A Year in Reading: Joanna Biggs

I haven’t finished it yet but my best discovery this year was by . In Florence in June with one of my best friends from college, we took a walk between drinks and dinner and came across the plaque at Casa Guidi: “Qui scrisse e mori ELISABETTA BARRET BROWNING.” She wrote and died here. Inside the next day, we found out that she slept facing a portrait a century later, in the middle of the living room so that her baby son could interrupt her as often as he pleased. Stopping in London on the way back to NYC, I bought a copy of and was bowled over. It’s a nine-book verse novel (which is why you’ll forgive me for mentioning it while I’m still reading) about a girl who wants to write poetry surrounded by men who think they can’t. “Mere women, personal and passionate,” Aurora’s cousin Romney says, “You give us doating mothers, and chaste wives, / Sublime Madonnas, and enduring saints! / We get no Christ from you, —and verily / We shall not get a poet, in my mind.” I wish the sentiment felt more remote, but there is something wonderful about the case against women poets being put so well by a woman poet in her masterwork. I feel like an idiot for not having started on it sooner. I also read by , and was delighted by ’s line drawings of the Casa Guidi living room I’d seen that summer.