The marriage of heaven and earth in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s A Drama of Exile, Sonnets from the Portuguese, and “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point.”

In this project, I analyze Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s (EBB’s) mid-career poetry alongside her desire for the union of heavenly and earthly, sacred and secular subjects. Other scholars have identified this union in her later work, Aurora Leigh, but EBB’s seemingly downward trajectory, from heaven-focused in her early career to increasingly earth-concerned in her mid-career work, has often prompted critics to align EBB’s poetic career with supposed secularization of Victorian culture. However, the three mid-career texts I examine in this thesis – A Drama of Exile, Sonnets from the Portuguese, and “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point” – exhibit growth and maturation of her theological thought from one work to the next and show her testing and working out the necessary elements for a heaven and earth union. Immanence and incarnation, rather than transcendence alone, play a vital role in these texts. I also read these works as hospitable to a postsecular lens, as postsecularism is interested in breaking down the binary between the sacred and secular. In all three works, love – between humans and reflective of Christ’s divine love – is what enacts the marriage of heaven and earth.