"Writing about a trip to the United States, the winner of the 1909 Nobel Prize for Peace, Paul Henri Benjamin Balluet d'Estournelles de Constant, wrote that he felt distanced from the present on a particular spot near the banks of the Hudson River, unsure whether he was even in America, let alone in the early twentieth century: "Was this America? Was this the year 1911 or 1912? No, it was a vision of Ancient Greece, an island of the Aegean Sea populated by nymphs, in the midst of whom I felt of another time, of another country, of another planet" (d'Estournelles de Constant 314). What was the cause of his temporal and terrestrial transportation; had he, like Socrates on the banks of the Illisos river, become nympholeptic? ... In this dissertation, I will argue that the poetry and activism of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, as well as her deep engagement with the field of classical studies began to blaze a trail for women like Agnata Frances Ramsay to explore further. I begin by examining cartoons from the late nineteenth century which are pictorial culminations of attitudes held in the mid-nineteenth century so that the context of women's achievements in classical studies and the poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning which I will closely examine in the second and third chapters of this study may be better understood by my readers. From the late nineteenth century environment of the introduction, we will travel, like Étournelles de Constant, to some islands in the Aegean for the first chapter, which considers nymphs in their Archaic and Classical Greek context, and then return, for the bulk of this study, to the mid-nineteenth century."--From Introduction.
"An island of nymphs" : Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Victorian women's classical education