‘My Elizabeth Barrett Browning film needs a woman’s touch – but where are all the female directors?’
Screenwriter of biopic about the radical poet says the industry must do more to get women behind the camera lens
July 2021
Carol Rumens's poem of the week
Poem of the week: Sonnet from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
A defiant assertion of the poet’s power to overcome physical separation from her beloved
June 2021
Pain on the page: is this the end of the hysterical, ill woman of literature?
From Hilary Mantel to Irenosen Okojie, contemporary writers are rewriting the story of illness and the female body
February 2021
Two Way Mirror by Fiona Sampson review – a fine life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
What we can learn from Elizabeth Barrett Browning's years in lockdown
December 2020
Elizabeth Barrett Browning letter describing lonely quarantine up for sale
Auctioneers say 1839 letter to her cousin bemoaning isolation in Torquay, with visitors ‘a thing forbidden’, is very apt reading this year
August 2018
Shortcuts
Karl Ove Knausgaard is wrong – writers should own dogs
The author blames his dog for the fact that he was blocked for two years. But pets provide a vital emotional lifeline for anybody who spends time alone
June 2017
Fatal attraction – writers' and artists' obsession with the sea
From Shakespeare to Woolf, Turner to Gormley, Philip Hoare explores the eternal allure of the ocean
February 2017
Victorians Undone by Kathryn Hughes review – the naked truth
Tennyson smelt and Darwin suffered from wind … this study of the bodies of famous Victorians is life-writing at its most dazzling
March 2016
Sebastian Faulks: How Poems That Make Grown Women Cry made me cry
Is it a poet’s job to make the reader weep? Sebastian Faulks is moved to tears by an anthology of verse chosen by women
June 2015
The top 10 literary swoons
From the Virgin Mary to Chaucer’s Criseyde to the narrator of The Bloody Chamber, here are the most memorable fainters, female and male
April 2014
Books blog
John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and the literary spouse
When Steinbeck was stumped for a title for his novel, his wife saved the day. Literary history is full of marital interventions, but what's your favourite example of writers wedded to their inspiration?
March 2014
Books blog
Elizabeth Barrett Browning's five best poems
Elizabeth Browning remembered in Google Doodle
June 2013
Gender balancing the books
We counted the numbers of male and female reviewers and authors under review in the major UK books sections for a month in 2012 and again for a month this year. Alex Clark reflects on why the review pages still bestow 'secondhand status' on women
May 2012
Browning's bicentenary is worth celebrating
Letters: Browning has been overshadowed by Dickens in their bicentenary year, but this is not for lack of attempts by the Browning Society to mark the occasion
Why such muted celebrations for Robert Browning's bicentenary?
Punch lampooned him, Wilde and James mocked him, but 'taken as a whole the man was great'. By John Dugdale
Robert Browning – a poet worth remembering
Margaret Reynolds
Margaret Reynolds: The Victorian didn't have the flash and dash of Dickens, but he was a great and brave writer
February 2012
Love poems: writers choose their favourites for Valentine's Day
Is there a perfect love poem? Authors and poets choose those verses that have special meaning for them
May 2010
Carol Rumens's poem of the week
Poem of the week: Sonnets from the Portuguese, No 43, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
From its brilliantly unassuming beginning, Barrett Browning's Sonnet 43 - better known for its opening line, "How do I love thee?" - unfolds into a merging of erotic and mystical experience that recalls Dante
Carol Rumens's poem of the weekPoem of the week: Sonnets from the Portuguese, No 43, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning