Constructing the Disabled Poetess: The Reception and Poetics of Frances Browne

Constructing the Disabled Poetess:The Reception and Poetics of Frances Browne Caley Liane Ehnes (bio) and Kylee-Anne Hingston (bio) Recent scholarship has highlighted the way nineteenth-century critics "obsessed over" the bodies of popular poetesses Letitia Elizabeth Landon (Brown 187) and Felicia Hemans (Laird 500). Even our own attention as modern readers has a somatic bent: as Tricia Lootens notes, the enduring critical tendency for a "histrionic shying-away from sentimental verse [continues to present] itself as a healthy response to texts conceived as [End Page 166] contagious, fleshly bodies of bad faith" (16; emphasis added). In this paper, we reconsider the "contagious, fleshly bodies of bad faith" and so-called bad poetry by considering a poet whose disabled body became an essential marker of her identity as a poetess, whether she wished it or not. A case study of Frances Browne's early poetry and the editorial notes and reviews that reframed her as "the Blind Poetess of Ulster" demonstrates the ease with which the disabled body was integrated into the cultural narrative of the Victorian poetess. Building on Alexis Easley's reading of Browne's position in and engagement with the new media of the era, this essay rereads Browne's early poetry as part of the rise of the poetess and invites a reconsideration of her poetry and her reception as a disabled poetess. In particular, we find in Browne's early poetry a distinct consciousness of and even push-back against the dominant cultural significations of non-normative bodies. Throughout her career, Browne deftly navigated the literary market, embodying the roles demanded of her by her publishers, editors, and the public; however, unlike her early self-branding as an Irish poetess (Easley 177), her identity as a blind working-class poet was imposed upon her by the Countess of Blessington through a note she appended to Browne's first contribution to The Keepsake in 1843. Blessington's note invites readers to interpret Browne's poem through both an aesthetic and biographical lens, merging Browne's poetic aesthetics with both her lived experience as a disabled woman and her "humble" origins, transforming her into a disabled working-class poetess whose "genius … surely acquires double the value" due to the circumstances surrounding it (111). This positioning of Browne as a "genius" whose work as a poetess is more remarkable and embodied because of, and not despite, her blindness informs subsequent affective and critical responses to her verse and her genius. For instance, Alicia Jane Sparrow's poetic response to Browne's first poetry volume emphasizes Browne's blindness both as central to her genius and as a source of wonder and inspiration.1 The final stanza of Sparrow's poem asks her imagined version of Browne if the feeling of the sun's rays, the hint of a rose's fragrance, and the sound of a wood-dove singing to her mate are what "give[s] thee gleams of bright-winged things, with loving human eyes?" "Oh!" Sparrow continues, "Chained in dark captivity upon a sunless shore, / Sweet child of genius, tell me, where hast thou learn'd thy lore?" (117).2 Like Letitia Elizabeth Landon's poem for Hemans and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's for Landon (discussed by Beverly Taylor elsewhere in this forum), Sparrow's poem in its use of apostrophe to address the absent and silent Browne allows Sparrow, herself a poetess, to define Browne for her readers and create a narrative that serves her own branding. In this case, Sparrow clearly positions Browne's work as limited by blindness in contrast to the critical and informed poetics of the sighted poetess who can see with "human eyes" and learn poetic "lore" from knowable sources. Reading Browne as part of this tradition encourages a re-evaluation of her poetry [End Page 167] by highlighting the artificial and arbitrary nature of the poetess designation and the way such categories shape reception and interpretation of female poets from this era. One of Browne's earliest periodical poems, the Irish Penny Journal's "The Pilgrim at the Well," further demonstrates how Browne's later reputation as a blind poetess colours the way critics read her poetry...

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