Wikis
Quiz
Facts
Map
| Elizabeth Barrett Browning | |
|---|---|
 An 1871 engraving of an 1859 photograph of Elizabeth Barrett Browning |
|
| Born | March 6, 1806 Kelloe, Durham, England |
| Died | June 29, 1861 (aged 55) Florence, Italy |
| Occupation | Poet |
|
Influenced
|
|
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (March 6, 1806 – June 29, 1861) was one of the most prominent poets of the Victorian era. Her poetry was widely popular in both England and the United States during her lifetime.[1] A collection of her last poems was published by her husband shortly after her death.
Contents |
Elizabeth Barrett Moulton-Barrett was born on March 6, 1806, in Coxhoe Hall, between the villages of Coxhoe and Kelloe in County Durham, England. Her parents were Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett and Mary Graham-Clarke; Elizabeth was the eldest of their 12 children (eight boys and four girls). All the children lived to adulthood except for one girl, who died at the age of four when Elizabeth was eight. The children in her family all had nicknames: Elizabeth's was "Ba". The Barrett family, some of whom were part Creole, had lived for centuries in Jamaica, where they owned sugar plantations and relied on slave labour. Elizabeth's father chose to raise his family in England while his fortune grew in Jamaica. The Graham-Clarke family wealth was as great as the Barrett family wealth.
Elizabeth was baptized in 1809 at Kelloe Parish Church, though she had already been baptized by a family friend in the first week after she was born.
Later that year, after the fifth child, Henrietta, was born, Edward bought Hope End, a 500-acre (2.0 km2) estate near the Malvern Hills in Ledbury, Herefordshire. Elizabeth had "a large room to herself, with stained glass in the window, and she loved the garden where she tended white roses in a special arbour by the south wall"[2] Her time at Hope End would inspire her in later life to write Aurora Leigh.
Elizabeth was educated at home and attended lessons with her brother's tutor. This gave her a good education for a girl of that time, and she is said to have read passages from Paradise Lost and a number of Shakespearean plays, among other works, before the age of ten. During the Hope End period, she was "a shy, intensely studious, precocious child, yet cheerful, affectionate and lovable".[3] Her intellectual fascination with the classics and metaphysics was balanced by a religious obsession which she later described as "not the deep persuasion of the mild Christian but the wild visions of an enthusiast."[4][1]
The Barretts attended services at the nearest Dissenting chapel, and Edward was active in Bible and Missionary societies. Elizabeth was very close to her siblings while playing the maternal role. She had great respect for her father: she claimed that life was no fun without him, and her mother agreed, probably because they did not fully understand what the business really was that kept him when his trips got longer and longer.
Her first known poem was written at the age of six or eight. The manuscript is currently in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library; the exact date is controversial because the "2" in the date 1812 is written over something else that is scratched out. By the age of twelve she had written an "epic" poem consisting of four books of rhyming couplets. When she was 14, her father paid for the publication of a long Homeric poem entitled The Battle of Marathon. Barrett later referred to this as "Pope's Homer done over again, or rather undone." By the age of twenty, she had read the principal Greek and Latin authors and Dante's Inferno in their original languages. She learnt Hebrew and read the Old Testament from beginning to end. Essays of the mind was published in 1826, also at her father’s expense.
It was then (at age 20) that Elizabeth began to battle with a lifelong illness, which the medical science of the time was unable to diagnose. She began to take morphine for the pain and eventually became addicted to the drug. This illness caused her to be frail and weak.[2] Her illness meant that Browning composed her poems primarily in her home.
Mary Russell Mitford described the young Elizabeth as having "a slight, delicate figure, with a shower of dark curls falling on each side of a most expressive face; large, tender eyes, richly fringed by dark eyelashes, and a smile like a sunbeam." Anne Thackeray Ritchie described her as being "very small and brown" with big, exotic eyes and an overgenerous mouth.[12]
On June 30, 1824, one of the leading newspapers in London, the Globe and Traveler, printed her Stanzas on the Death of Lord Byron.[5] In the same year a lawsuit about her father's property estate in Jamaica had been decided in favor of their cousin, causing the start of their financial reversal.
In 1826 she published her first collection of poems, An Essay on Mind and Other Poems. This is a didactic poem with Homer; Latin and Greek are manifested within these poems. Its publication drew the attention of a blind scholar of the Greek language, Hugh Stuart Boyd, and that of another Greek scholar, Uvedale Price. She maintained a scholarly correspondence with both men until her death. Among other neighbors was Mrs. James Martin from Colwall, with whom she kept up a correspondence throughout her life.
At Boyd's suggestion, she translated Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound (published in 1833; retranslated in 1850). During their friendship Barrett absorbed a lot of Greek literature, including Homer, Pindar and Aristophanes. From 1822 onwards, Elizabeth's interests tended more and more to the scholarly and literary. In 1825 she published The Rose and Zephyr, her first published work.
In 1828, Elizabeth’s mother died. She is buried at the Parish Church of St Michael and All Angels in Ledbury, next to her daughter Mary. The death of her mother hit her hard, which, Boyd says in his letters, for a time took away from her the power of thinking. The abolition of slavery in the early 1830s reduced Mr. Barrett's finances. His financial losses in the early 1830s forced him to sell Hope End, and although the family were never poor, the place was seized and put up for sale to satisfy creditors. The investment that had given them revenue in Jamaica was also stopped with the abolition of slavery. In 1831 Elizabeth received news that her grandmother Moulton had died. She had been like a second mother to Elizabeth and the other children, and subsequently Elizabeth became ill for weeks.
The family moved three times between 1832 and 1837, first to a white Georgian building in Sidmouth, Devonshire, where they remained for three years. Later they moved on to Gloucester Place London. While living there she wrote for several magazines, and in 1825 her first published work, The Rose and Zephyr, was published in the Literary Gazette.
They finally settled at 50 Wimpole Street, a place she had visited as a child. John Kenyon, a distant cousin, introduced her to celebrities of the literary world, including William Wordsworth, Mary Russell Mitford, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Alfred Lord Tennyson and Thomas Carlyle.
Elizabeth continued to write, contributing The Romaunt of Margaret, The Romaunt of the Page, The Poet's Vow, and other pieces to various periodicals. She corresponded with literary figures of the time, including Mary Russell Mitford. She and Mary became close friends, Mary helping her to further her literary ambition. In 1838 The Seraphim and Other Poems appeared as the first volume of Elizabeth's mature poetry to appear under her own name.
In 1838, at her physician's insistence, Elizabeth moved from London to Torquay, on the Devonshire coast. Her brother Edward, one of her closest relatives, went along with her. Her father, Mr. Barrett, disapproved of Edward's going to Torquay but did not hinder his visit. The subsequent drowning of her brother Edward, in a sailing accident at Torquay in 1840, had a serious effect on her already fragile health; when they found his body after a couple of days, she had no strength for tears or words. They returned to Wimpole Street.
By the time of her return to Wimpole Street, she had become an invalid and a recluse, spending most of the next five years in her bedroom, seeing few people other than her immediate family. One of those she did see was her friend John Kenyon, a wealthy and convivial friend of the arts. She felt responsible for her brother's death because it was she who wanted him to be there with her. During this time she allegedly developed an addiction to opium. She got comfort from her golden-haired cocker spaniel named “Flush”, which had been given to Elizabeth as a gift.
She continued to write poetry, including The Cry of the Children, published in 1842. This poem condemned child labour and helped bring about child labour reforms. At about the same time, she contributed some critical prose pieces to Richard Henry Horne's A New Spirit of the Age. She also wrote The First Day’s Exile from Eden. In 1844 she published two volumes of Poems, which included A Drama of Exile, A Vision of Poets, and Lady Geraldine's Courtship. “Since she was not burdened with any domestic duties expected of her sisters, Elizabeth could now devote herself entirely to the life of the mind, cultivating an enormous correspondence, reading widely”.[6]
Her 1844 Poems made her one of the most popular writers in the land at the time and inspired Robert Browning to write to her, telling her how much he loved her poems. Kenyon arranged for Browning to meet Elizabeth in May 1845, and so began one of the most famous courtships in literature.
Elizabeth had produced a large amount of work and had been writing long before Robert Browning had ever published a word. However, he had a great influence on her writing, as did she on his; it is observable that Elizabeth’s poetry matured after meeting Robert. Two of Barrett’s most famous pieces were produced after she met Browning: Sonnets from the Portuguese and Aurora Leigh.
Some critics, however, point to him as an undermining influence: "Until her relationship with Robert Browning began in 1845, Barrett’s willingness to engage in public discourse about social issues and about aesthetic issues in poetry, which had been so strong in her youth, gradually diminished, as did her physical health. As an intellectual presence and a physical being, she was becoming a shadow of herself".[7]
Among Elizabeth's best known lyrics are Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850)—the "Portuguese" being her husband's pet name for her. The title also refers to the series of sonnets of the 16th-century Portuguese poet Luis de Camões; in all these poems she used rhyme schemes typical of the Portuguese sonnets.
The verse-novel Aurora Leigh, her most ambitious and perhaps the most popular of her longer poems, appeared in 1856. It is the story of a woman writer making her way in life, balancing work and love. The writings depicted in this novel are all based on similar, personal experiences that Elizabeth suffered through herself. The North American Review praised Elizabeth’s poem in these words: “ Mrs. Browning’s poems are, in all respects, the utterance of a woman—of a woman of great learning, rich experience, and powerful genius, uniting to her woman’s nature the strength which is sometimes thought peculiar to a man.”[8]
The courtship and marriage between Robert Browning and Elizabeth were carried out secretly. Six years his elder and an invalid, she could not believe that the vigorous and worldly Browning really loved her as much as he professed to, and her doubts are expressed in the Sonnets from the Portuguese, which she wrote over the next two years. Love conquered all, however, and after a private marriage at St. Marylebone Parish Church, Browning imitated his hero Shelley by spiriting his beloved off to Italy in August 1846, which became her home almost continuously until her death. Elizabeth's loyal nurse, Wilson, who witnessed the marriage at the church, accompanied the couple to Italy.
Mr. Barrett disinherited Elizabeth, as he did each of his children who married: “The Mrs. Browning of popular imagination was a sweet, innocent young woman who suffered endless cruelties at the hands of a tyrannical papa but who nonetheless had the good fortune to fall in love with a dashing and handsome poet named Robert Browning. She finally escaped the dungeon of Wimpole Street, eloped to Italy, and lived happily ever after.”[9]
As Elizabeth had some money of her own, the couple were reasonably comfortable in Italy, and their relationship together was harmonious. The Brownings were well respected in Italy, and even famous, for they would be asked for autographs or stopped by people because of their celebrity. Elizabeth grew stronger and in 1849, at the age of 43, she gave birth to a son, Robert Wiedemann Barrett Browning, whom they called Pen. Their son later married but had no legitimate children, so there are apparently no direct descendants of the two famous poets. However, it is rumoured that the city of Florence and its surrounding areas are peopled by his descendants.
“Several Browning critics have suggested that the poet decided that he was an “objective poet” and then sought out a “subjective poet” in the hope that dialogue with her would enable him to be more successful.”[6]
At her husband's insistence, the second edition of Elizabeth’s Poems included her love sonnets; as a result, her popularity shot up (as well as her critical regard), and her position as Victorian poetess du jour was cemented. In 1850, upon the occasion of the death of William Wordsworth, she was thought to be a serious contender for Poet Laureate, but the position went to Tennyson.
At the death of an old friend, G.B. Hunter, and then of her father, her health faded again, centering around deteriorating lung function. She was moved from Florence to Siena and to their summer home, The Villa Alberti.
In 1860 she issued a small volume of political poems titled Poems before Congress. These poems related to political issues for the Italians, “most of which were written to express her sympathy with the Italian cause after the outbreak of fighting in 1859”[5]. She dedicated this book to her husband.
Her last piece of work was A Musical Instrument, published in July 1862. She had also reprinted Last Poem, which became one of her best-known works.
In 1860 they returned to Rome, only to find that Elizabeth’s sister Henrietta had died, news which made Elizabeth weak and depressed. She became gradually weaker and died on June 29, 1861. She was buried in the English Cemetery of Florence. “On Monday July 1 the shops in the section of the city around Casa Guidi were closed, while Elizabeth was mourned with unusual demonstrations.”[10]
The nature of her illnesses is still unclear, although medical and literary scholars have speculated that longstanding pulmonary problems, combined with palliatives opiates, contributed to her decline.
Much of Elizabeth’s work has religious themes recurring throughout her literature. She had read and studied such famous literary works as Milton's Paradise Lost and Dante's Inferno. Elizabeth says in her writing, "We want the sense of the saturation of Christ's blood upon the souls of our poets, that it may cry through them in answer to the ceaseless wail of the Sphinx of our humanity, expounding agony into renovation. Something of this has been perceived in art when its glory was at the fullest. Something of a yearning after this may be seen among the Greek Christian poets, something which would have been much with a stronger faculty"[2]
She also believed that "Christ's religion is essentially poetry—poetry glorified.” She explores the religious aspect in many of her poems, especially in her early work, such as the Sonnets. She was interested in theological debate,[11] had learned Hebrew and read the Hebrew Bible. We find in the poem Aurora Leigh, for example, much religious imagery and allusion to images of the apocalypse.
American poet Edgar Allan Poe was inspired by Barrett Browning's poem Lady Geraldine's Courtship and specifically borrowed the poem's meter for his poem The Raven.[12] Poe had reviewed Barrett's work in the January 1845 issue of the Broadway Journal and said that "her poetic inspiration is the highest—we can conceive of nothing more august. Her sense of Art is pure in itself."[13] In return, she praised The Raven and Poe dedicated his 1845 collection The Raven and Other Poems to her, referring to her as "the noblest of her sex".[14]
Her poetry greatly influenced Emily Dickinson, who admired her as a woman of achievement. Her popularity in the United States and Britain was further advanced by her stands against social injustice, including slavery in the United States, anti-government subversive movements in Italy, and child labour.
In 1899 Lilian Whiting wrote a biography of Elizabeth entitled A study of Elizabeth Barrett Browning which describes her as "the most philosophical poet" and depicts her life as "a Gospel of applied Christianity". To Whiting, the term "art for art's sake" did not apply to Barrett Browning's work for the reason that each poem, distinctively purposeful, was borne of a more "honest vision". In this critical analysis, Whiting portrays Browning as a poet who uses knowledge of Classical literature with an "intuitive gift of spiritual divination".[15] In Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Angela Leighton suggests that the portrayal of Barrett Browning as the "pious iconography of womanhood" has distracted us from her poetic achievements. Leighton cites the 1931 play by Even Besier titled The Barretts of Wimpole Street as evidence that 20th century literary criticism of Barrett Browning's work has suffered more as a result of her popularity than poetic ineptitude.[16]
Throughout the majority of the 20th Century, literary criticism of Barrett Browning's poetry remained sparse until her poems were discovered by the Feminist movement. She described herself as being inclined to reject several women's rights principles, suggesting in letters to Mary Russell Mitford and her husband that she believed that there was an inferiority of intellect in women.[16] However, feminist critics have used Deconstructionist theories of Jaques Derrida and others to explain the importance of Barrett Browning's voice to the feminist movement. Leighton writes that because she participates in the literary world, where voice and diction are dominated by popular accession to perceived masculine superiority, she "is defined only in mysterious opposition to everything that distinguishes the male subject who writes..."[16]
| Year | Title of Publications and editors | Publisher |
|---|---|---|
| 1820 | The Battle of Marathon:A Poem | Privately printed |
| 1826 | A Essay On Mind, with Other Poems | London: James Duncan |
| 1833 | Prometheus Bound, Translated from the Greek of Aeschlus,and Miscellaneous Poems | London: A.J. Valpy |
| 1838 | The Seraphim, and Other Poems | London: Saunders and Otley |
| 1844 | Poems (UK)/ A Drama of Exile, and other Poems (US) | London: Edward Moxon. New York: Henry G. Langley |
| 1850 | Poems("New Edition," 2 vols.)Revision of 1844 edition adding Sonnets from the Portuguese and others | London: Chapman & Hall ] |
| 1851 | Casa Guidi Window | London: Chapman & Hall |
| 1853 | Poems(3d ed.) | London: Chapman & Hall |
| 1854 | Two Poems:"A Plea for the Ragged Schools of London" by Barrett Browning and "The Twins" by Browning | London: Bradbury & Evans |
| 1856 | Poems(4th ed.) | London: Chapman & Hall (1857 printed on title page) |
| 1857 | Aurora Leigh | London: Chapman and Hall |
| 1860 | Poems Before Congress | London: Chapman & Hall |
| 1862 | Last Poems | London: Chapman & Hall |
| 1863 | The Greek Christian: Poets and the English Poets | London: Chapman & Hall |
| 1877 | The Earlier Poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1826-1833, ed Richard Herne Shepheard | London: Bartholomew Robson |
| 1877 | Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning Addressed to Richard Hengist Horne, with comments on comtemoraries, 2 vols., ed. S.R. Townshend Mayer | London: Richard Bentley & Son |
| 1897 | Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 2 vols., ed. Frederic G. Kenyon | London:Smith, Elder,& Co. |
| 1899 | Letters of Robert Browing and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett 1845-1846, 2 vol., ed Robert W. Barrett Browning | London: Smith, Elder & Co. |
| 1914 | New Poems by Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. Frederic G Kenyon | London:Smith, Elder & Co. |
| 1929 | Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Letters to Her Sister, 1846-1859, ed. Leonard Huxley | London: John Murry |
| 1935 | Twenty-Two Unpublished Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning to Henrietta and Arabella Moulton Barrett | New York: United Feature Syndicate |
| 1939 | Letters from Elizabeth Barrett to B.R. Haydon, ed. Martha Hale Shackford | New York: Oxford University Press |
| 1954 | Elizabeth Barrett to Miss Mitford, ed. Betty Miller | London: John Murry |
| 1955 | Unpublished Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Hugh Stuart Boyd, ed. Barbara P. McCarthy | New Heaven, conn.: Yale University Press |
| 1958 | Letters of the Brownings to George Barrett, ed. Paul Landis with Ronald E. Freeman | Urbana: University of Illinois Press |
| 1974 | Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Letters to Mrs. David Ogilvy, 1849-1861, ed. Peter N Heydon and Philip Kelley | New York: Quadrangle, The New York Times Book Co., and The Browning Institute |
| 1984 | The Brownings' Correspondence, ed. Phillip Kelley, Ronald Hudson, and Scott Lewis | Winfield, Kans.: Wedgestone Press |
The University of Worcester has acknowledged Browning's local connection by naming a new building after her.
Browning is mentioned during the animated Peanuts television special Be My Valentine, Charlie Brown. In one scene, Sally receives a heart-shaped piece of candy with Sonnet Number 43 of Sonnets from the Portuguese ("How do I love thee? Let me count the ways...") written on it. Later, a heart-broken Linus Van Pelt yells "This one is for Elizabeth Barrett Browning!" in frustration, as he throws away the box of chocolates he bought for a teacher on whom he had an unrequited crush.
She was brought to popular accord in the play The Barretts of Wimpole Street, in a production by famed actress Katharine Cornell.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-03-06 – 1861-06-29) was an English poet and the wife of fellow poet Robert Browning.
Contents |
And cold before my summer's done,
And deaf in Nature's general tune,
And fallen too low for special fear,
And here, with hope no longer here,
While the tears drop, my days go on.
For us, — whatever's undergone,
Thou knowest, willest what is done,
Grief may be joy misunderstood;
Only the Good discerns the good.
I trust Thee while my days go on.
And having in thy life-depth thrown
Being and suffering (which are one),
As a child drops his pebble small
Down some deep well, and hears it fall
Smiling — so I. THY DAYS GO ON.
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING (1806-1861), English poet, wife of the poet Robert Browning, was born probably at Coxhoe Hall, Durham, for this was the home of her father and mother for some time after their marriage in 1805. Her baptismal register gives the date of her birth as the 6th of March 1806, and that of her christening as the 10th of February 1808. The long misunderstanding as to her age, whereby she was supposed to have been born three years later, was shared by her contemporaries and even for a time by her husband. She was the daughter and eldest child of Edward Barrett Moulton, who added the surname of Barrett on the death of his maternal grandfather, whose estates in Jamaica he inherited. His wife was Mary Graham-Clarke, daughter of J. Graham-Clarke of Fenham Hall, Newcastle-on-Tyne. She died when her illustrious daughter was twenty-two years old. Elizabeth's childhood was passed in the country, chiefly at Hope End, a house bought by her father in the beautiful country in sight of the Malvern Hills. " They seem to me," she wrote, " my native hills; for though I was born in the county of Durham, I was an infant when I went first into their neighbourhood, and lived there until I had passed twenty by several years." Her country poems, such as " The Lost Bower," " Hector in the Garden, ,' and " The Deserted Garden," refer to the woods and gardens of Hope End. Elizabeth Barrett was much the companion of her father, who pleased himself with printing fifty copies of what she calls her " great epic of eleven or twelve years old, in four books " - The Battle of Marathon (sent to the printer in 1819). She owns this to have been " a curious production for a child," but disclaims for it anything more than " an imitative faculty." The love of Pope's Homer, she adds, led her to the study of Greek, and of Latin as a help to Greek, " and the influence of all those tendencies is manifest so long afterwards as in my Essay on Mind [Essay on Mind and other Poems, 1826], a didactic poem written, when I was seventeen or eighteen, and long repented of." She was a keen student, and it is told of her that when her health failed she had her Greek books bound so as to look like novels, for fear her doctor should forbid her continuous study. At this time began her friendship with the blind scholar Hugh Stuart Boyd, with whom she read Greek authors, and especially the Greek Christian Fathers and Poets. To him she addressed later three of her sonnets, and he was one of her chief friends until his death in 1848. In 1832 Mr Barrett sold his house of Hope End, and brought his family to Sidmouth, Devon, for some three years. There Elizabeth made a translation of the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus, published with some original poems (1833). After that time London became the home of the Barretts until the children married and the father died. The temporary dwelling was at 74 Gloucester Place, Portman Square, and in 1838 the lease was taken of the final house, 50 Wimpole Street.
It is in the middle of the year 1836 that Elizabeth Barrett's active literary life began. She then made the acquaintance of R. H. Horne, afterwards famous for a time as the author of Orion, but perhaps best remembered as her correspondent (Letters to R. H. Horne, 2 vols. 1877), and this acquaintance led to the appearance of rather frequent poems by Miss Barrett in the New Monthly Magazine, edited by Bulwer (Lord Lytton), and in other magazines or annuals. But the publication of The Seraphim and other Poems (1838) was a graver step. " My present attempt," she writes in this year, " is actually, and will be considered by others, more a trial of strength than either of my preceding ones." There was at that date a lull in the production of conspicuous books of poetry. Wordsworth had ceased, Browning and Tennyson had hardly begun to write their best. Miss Barrett's volume was well reviewed, but not popular, and no second edition was required; of the poems afterwards famous it contained three, " Cowper's Grave," " My Doves," and " The Sea-Mew," the first impassioned and the other two very quiet, which a fine taste must rank high among all her works. The Quarterly Review (September 1840), in an article on " Modern English Poetesses," criticizes The Seraphim with Prometheus, and treats the former with respect, but does not lift the author out of the quite unequal company of Mrs Norton, " V," and other contemporary women. In the previous year Elizabeth had made the memorable acquaintance of Wordsworth. " No," she writes, " I was not at all disappointed in Wordsworth, although perhaps I should not have singled him from the multitude as a great man. There is a reserve even in his countenance;. .. his eyes have more meekness than brilliancy; and in his slow, even articulation there is rather the solemnity and calmness of truth itself than the animation and energy of those who seek for it. .. He was very kind, and sate near me and talked to me as long as he was in the room, and recited a translation by Cary of a sonnet of Dante's - and altogether it was a dream." With Landor, at the same date, a meeting took place that had long results. At this time, too, began another of Elizabeth's valued friendships - that with Miss Mitford, author of Our Village and other works less well remembered. Mr John Kenyon also became at about this time a dear and intimate friend. He was a distant cousin of the Barretts, had published some verse, and was a warm and generous friend to men of letters. From the date of the birth of their child (1849) he gave the Brownings a hundred pounds a year, and when he died in 1856 he bequeathed to them eleven thousand pounds. To him a great number of Elizabeth's letters are addressed, and to him in later years was Aurora Leigh dedicated. Elizabeth Barrett began also in London an acquaintance with Harriet Martineau.
Full of the interest of friendship and literature, the residence in London was unfavourable to Elizabeth's health. In early girlhood she had a spinal affection, and her lungs became delicate. She broke a blood-vessel in the beginning of the Barretts' life in town, and was thereafter an invalid - by no means entirely confined to her room, but often imprisoned there, and generally a recluse, until her marriage. Her state was so threatening that in 1838 it was found necessary to remove her to Torquay, where she spent three years, accompanied by her brother Edward, the dearest of her eight brothers, the only one, she said many years later, who ever comprehended her, and for a time by her father and sisters. During this time of physical suffering she underwent the greatest grief of her life by the drowning of her beloved brother, who with two friends went sailing in a small boat and was lost in Babbacombe Bay. Rumours of the foundering reached the unhappy sister, who was assured of the worst after three days, when the bodies were found. The accident of Edward Barrett's meeting with his death through her residence at Torquay, and the minor accident of her having parted from him on the day of his death, as she said, " with pettish words," increased her anguish of heart to horror. A few days before she had written, " There are so many mercies close around me that God's being seems proved to me, demonstrated to me, by His manifested love." When the blow came, its heavy weight and closeness to her heart convinced her, she wrote, through an awful experience of suffering, of divine action. But many years later the mention of her brother's death was intolerable to her. At the time she only did not die. She had to remain for nearly a year day and night within hearing of the sea, of which the sound seemed to her the moan of a dying man.
There is here an interval of silence in the correspondence which busied her secluded life at all ages; but with an impulse of self-protection she went to work as soon as her strength sufficed. One of her tasks was a part taken in the Chaucer Modernized (1841), a work suggested by Wordsworth, to which he, Leigh Hunt, Horne and others contributed. In 1841 she returned to Wimpole Street, and in that and the following year she was at work on two series of articles on the Greek Christian poets and on the English poets, written for the Athenaeum under the editorship of Mr C. W. Dilke. In work she found some interest and even some delight: " Once I wished not to live, but the faculty of life seems to have sprung up in me again from under the crushing foot of heavy grief. Be it all as God wills." It is in 1842 that we notice the name of Robert Browning in her letters: " Mr Horne the poet and Mr Browning the poet were not behind in approbation," she says in regard to her work on the poets. " Mr Browning is said to be learned in Greek, especially the dramatists." In this year also she declares her love for Tennyson. To Kenyon she writes, " I ought to be thanking you for your great kindness about this divine Tennyson." In 1842, moreover, she had the pleasure of a letter from Wordsworth, who had twice asked Kenyon for permission to visit her. The visit was not permitted on account of Miss Barrett's illhealth. Now Haydon sent her his unfinished painting of the great poet musing upon Helvellyn; she wrote her sonnet on the portrait, and Haydon sent it to Rydal Mount. Wordsworth's commendation is rather cool. In August 1843 " The Cry of the Children " appeared in Blackwood's Magazine, and during the year she was associated with her friend Home in a critical work, The New Spirit of the Age, rather by advice than by direct contribution. Her two volumes of poems (1844) appeared, six years after her former book, under the title of Poems, by Elizabeth Barrett Barrett. The warmest praises that greeted the new poems were H. F. Chorley's in the Athenaeum, John Forster's in the Examiner, and those conveyed in Blackwood, the Dublin Review, the New Quarterly and the Atlas. Letters came from Carlyle and others. Both he and Miss Martineau selected as their favourite poem " Lady Geraldine's Courtship," a violent piece of work. In the beginning of the following year came the letter from a stranger that was to be so momentous to both. " I had a letter from Browning the poet last night," she writes to her old friend Mrs Martin, " which threw me into ecstasies - Browning, the author of Paracelsus, the king of the mystics." She is flattered, though not to " ecstasies," at about the same time by a letter from E. A. Poe, and by the dedication to her, as " the noblest of her sex," of his own work. " What is to be said, I wonder, when a man calls you the ` noblest of your sex ' ? ` Sir, you are the most discerning of yours.' " America was at least as quick as England to appreciate her poetry; among other messages thence came in the spring letters from Lowell and from Mrs Sigourney. " She says that the sound of my poetry is stirring the ` deep green forests of the New World '; which sounds pleasantly, does it not?" It is in the same year that the letters first speak of the hope of a journey to Italy. The winters in London, with the imprisonment which - according to the medical practice of that day - they entailed, were lowering Elizabeth's strength of resistance against disease. She longed for the change of light, scene, manners and language, and the longing became a hope, until her father's prohibition put an end to it, and doomed her, as she and others thought, to death, without any perceptible reason for the denial of so reasonable a desire.
Meanwhile the friendship with Browning had become the chief thing in Elizabeth Barrett's life. The correspondence, once begun, had not flagged. In the early summer they met. The allusion to his poetry in " Lady Geraldine's Courtship " had doubtless put an edge to his already keen wish to know her. He became her frequent visitor and kept her room fragrant with flowers. He never lagged, whether in friendship or in love. We have the strange privilege, since the publication of the letters between the two, of following the whole course of this noble love-story from beginning to end, and day by day. Browning was six years younger than the woman he so passionately admired, and he at first believed her to be confined by some hopeless physical injury to her sofa. But of his own wish and resolution he never doubted. Her hesitation, in her regard for his liberty and strength, to burden him with an ailing wife, she has recorded in the Sonnets after wards published under a slight disguise as Sonnets from the Portuguese. She refused him once " with all her will, but much against her heart," and yielded at last for his sake rather than her own. Her father's will was that his children should not marry, and, kind and affectionate father though he was, the prohibition took a violent form and struck terror into the hearts of the three dutiful and sensitive girls. Robert Browning's addresses were, therefore, kept secret, for fear of scenes of anger which the most fragile of the three could not face. Browning was reluctant to practise the deception; Elizabeth alone knew how impossible it was to avoid it. When she was persuaded to marry, it was she who insisted, in mental and physical terror, upon a secret wedding. Throughout the summer of 1846 her health improved, and on the 12th of September the two poets were married in St Marylebone parish church. Browning visited it on his subsequent journeys to England to give thanks for what had taken place at its altar. Elizabeth's two sisters had been permitted to know of the engagement, but not of the wedding, so that their father's anger might not fall on them too heavily. For a week Mrs Browning remained in her father's house. On the 19th of September she left it, taking her maid and her little dog, joined her husband, and crossed to the Continent. She never entered that home again, nor did her father ever forgive her. Her letters, written with tears to entreat his pardon, were never answered. They were all subsequently returned to her unopened. Among them was one she had written, in the prospect of danger, before the birth of her child. With her sisters her relations were, as before, most affectionate. Her brothers, one at least of whom disapproved of her action, held for a time aloof. All others were taken entirely by surprise. Mrs Jameson, who had been one of the few intimate visitors to Miss Barrett's room, had offered to take her to Italy that year, but met her instead on her way thither with a newly-married husband. The poets' journey was full of delight. Where she could not walk, up long staircases or across the waters of the stream at Vaucluse,. Browning carried her. In October they reached Pisa, and there they wintered, Mrs Jameson keeping them company for a time lest ignorance of practical things should bring them, in their poverty, to trouble. She soon found that they were both admirable economists; not that they gave time and thought to husbandry, but that they knew how to enjoy life without luxuries. So they remained to the end, frugal and content with little.
For climate and cheapness they settled in Italy, choosing Florence in the spring of 1847, and remaining there, with the interruptions of a change to places in Italy such as Siena and. Rome, and to Paris and England, until Mrs Browning's death. It was at Pisa that Robert Browning first saw the Sonnets from the Portuguese, poems which his wife had written in secret and had no thought of publishing. He, however, resolved to give them to the world. " I dared not," he said, " reserve to myself the finest sonnets written in any language since Shakespeare's." The judgment, which the existence of Wordsworth's sonnets renders obviously absurd, may be pardoned. The sonnets were sent to Miss Mitford and published at Reading, as Sonnets by E.B.B., in 1847. In 1850 they were included, under their final title, in a new issue of poems. During the Pisan autumn appeared. in Blackwood's Magazine seven poems by Mrs Browning which she had sent some time before, and the publication of which at that. moment disturbed her as likely to hurt her father by an apparent reference to her own story. At Pisa also she wrote and sent to America a poem, " The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim Point," which was published in Boston, in The Liberty Bell, in 1848, and separately in England in 1849. In the summer of 1847 the Brownings left their temporary dwelling in Florence and took the apartment in Casa Guidi, near the Pitti Palace, which was thenceforth their chief home. Early in their residence began that excited interest in Italian affairs which made so great a. part of Mrs Browning's emotional life. The Florentines, under the government of the grand duke, were prosperous but disturbed by national aspirations. Mrs Browning, by degrees, wrote. Casa Guidi Windows on their behalf and as an appeal to the always impulsive sympathies of England. In 1849 was born.
the Brownings' only child, their beloved son Robert Wiedemann Barrett. After this event Mrs Browning resumed her literary activities, preparing a new issue, with some additions, of her poems (1850). A poem on the death of a friend's child appeared in the Athenaeum (1849), and there the new volumes were warmly praised. Casa Guidi Windows followed in 1851. Visiting England in that year, the Brownings saw much of the Procters, and something of Florence Nightingale, Kingsley, Ruskin, Rogers, Patmore and Tennyson, and also of Carlyle, with whom they went to Paris, where they saw George Sand, and where they passed the December days of the coup d'etat. Mrs Browning happened to take a political fancy to Napoleon III., whom she would probably have denounced if a tithe of his tyrannies had occurred in Italy, and the fancy became more emotional in after years.
A new edition of Mrs Browning's poems was called for in 1853, and at about this time, in Florence, she began to work on Aurora Leigh. She was still writing this poem when the Brownings were again in England, in 1855. Tennyson there read to them his newly-written Maud. After another interval in Paris they were in London again - Mrs Browning for the last time. She was with her dear cousin Kenyon during the last months of his life. In October 1856 the Brownings returned to their Florentine home, Mrs Browning leaving her completed Aurora Leigh for publication. The book had an immediate success; a second edition was required in a fortnight, a third a few months later. In the fourth edition (1859) several corrections were made. The review in Blackwood was written by W. E. Aytoun, that in the North British by Coventry Patmore.
In 1857 Mrs Browning addressed a petition, in the form of a letter, to the emperor Napoleon begging him to remit the sentence of exile upon Victor Hugo. We do not hear of any reply. In 1857 Mrs Browning's father died, unreconciled. Henrietta Barrett had married, like her sister, and like her was unforgiven. In 1858 occurred another visit to Paris, and another to Rome, where Hawthorne and his family were among the Brownings' friends. In 1859 came the Italian war in which Mrs Browning's hasty sympathies were hotly engaged. Her admiration of Italy's champion, Napoleon III., knew no bounds, and did not give way when, by the peace of Villafranca, Venice and Rome were left unannexed to the kingdom of Italy, and the French frontiers were " rectified " by the withdrawal from that kingdom of Savoy and Nice. That peace, however, was a bitter disappointment, and her fragile health suffered. At Siena and Florence this year the Brownings were very kind to Landor, old, solitary, and ill. Mrs Browning's poem, " A Tale of Villafranca," was published in the Athenaeum in September, and afterwards included in Poems before Congress (1860). Then followed another long visit to Rome, and there Mrs Browning prepared for the press this, her last volume. The little book was judged with some impatience, A Curse for a Nation being mistaken for a denunciation of England, whereas it was aimed at America and her slavery. The Athenaeum, amongst others, committed this error. The Saturday Review was hard on the volume, so was Blackwood; the Atlas and Daily News favourable. In July 1860 was published " A Musical Instrument " in the young Cornhill Magazine, edited by the author's friend W. M. Thackeray. The last blow she had to endure was the death of her sister Henrietta, in the same year.
On the 30th of June 1861 Elizabeth Barrett Browning died. Her husband, who tended her alone on the night of her decease, wrote to Miss Blagden: " Then came what my heart will keep till I see her again and longer - the most perfect expression of her love to me within my whole knowledge of her. Always smilingly, happily, and with a face like a girl's, and in a few minutes she died in my arms, her head on my cheek.. .. There was no lingering, nor acute pain, nor consciousness of separation, but God took her to himself as you would lift a sleeping child from a dark uneasy bed into your arms and the light. Thank God." Her married life had been supremely happy. Something has been said of the difference between husband and wife in regard to " spiritualism," in which Mrs Browning had interest and faith, but no division ever interrupted their entirely perfect affection and happiness. Of her husband's love for her she wrote at the time of her marriage, " He preferred. .. of free and deliberate choice, to be allowed to sit only an hour a day by my side, to the fulfilment of the brightest dream which should exclude me in any possible world." " I am still doubtful whether all the brightness can be meant for me. It is just as if the sun rose again at 7 o'clock P.M." " I take it for pure magic, this life of mine. Surely nobody was ever so happy before." " I must say to you [Mrs Jameson] who saw the beginning with us, that this end of fifteen months is just fifteen times better and brighter; the mystical ` moon ' growing larger and larger till scarcely room is left for any stars at all: the only differences which have touched me being the more and more happiness." Browning buried his wife in Florence, under a tomb designed by their friend Frederick Leighton. On the wall of Casa Guidi is placed the inscription: " Qui scrisse e mori Elisabetta Barrett Browning, the in cuore di donna conciliava scienza di dotto e spirito di poeta, e face del suo verso aureo annello fra Italia e Inghilterra. Pone questa lapide Firenze grata 1861." In 1866 Robert Browning published a volume of selections from his wife's works.
The place of Elizabeth Barrett Browning in English literature is high, if not upon the summits. She had an original genius, a fervent heart, and an intellect that was, if not great, exceedingly active. She seldom has composure or repose, but it is not true that her poetry is purely emotional. It is full of abundant, and even over-abundant, thoughts. It is intellectually restless. The impassioned peace of the greatest poetry, such as Wordsworth's, is not hers. Nor did she apparently seek to attain those heights. Her Greek training taught her little of the economy that such a poetic education is held to impose; she " dashed," not by reason of feminine weakness, but as it were to prove her possession of masculine strength. Her gentler work, as in the Sonnets from the Portuguese, is beyond praise. There is in her poetic personality a glory of righteousness, of spirituality, and of ardour that makes her name a splendid one in the history of an incomparable literature.
See the Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning addressed to R. H. Horne, with Comments on Contemporaries, edited by S. R. Townshend Mayer (2 vols., 1877); The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning from 1826 to 1844, edited with memoir by J. H. Ingram (1887); Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Eminent Women series), by J. H. Ingram, 1888); Records of Tennyson, Ruskin and the Brownings, by Anne Ritchie (1892); The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, edited with biographical additions by Frederick G. Kenyon (2 vols., 1897); The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett (2 vols., 1899); La Vie et l'oeuvre d'Elizabeth Browning, by Mdlle. Germaine-Marie Merlette (Paris, 1906). (A. ME.)
|
<< Brownhills |
Categories: BRI-BRO | English poets
   | Sonnets from the Portuguese - Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning - Project Gutenberg |
| | The Brownings: A Research Guide (Baylor University) - Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning: A Database |
| | Poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning at PoetryFoundation.org - Elizabeth Barrett Browning : The Poetry Foundation : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry. |
| | Reely's Poetry Pages - Sonnets from the Portuguese (audio) |
| | Sonnets from the Portuguese - Sonnets From the Portuguese from Project Gutenberg |
| | Sonnets from the Portuguese - Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning |
| | Poetry, Letters and Quotes by Elizabeth Barrett Browning - Poet: Elizabeth Barrett Browning Poems and Poetry - Quotes and Poems dot com |
| | ''The Barretts of Wimpole Street'' - The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934) |
|
|
Search
