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Frances Browne, the "Blind Poetess'': Towards a Poetics of Blind Writing

Lookup NU author(s): Dr Heather Tilley

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Abstract

This essay analyses the nineteenth-century reception of Frances Browne’s writing by both sighted and blind and visually impaired readers, exploring the competing ways in which the work was read bio-critically by the two groups. Sighted readers were concerned to test the validity of visual images constructed in the writing, while the blind and visually impaired community hailed the well-known poet and novelist as a role model. The essay concentrates on the poignantly ironic depiction of blindness in Browne’s 1861 novel, My Share of the World, in which a woman who experiences sight loss commits suicide, considering how the visiocentric medium within which Browne wrote impacted on her refusal to grant her heroine a happy ending.

Publication metadata

Author(s): Tilley H

Publication type: Article

Publication status: Published

Journal: Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies

Year: 2009

Volume: 3

Issue: 2

Pages: 147-161

ISSN (print): 1757-6458

ISSN (electronic): 1757-6466

Publisher: Liverpool University Press

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/jlc.0.0017

DOI: 10.1353/jlc.0.0017

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