There has not been a scholarly edition of the works of the influential Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning (EBB) in over a century, the last having been published in 1900. At this writing (2008), a new, five-volume print edition of EBB’s works is underway, with Sandra Donaldson as the general editor. The new edition will provide readers accurate and accessible texts with annotations on context, composition, and publication, creating a reliable foundation for more complete analysis and interpretation of EBB’s works and of Victorian Britain.

As a supplement to that work, this collection serves multiple purposes. First, it will contain versions of works that are difficult to represent in print, such as those from the volumes of Poems that were heavily revised. The second group is composed of those that remain unpublished mainly because of the difficulty of interpreting her handwriting and directions; mounting these materials especially will allow us to invite scholars to propose readings and interpretations in addition to ours.

Presentation all versions of works that EBB revised significantly, the first category, is meant to solve the problem of the linear aspect of print. Some poems were revised numerous times, even in printed copies of her works. Presentation on facing pages is successful for items like her two published translations of Æschylus’s Prometheus Bound, where line numbers align fairly well. Foot-of-the-page variants work when there are few revisions. But when lines and stanzas are shifted and the concept of the poem is rethought, the linear mode of the book is less successful, especially for direct comparisons and recognition of patterns of revision. The ability to manipulate texts offered by TEI-compliant presentation allows us, for example, to instantiate the versions of the poem titled “An Island” when it was published in 1850 and “The Island” when it was published in 1837. Viewed in this way it becomes apparent that it isn’t really a different poem, as is sometimes said about heavily revised work, but that it was worked and reworked in ways that can be seen and described specifically. Too, instantiating extant versions in a row then examining her correspondence at points of the generation and publication of these versions can reveal aspects of the cultural and historical changes around her and in her own thinking, whether stated explicitly in reference to the poem or only mentioned or discussed at the time she was working on it.

Regarding the second category, the gap between the relative certainty about a work that is asserted by its publication in print and the certain uncertainty of materials in manuscript that are difficult to transcribe — and that earlier scholars did not wish to commit to the finality of print — may be bridged by our presenting our transcriptions and encouraging other scholars to offer their readings. Thus, we will be translating the unpublished materials collaboratively.

This project also serves a pedagogical purpose. Under the guidance of Sandra Donaldson, students--graduates and undergraduates alike—are writing scholarly introductions and annotations to select works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, as well as encoding them in TEI compliant XML.

Digitization Standards

These materials are being encoded in XML in compliance with TEI guidelines (P4) under the direction of the Editorial Consultant, Crystal Alberts. In order to ensure accuracy and consistency of the electronic edition, the methods of encoding and choice of tags have been explicitly documented within the files and will be incorporated into the editing guidelines.

Images used on this site will be converted from camera raw to TIFF files and the master archived. All images will conform to the preservation standard of 600 dpi. Copies of the original TIFF files will be modified for web delivery and assigned Dublin Core metadata. Our files conform to the open standards set by TEI and the best practices set by the Digital Library Federation (DLF), as well as the National Information Standards Organization (NISO).

To ensure the persistence and preservation of this project, it will be stored on the University of North Dakota server. Although these files are currently being delivered in XHTML, our intention is to deliver them in fully searchable XML in the future.