Definition
Mrs. Sutherland Orr (1828–1903) is known primarily as a biographer and literary critic of poet Robert Browning. Orr was born in Russia and spent a brief and turbulent period in India, following her marriage in 1857 to Sutherland George Gordon Orr. She was present for the Indian Mutiny in the same year, escaping from Aurangabad. Orr’s major works include her critical guide to Browning’s poetry, A Handbook to the Works of Robert Browning (1885), which went through multiple editions. Her Life and Letters of Robert Browning (1891) was the first full biography of the poet and received international attention. The biography incorporates segments of what was then newly available correspondence in the possession of Browning’s sister, presenting letters by Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning as part of the narrative of his life. Orr drew on her own knowledge of Browning to speculate on his personality, as she also did in the Handbook, and she collected anecdotes from...
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References
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Bailey, S. (2019). Orr, Alexandra. In: The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women's Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02721-6_110-1
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