Alison Chapman articulates the contribution of her wide-ranging study of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and her circle when she notices that Barrett Browning scholarship typically treats as separate the poet's interests in spiritualism and her devotion to Italian Risorgimento politics, “despite the repeated alignment of spiritualism and politics in her correspondence and poetry” (171). This is a book of synthesis. Through a fruitful and persistent clustering of ideas and people, Chapman's book uncovers the multidirectional relationships in Barrett Browning's poetry to the politics of abolition in the United States; to women's rights activism in England; and to English foreign policy toward Italy, Austria, and the United States—all while explaining how Barrett Browning's fascination with spiritualism reveals her concerns about poetic and political agency, topics connected through the social and print cultures that the Brownings participated in and often led during the decades they called Florence home.

This rootedness in Florence at mid-century gives Chapman a productive approach to intersectionality as she examines the poetry of Barrett Browning as well as the poetry, periodical publication, and journalism of women of her Florence circle, prominently Isa Blagden, Elizabeth Kinney, Sophie May Eckley, Eliza Ogilvy, and Theodosia Garrow Trollope, but also considering, more briefly, Harriett Hosmer, Anna Murphy Jameson, Kate Field, and a multiplicity of other Victorian English women living abroad. How, Chapman asks in various ways, do we understand proper Victorian femininity and its limits by giving prominence to national identity over gender? Central, then, for her is the question of the category of “English Poetess” that preoccupies chapter 5, “The ‘English Poetess’ and Aurora Leigh,” and persists throughout the book. Chapman's careful extrication of the modifier from the noun illuminates “English Poetess” as helpfully as her accounting of Barrett Browning's resistance to feminizing the professional role. More broadly, Chapman explores various cases of liminality—whether architectural as with palazzo balconies, or print as with expatriate newspapers, or domestic as with female cohabitation described as “female marriages”—that provided mid-Victorian women living abroad with opportunities to reimagine and redefine their identity in productive and often liberating terms. In Chapman's words, “Networking the Nation maps the careers of these expatriate women poets who were based in Florence in the key years of patriotic Risorgimento politics, tracing their writing's relationship to transnational social and print communities, and the sometimes problematic but schismatic shift in their poetry from the conventional sphere of the poetess” (xxvii). Jennifer Orr's Literary Networks and Dissenting Print Culture in Romantic-Period Ireland (2015) offers an analogous study of social and print networks that testifies to Chapman's scholarly approach, albeit without the central figure of a celebrity to organize them, and placing religion alongside nationalism rather than gender.

The generative sense-making of Chapman's tripartite approach to Barrett Browning and her Florentine circle becomes clearest, unsurprisingly, only after one has read the third part of the book. In an initial section, she documents physical sites of Florence, focusing on three households that served as “informal, fluid, and heterogeneous” spaces for women to gather, including Barrett Browning's Casa Guidi, where the poet “fostered a coterie that operated as a de facto salon” (9). In chapters that focus on Blagden's Villa Bricheri and Garrow Trollope's Villino Trollope, Chapman delineates the freedoms and the alliances that Victorian women discovered to imagine flexible paths to writing professions and to political and national identities. The second section, “The Expatriate Poetess,” draws case studies from Aurora Leigh and from the writing of Garrow Trollope, Blagden, and Ogilvy, arguing that these more malleable identities both surfaced in their poetry and were further extended by their poetic and journalistic texts. In the final section, Chapman turns to spiritualism and to questions of agency, materiality, and resurrected bodies (whether political, social, imaginary, or spiritual) to put paid to her interest in networks throughout. In any given section, Chapman's analysis occasionally lapses into diffuseness (particularly in the detail-rich chapter on Blagden's home in the suburb of Bellosguardo); however, her readings remain consistently insightful and compelling, even if not always tightly connected.

At the moment of its publication, Chapman's book presses on the urgency of critically examining the stakes of her key term, “expatriate.” She never problematizes her choice in privileging these women's experiences as expatriates, even while she is aware of the economic and political reasons that the Brownings, particularly, had for leaving England. The current moment calls for close consideration of not only the terms “migrant” and “refugee,” but also of “expatriate,” “visitor,” and even “foreigner” in ways that might help historicize our political debates. Chapman's consideration of the “hybrid” national and ethnic identities of both Blagden and Ogilvy could contribute to these discussions and to the privileging of terms that often rests only obliquely in the economic or political status of a person living away from their home region.

Chapman generously opens her text with an eight-page timeline of events around the lives of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and her social circles, juxtaposing those biographical and publication details with major events of Italian politics in the 1840s through early 1870s. Both the capaciousness of her thinking and the depth of her research come through with this opening gesture, and those traits persist through the textual close readings that ground her afterword.