EARLIER LONG POEMS IN BIBLICAL SYMBOLISM BY BRITISH WOMEN (FOR example, Elizabeth Smith's The Brethren: A Poem in Four Books of 1787 and Barrett's own The Seraphim of 1838), l Elizabeth Barrett's A Drama of Exile tells a contemporary story in mythological form. 2 In contrast to later writings by Christina Rossetti (Face of the Deep, for example), 3 or Alice Meynell (" Christ in the Universe"), 4 but in this respect like Jean Ingelow's epic retelling of the episode of Noah in A Story of Doom, 5 Elizabeth Barrett's poem has nothing to do with religion in any sense that would be understood by a literal believer: the poem's meanings do not involve belief in the actual existence of its supernatural characters. Instead, its meanings involve two very real sorts of things, both of them quite historical. 6 The more obvious meaning is its critical treatment of gender, using the story of Eve to deny the patriarchal myth of female inferiority; 7 this gender theme is the core of the poem's social meanings. A more complex frame of the poem's meanings concerns hermeneutics, or the philosophy of interpretation. Consistently with the biblical criticism that arose in France in the eighteenth century, went to England and Germany, and became the Higher Criticism, Elizabeth Barrett writes a poem whose topics and contentions include the mental and cultural acts of interpretation-A Drama of Exile and Ingelow's A Story of Doom are about the interpretative acts which they (and their genres) perform in social and personal frames of reference and not only in the domain of literary simulations. In 1842, just two years before the first publication of A Drama of Exile, Barrett published in The Athenaeum a series of essays on the patristic writers, 8 dismissing their theology and their authority, but arguing learn-edly about their poetry, principally from a philological point of view: Barrett is determined" by no means to recognize a hierarchy, whether in the Church or in literature";" To these'Fathers,'as we call them filially, with heads