‘Even a lady sometimes raises her voice’: Mary Russell Mitford and Elizabeth Barrett Browning

This chapter offers an example of biographical experimentation and feminist historiography in Woolf’s engagement with minor Victorian women writers Mary Russell Mitford and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, as she is drawn to their lives as a testimony to the complex interrelation of money, authorship and domestic tyranny that underpins her analysis in A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas. Woolf challenges nostalgic accounts of Mitford’s rural idyll by exploring Dr Mitford’s emotional and financial abuse of his daughter, while cautiously testing core ideas of her New Biography in a series of increasingly fictionalising reviews of Mary Russell Mitford and Her Surroundings (1920). Her writing on Barrett Browning responds similarly to contemporary sensationalist representations of domestic tyranny in The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1930) to reframe Barrett Browning’s life as wide-reaching critique of patriarchal society’s worst excesses.