The original Writers and Their Work volume on Elizabeth Barrett Browning, written by the key EBB critic of the period, Alethea Hayter, was published in 1965. Only 29 pages in length and drawing upon some of the insights developed in Hayter's earlier book-length study, Browning: A Poet's Work and Its Setting (1962), the Writers and Their Work Mrs volume offered a swift overview of EBB's career and some specific points on language and prosody, before closing with a telling assessment of the perceived status of EBB's poetry at that time:

Interestingly, Hayter's phrasing here recalls Virginia Woolf's humorous but poignant assessment of EBB in her 1931 essay on Aurora Leigh:

In the three decades between Woolf and Hayter's analyses, then, little seemed to have shifted. EBB, the once internationally renowned and highly-influential poet, had been firmly pushed to the margins of literary history, her status as writer of some of the most powerful and innovative poetic works of the nineteenth century erased by both the general modernist backlash against Victorian literature and the processes of early twentieth-century canon formation.