“I begin to believe in Ovid, or look for a metamorphosis”: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Veiled Reception of Ovid

By the late Romantic period, Ovid had been all but banished in the European literary tradition, his work associated with debauchery and viewed as trivial compared to Homer and Virgil. “Ovid’s a rake, as half his verses show him” Byron writes in Don Juan (1819), and in his influential 1818 lectures, Friedrich von Schlegel perceives in Ovid the “symptoms of declining taste,” especially in his “unhealthy superfluity of fancy, and a sentimental effeminacy of expression.” Despite these smears on Ovid’s reputation, some writers found Ovid to be useful. In her dissertation, Emily McConkey examines the allusive writing of Barrett Browning, who more explicitly admired Homer, but at the same time subtly invoked Ovid’s poetry and myths throughout her life.

The challenge of measuring Barrett Browning’s imitation of Ovid stems in part from her tendency to omit him in catalogues of her literary heroes. Writing in the wake of his decline in reputation, EBB likely felt it best not to advertise her interest in his works, but she drew on him nonetheless. Ovid’s notion of metamorphosis helped Barrett Browning to articulate her desires for self-expansion, whether through her own identification with the daring and boyish Phaethon in writings from her youth or through the representation of a young girl who transforms the great Hector of Troy into shrubbery in Ovidian fashion in the poem “Hector in the Garden” (1846). Furthermore, Ovid’s exploration of the politics of women’s bodies and voices provided a powerful model of rebellion for a woman seeking to position herself as both a serious writer in the male canon of epic and as a political advocate for the marginalized. From her casual allusions to Ovid’s myths in adolescence to her political reviving of his myths in later poems such as “A Musical Instrument,” EBB’s reception of Ovid reveals much about the nature of classical reception in the nineteenth century, especially those receptions concealed in the aftermath of disrepute.

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Emily McConkey is a PhD candidate in English at McGill University. Her dissertation examines Ovid’s absent presence in the writings of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and locates this example of classical reception within the wider context of Ovid’s ambivalent position in the nineteenth century. Her master’s thesis focused on the figure of Medusa in Victorian women’s art and poetry. Among her other research interests is the intersection of poetry and music; she was a student researcher for the Christina Rossetti in Music archive (hosted by the University of Ottawa) from 2018 to 2022.