Poetry in Process: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Sonnets Notebook.

To date, the examination of Elizabeth Barrett Brownings\u27 composition and publication history has been hampered by the inaccessibility of the manuscripts and corrected proofs that were sold at public auction following the death of the Brownings\u27 son in 1913. This examination of the Sonnets manuscript notebook at the Armstrong Browning Library at Baylor University, then, sheds new light on Elizabeth Barrett Browning\u27s literary interests and activities in the early 1840\u27s as well as on her methods of composition and revision. Each of the twenty-three poems and fragments in the Sonnets notebook was written between 1842-1844, years which mark a turning point in Elizabeth Barrett Browning\u27s artistic development. Nearly half the poems in the notebook are unpublished, and examination of the unpublished pieces illuminates the author\u27s later work on the Sonnets from the Portuguese, Aurora Leigh, and Poems Before Congress. Moreover, the drafts of all the published poems in the notebook vary significantly from the versions published under the author\u27s supervision, and examination of these and other recently discovered drafts illuminates her process of revision and answers a number of questions about establishing a text of her poetry. By far the most significant implication of the present study of the Sonnets notebook involves the shortcomings in the existing criticism written without reference to Elizabeth Barrett Browning\u27s unpublished manuscripts. That many of the holographs scattered at the Sotheby auction of 1913 have been located calls for a re-assessment of Elizabeth Barrett Browning\u27s career in light of manuscripts--like those in Sonnets --to which critics and biographers have had no previous access. This examination of the Sonnets notebook is among the first in which such materials are incorporated, and in it the necessity of consulting Elizabeth Barrett Browning\u27s unpublished manuscripts is demonstrated throughout