Classical Daughters: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Margaret Fuller

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Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this article was presented at the “Domesticating the Classics in Nineteenth-Century England and America” panel at Feminism & Classics V: Bringing It All Back Home (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, May 2008). I would like to thank Yopie Prins for inviting me to contribute a paper to this panel.

Notes

¹See Hurst, Victorian Women Writers and the Classics.

²Her resentment recalls one of the period's negative images of women's relationship with classical studies, Milton's daughters being required to read Latin, Greek and Hebrew texts to their father without understanding those languages. Elizabeth Barrett wrote of a “Miss Nelly something” whose father “had amused himself by teaching her the Greek character[s], & had made her read the Hecuba thro', without, of course, her understanding a word” (Diary by E.B.B. 58).

³When Fuller fled from Rome after the fall of the Republic to the combined forces of the Pope and the French, she caused a sensation in Anglo-Florentine society by arriving accompanied by Giovanni Ossoli and their son. Fuller set out for America in 1850 from Casa Guidi, “returning to conservative New England as a figure of both political radicalism and sexual transgression” (Boggs 31).