Lately, I've assumed a lot of things about things that I shouldn't have. No need to go into the details. I am an experienced assumer. Sometimes, it's a wonder how I get through a day without injuring myself or worse, I assume so much so often. That driver is going to respect the crosswalk I'm crossing on foot. That sort of thing.
Here's an assumption: Elizabeth Barrett Browning is a minor English poet of the 19th Century, a footnote to her more famous and deserving husband.
She wrote one really famous poem ("How Do I Love Thee") and one famous book (Sonnets from the Portuguese) and that was that. That footnote part isn't the assumption, though; it's a fact, for that's how she has been treated in anthology after anthology, survey course after survey course. A one-hit wonder. It's the "deserving" part that constitutes the shaky assumption.
A new biography, Two-Way Mirror, by the scholar and poet Fiona Sampson, reviewed in The New York Times today, wants to undermine that assumption and place Barrett Browning back on the pedestal she occupied in Victorian England at the climax of her career, when Robert Browning was second fiddle.
So, another book to add to my reading list!
The shaky assumption is dead! Long live the assumption!
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