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• Margaret McGlynn
• John Schiumo
• Sandra Donaldson
• Daniel Sucato

Sandra Donaldson

Distinguished English professor on a mission to change literary reputation of Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Story by Cynthia Machamer : Photo by Eric Hylden

In the 1970s when Sandra Donaldson was beginning her doctoral dissertation work at the University of Connecticut, a committee member suggested she look at Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861). “That sentimental love poet?” she thought to herself. But when her efforts to research poet Elizabeth Siddall Rossetti fell flat, Donaldson took another glance at E. B. B.

Today, Donaldson is considered one of the foremost feminist literary critics on this 19th-century poet. She has edited two volumes—Elizabeth Barrett Browning: An Annotated Bibliography of the Commentary and Criticism, 1826–1990 and Critical Essays on Elizabeth Barrett Browning—and is in the midst of an extensive project that will most assuredly repair the image of the poet whose works seem to exist in the shadow of her famous poet husband, Robert Browning.

The project, supported by a $130,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, is to produce a new scholarly, five-volume edition of E. B. B.’s works. The last complete edition of her works was published in 1900, replete with errors and omissions.

Donaldson—principal investigator and overseer of the work of five subeditors and five assistant editors who are spread around the U.S., Canada and the U.K.—is more than qualified to undertake the work that will provide a reliable foundation for scholars to analyze and interpret E. B. B.’s works. Donaldson is a Chester Fritz Distinguished Professor of English and Women’s Studies, the highest honor at the University of North Dakota, where she has worked since 1977, after earning master’s and doctoral degrees in English from the University of Connecticut.

Donaldson is on a quest to help the world meet E. B. B. as “a thoughtful, passionate writer who exemplifies the engaged intellectual, one who from her earliest days as a writer and thinker cared deeply about social justice.” The grant is enabling the international group of scholars to travel to library archives around the country. The group’s collection of more than 475 of E. B. B.’s poems and her verse-novel, Aurora Leigh, will be published by Pickering & Chatto in London when the edition is complete in fall 2008.

Donaldson, who grew up in Buffalo, says she is grateful to UB for helping her develop “the life of the mind.”