The Poetical Works of Robert Browning Volume IX: The Ring and the Book, Books IX-XII

Reviews / Votes

Stefan Hawlin and Tim Burnett have delivered Browning's major long poem in wonderfully pristine form, and their exemplary annotations leave only the myseteries which were present from the beginning.. * TLS * [this edition] is an extradordinary work, both in its meticulous textual scholarship and in the detail of its attention to Browning's own exceptionally detailed imagining of the past. * TLS * ... the editors are to be heartily congratulated on a masterly piece of editing. * Contemporary Review * The tradition of Browning studies initiated by the "Me Society" is bearing remarkable fruit in the magnificent OUP series of his complete works which has now reached volume IX, the concluding section of The Ring and the Book. * Literary Review * The Ring and the Book is a wonderfully told and gripping story, in which, as this edition makes clear, Browning transforms his material into a drama of Jamesian scope and subtlety without ever losing the sense of earthy reality on which it is grounded. James was a great admirer: reading The Ring and the Book we can see why. * Literary Review * The Ring and the Book provides one of the most richly interesting reading experiences anyone could hope for ... It is a true privilege to be alive in 2004, therefore, and to have lived to see the unfolding glory of the Oxford Browning under the general editorship of Michael Meredith. Stefan Hawlin and Tim Burnett have now come to the end of a three-volume annotated edition of the poem that is a superb feat of scholarship. * A. N. Wilson, "World of Books", Daily Telegraph, April 2004 * Whatever we make of the new discoveries, we shall never want to read this poem other than in the Oxford edition. A great canvas, long blackened by varnish, has been painstakingly and triumphantly restored. * A. N. Wilson, "World of Books", Daily Telegraph, April 2004 * Hawlin and Burnett have been scrupulous in their examination of the 1888-9 edition . . . The extensive annotations . . . are also illuminating, and certainly an improvement on the brief notes in the Broadview and Penguin editions. But the best things about this volume lie in its back pages. The first is an appendix that presents previously unknown source material concerning the cadaver synod from Browning's father's historical notebooks. The second is an afterword by Michael Meredith and Simonetta Berbeglia that presents a fresh perspective on the real history of the Franceschini murder case, based on new research in the archives in Arezzo. Both make significant and original contributions to Browning studies. * Tennyson Research Bulletin * Hawlin and Burnett's concluding volume of The Ring and the Book is a magnificent achievement , accessible to the general reader and an indispensable scholarly tool. * Tennyson Research Bulletin *