ABSTRACT
Fictions about “notable” historical women abound in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and have attained particular prominence since the 1990s, with the critical and commercial success of novels such as Michael Cunningham’s The Hours and Joyce Carol Oates’s Blonde.2 Their hybrid nature renders them a fascinating field of critical inquiry from a biographical angle, as well as from a gender studies point of view. Adopting a gender-sensitive approach to biographical fiction, this essay examines six novels about Elizabeth Barrett Browning and locates them in the context of the poet’s reception in the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries: C. Lenanton’s Miss Barrett’s Elopement, Virginia Woolf’s Flush: A Biography, Helen Elmira Waite’s How Do I Love Thee: The Story of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Constance Buel Burnett’s The Silver Answer: A Romantic Biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Margaret Forster’s Lady’s Maid, and Laura Fish’s Strange Music. Critics so far have largely overlooked some of them (notably Lenanton, Waite, and Burnett). Viewed together, the novels reveal various ways in which the figure of a “notable woman” can be employed in biographical fiction, and how generic specificities are complicated by questions of gender. Moreover, a comparison of several novels about the same subject also allows for some more general points to be made about the functions and narrative possibilities of the biographical novel as an “in-between” genre that has gained immense popularity.
