed the rules of poetry and women’s place in the poetic realm. She was inspired by her husband Robert Browning, he had a great influence on her writing just as she had on his. How Do I Love Thee (Sonnet 43), If Thou Must Love Me (Sonnet 14), and Aurora Leigh are three of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s most famous, admired, and passionate works. They all are used to explore and challenge traditional Victorian women. Elizabeth Barrett Browning was born March 6, 1806 in Durham, England. Some of Elizabeth Barrett's family had lived in Jamaica since 1655. The main wealth of the household derived from Edward Barrett (1734–1798), landowner of 10,000 acres in Cinnamon Hill, Cornwall, Cambridge, and Oxford estates in northern Jamaica. Elizabeth's maternal grandfather owned sugar plantations, mills, glassworks and ships that traded between Jamaica and Newcastle. Biographer Julia Markus states that the poet believed that she had African blood through her grandfather Charles Moulton. There is no evidence to suggest that her line of the Barrett family had any African ancestry, although other branches did, through the children of plantation owners and slaves. What the family believed to be their genealogy in relation to Jamaica is unclear.
Her father, Edward Moulton-Barrett, made most of his considerable fortune from Jamaican sugar plantations, and in 1809 he bought Hope End, a 500-acre estate near the Malvern Hills.(Wikipedia) Elizabeth received her education at home and attended lessons with the tutor of her brother. During her time in Hope End, she was an extremely studious and smart girl. Since childhood, Elizabeth was quite attached to her siblings and father. Elizabeth lived a privileged childhood, riding her pony around the grounds, visiting other families in the neighborhood, and arranging family theatrical productions with her eleven brothers and sisters. Although frail, she apparently had no health problems until 1821, when Dr. Coker prescribed opium for a nervous disorder. Her mother died when she was 22, and critics mark signs of this loss in Aurora Leigh. (Victorian Web)
Elizabeth wrote her first known poem at the tender age of six or eight, titled “On the Cruelty of Forcement to Man”. The manuscript of the same is presently in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. As a gift on her 14th birthday, her father insured the publication of her long Homeric poem titled “The Battle of Marathon.” In May 1821, her first independent publication came out in The New Monthly Magazine, titled “Stanzas Excited by Reflections on the Present State of Greece”. This was followed by the publication of "Thoughts Awakened by
