Four days after the christening, the household – including Wilson, who’s become the baby’s nursemaid, the balia and Flush – set out for Bagni di Lucca, where they’ve rented an apartment in Casa Valeri, on hills above Bagni Caldi. They’ve decamped for the summer in the Italian style, but also because Robert is still in a bad way. In fact he’s so depressed that Elizabeth has had to force the issue. ‘The truth was, there was a necessity for our going. His nerves were unstrung, and […] he began to leave off eating altogether.’
They’re following where the Shelleys summered a quarter century ago. Indeed earlier in June they also checked out Percy Bysshe Shelley’s last home, La Spezia, on the Ligurian coast north of Leghorn, but despite ‘the most exquisite and various country […] found the prices enormous.’ In any case, Bagni di Lucca is beautiful in ways that speak touchingly of Hope End:
You may take some suggestion of it from Malvern […]. There is a throng of mountains, much higher of course & more romantic than the Worcestershire hills, .. the chesnut woods running up them perpendicularly, and the pretty, bright village, with a scattering of villa residences, burrowing, like rabbits, in the clefts of the rocks.
Life up here is good. Wiedeman thrives, ‘plays with Flush’s ears & talks to him. By the way, I forgot to tell you that I cant help calling him Flush, and Flush, Baby—& Robert is apt to make the same mistake—’. Elizabeth has put on so much weight that she’s ‘grown the image of Henrietta’, and is enjoying long walks in the surrounding hills. Before they leave Bagni di Lucca she has fallen pregnant again. So restored is she that she now finally does something she has resisted for years, revealing to Robert the sonnet sequence she wrote during their courtship. Relaxed and sure of herself, perhaps she no longer sees the point of keeping them secret in a relationship that’s inevitably more or less ‘warts and all’. Or maybe she wants gently to remind her partner of the love at the heart of their great adventure. Romance can’t heal bereavement, but Robert seems to need a fresh injection of joy.
In the twenty-first century, these immaculate sonnets will be her best-known legacy. But in 1849 Elizabeth has nothing but instinct to go on as to whether they work, and the emotional risk she’s running is considerable. If they fail as poetry then something fundamental to this poets’ love match will be damaged. For in them Elizabeth is again being radical: this time by stepping into the first person to speak in the literary masculine. In the nineteenth century the sonnet is still a form expressing male desire, even if that’s not always heterosexual – think Michelangelo, if not, indeed, Shakespeare. Can it adapt itself to female experience? And what could adopting this form do to the balance of her femininity and Robert’s masculinity?
Of course Elizabeth isn’t the first woman to write a sonnet. Her English precursors include the sixteenth-century Lady Mary Wroth, also famous for The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania (the first prose romance known to be by a woman), and poet-novelist Charlotte Turner Smith, who died the year Elizabeth was born. But this sustained investigation of form and feeling is unique. The most famous, penultimate poem of the sequence transforms long literary tradition into intimate immediacy:
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach […]
I love thee to the level of everyday’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
Luckily, Robert is enthusiastic; indeed he urges her to include the sequence in her next collection. All the same, he has a canny idea. He suggests using a title to signal that this isn’t to be read as scandalous confession but as a serious literary project. Elizabeth first thinks of ‘Sonnets translated from the Bosnian’, but ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’ has the additional virtue of deflecting attention onto her poem on ‘Catarina to Camoens’, Portugal’s national poet, which immediately precedes the sonnets in her manuscript. It also alludes to a rich tradition of homage to the seventeenth-century French Lettres Portuguese, a ‘woman’s’ love letters supposedly by a Portuguese nun, a literary sensation that in the mid-nineteenth century is still attracting wide readership and distinguished translations. Last and not least, buried among these literary allusions is Robert’s nickname for Elizabeth: his ‘little Portuguese’.
Perhaps it’s the injection of joy that works. Gradually Robert recovers from his long funk. About a month after the family’s return to Casa Guidi, in mid-October, he starts writing the diptych Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day. At the start of March 1850 he sends this manuscript to Chapman and Hall, who turn it round quickly, publishing on 1 April. At last, the critical response is respectful, substantial and close-reading; though there are no raves and sales remain poor. Meanwhile in February Elizabeth has sent in her own manuscript. A substantial volume, including heavily revised versions of Prometheus Bound and The Seraphim, most of Poems (1844), recent poems, and the Sonnets, it appears as Poems (1850).
The critical response will be, by her standards, muted; several critics assume that this is largely a reissue plus some new translations. It will also be the first time that she’s widely characterised as a ‘poetess’: as if marriage has gendered her, removing her liberty to be pure ungendered mind. The Christian Register will dismiss her work as ‘deficient in that weight and breadth of thought—that enlarged view of life, which is as essential to the highest poetry as to the highest philosophy.’ The English Review will wheel out Arthur Thompson Gurney for a hatchet job, which starts with a 1,300-word rant on the ‘endless twaddle’ of ‘Female Poetry’ and gratuitously brings in Robert as ‘Upon the whole […] the higher and the master spirit’. The Morning Post has graciously ‘ALWAYS been of opinion that Elizabeth Browning is the best English poetess […] since the days of Felicia Hemans […] The grace and sensibility which are so charmingly characteristic of female genius are found throughout her poetry.’ And so on. Even The Athenaeum will crystalise the double-edged compliment: ‘Mrs. Browning is probably, of her sex, the first imaginative writer England has produced in any age:—she is, beyond comparison, the first poetess of her own.’
And yet: she’s arrived at a canonical moment. In 1850 there is, as Harper’s will put it, ‘a wide circle which has learned to venerate Mrs. Browning’s genius, […] the most remarkable poetess of modern times.’ Her body of work isn’t huge and she’s not yet a bestseller, but almost by stealth she has become one of the undeniable poets. Gurney is right in one way, though: she is undeniably a woman. 1849’s summer pregnancy had been ended in the second half of October by a bleed bad enough to make Elizabeth faint. And there is one final throw of the dice: this spring, at the age of forty-four, she falls pregnant for the fifth and final time.
Spring 1850 is an exciting time in general. On 6 April Henrietta and Surtees finally marry, after a wait of six years. Money is still a worry but to delay any longer would be folly: at forty-one, the bride is even older than Elizabeth was on her wedding day. Like her older sister, Henrietta tries her best not to elope. She and Surtees ask her father’s permission, which he refuses on the perverse grounds that she’s a hypocrite because she’ll go ahead and marry whatever his response. But this time the Barrett brothers ‘though generally obtuse on such matters’, Elizabeth drily observes, are more supportive. Treppy even braves the wedding itself. Only Bummy, ‘whose conduct has been, I do think, shameful & most treacherous’, as Arabella says, betrays her niece by sending Papa the letter in which Henrietta confided her plans, commenting, ‘I grieve for you dearest Edward—.’ The match holds up a mirror to Elizabeth’s own hard-won happiness:
what emotion this […] has stirred me to! How I have felt every line of it, gone with you through the whole trial .. no less bitter indeed, because, if God pleases, happiness & love catch up the ends of it for ever.
But now the literary world holds up a mirror too. This same month, shortly after his eightieth birthday, William Wordsworth dies (symbolically, on Shakespeare’s birthday). Almost immediately the question arises of who w
ill succeed him as Poet Laureate. On 1 June The Athenaeum publishes its opinion that, ‘There is no living poet of either sex who can prefer a higher claim than that of Mrs Elizabeth Barrett Browning’, and that to have a female laureate ‘would be at once an honourable testimony to the individual, a fitting recognition of the remarkable place which the women of England have taken in literature of the day, and a graceful compliment to the Sovereign herself.’
As Elizabeth tells Arabel, ‘Somebody of the name of Langley suggested it first, in the Daily News—The Globe took it up—& Robert saw it in two or three other English papers, besides Galignani’, we glimpse, fascinatingly, her pragmatism:
it’s curious to myself that I should seem to have a chance—a faint one though, because the gallantry of Englishmen always takes care, carefully taking off its hat, to push a woman against the wall, upon principle. Besides, even among the candidates named, both Leigh Hunt & Tennyson are worthier than I .. & except as a proof that women have made some way against prejudice, I should shrink from the very thought of appearing in the competition.
In fact, of course, it will take another century and a half for Britain to create its first woman Poet Laureate. It is Tennyson who is finally appointed in November, just three weeks after Elizabeth’s Poems (1850) has appeared. If she’s disappointed, her correspondence gives no suggestion of it. Instead, reading Tennyson’s In Memoriam in December, she finds it ‘appeals, heart to heart, directly as from his own to the universal heart’.
Besides, there has been a more critical disappointment in her personal life. On 28 July she suffered a near-fatal miscarriage, losing ‘above a hundred ounces of blood within the twenty four hours’ as Robert over-shares with John Kenyon. A month later she was still pale – ‘when I look in the glass […] I see nothing but a perfectly white & black face, the eyes being obliterated by large blots of blackness’ – when the family moved to the countryside for the summer cool. They had rented the Villa Poggio al Vento outside Siena, which, as its name suggests, sits on a sunny, windy knoll with a ‘vineyard up to the door, with the purple of grapes caught sight of down the vistas of vines—& magnificent views beyond all’. Little Wiedeman had also been ill, with heatstroke turning to fever, but both patients recovered quickly in the country air; even though ‘except the blackberries & grapes, .. yes, & except the donkey, & the pigeons, & the pig, & the great yellow dog [Baby] does’nt particularly enjoy a rural life’.
The trip ended with a week in Siena and, for Wilson, the crushing disappointment of a disappearing act by Signor Righi, who broke their engagement with this cruelly practical expedient. But once they’re home, in the second week of October, Elizabeth got down to work. She started writing the second part to what will become Casa Guidi Windows, almost as a riposte to Part One, as ‘A Meditation in Tuscany’ now becomes. She also composed a prefatory ‘Advertisement’, drawing attention to the eponymous ‘Windows’ as framing, limiting device. ‘No continuous narrative nor exposition of political philosophy is attempted. It is a simple story of personal impressions’, she claimed, distancing herself from her own first response to the Tuscan dream of independence, and underlining her poem’s radically subjective approach.
Perhaps we should remember that as she wrote she was waiting for her previous book to come out, and anticipating the critical reception of the Sonnets in particular. All the same her caution now reminds us how thoroughly she’s a cultural Victorian, aiming to speak not for an intellectual avant-garde but from the heart of consensus morality. By the time Casa Guidi Windows is published next May, Elizabeth will know both the muted verdict on Poems (1850), and which way the tide of British public opinion is turning over Italy. At first her political caution seems to have been rewarded. When the book appears on 21 May 1851 it receives more than two dozen reviews in Britain, America and Europe. From The Literary Gazette and The Athenaeum to The Scotsman most chorus applause for both her sentiments and the poetry itself, especially in Part Two: critics seem to find it hard to separate poetics from politics. The Liberator praises her ‘relentless insight, into the heart of Italian strength and weakness, and […] the cardinal principles of all reform’, reminding its readers, ‘she is the only poet of the first rank in England, except Campbell, who has made a direct offering on the altar of American Anti-Slavery’. For Revista Britannica, the poem offers a riposte to Goethe’s dismissal of political poetry; for The Monthly Christian Spectator a principled response to despotism; and for Die Grenzboten proof of why Elizabeth ‘is revered as a prophet by all the ambitious minds of her race in England’.
But the feminising continues apace, some of it as a backhanded compliment: The Morning Chronicle ‘We will not call her poetess, for Mrs. Barrett Browning’s mind is masculine’; Fraser’s ‘altogether manlike’; and the The Eclectic Review, which grumbles that ‘her otherwise manly and prominent progression’ advocates violence. Much is negative: ‘Mrs. Browning […] presents us with a pleasant little volume of extracts from a journal of her residence in Florence’, sneers The Prospective Review. The Manchester Guardian’s complaint about ‘diffuse and rather commonplace reflection and regret. She is really not at home in politics and social philosophy’ becomes understandable when it declares its own political allegiance: ‘She must get better heroes than Mazzini and Garibaldi.’ Worst of all, The English Review – ‘Woe to relate! Mrs. Browning is not contented with being Elizabeth Barrett Browning; she will be Robert Browning also’ – starts the long trend in Browning reception for ignoring chronology, and poetic record, to claim that Elizabeth imitates her husband.
By the time these notices appear the Brownings themselves have left Casa Guidi. The eighteen months they’ll stay away, from 3 May 1851 to mid-November 1852, illustrate starkly the dilemma posed by Elizabeth’s health. In sunny Italy she appears as strong as anyone; it is Robert who suffers from the lack of social and cutting-edge cultural stimulation. But now, as they travel north to rejoin the cultural world, Elizabeth starts to cough. Something is on the turn. But it doesn’t look that way at first. Leaving Pen’s balia behind in a rainy Florence they set out for Paris, visiting Bologna, Modena, Parma, Mantua – and Venice, where they rent rooms on the Grand Canal for a month, and Elizabeth falls for ‘the mystery of the rippling streets & soundless gondolas’. But while she and Pen thrive in the watery city, and the toddler’s Italian vocabulary comes on apace, Wilson feels constantly bilious and Robert ‘cant eat or sleep, .. & suffers from continual nervous irritability’. He even overrules Elizabeth on how to dress their son:
Robert & I had a quarrel about it yesterday & Robert had the upper-hand. Robert wants to make the child like a boy, he says—(because he is a man)—and I […] like him to be a baby as long as possible. […] The truth is that the child is not ‘like a boy,’ and that if you put him into a coat & waistcoat forthwith, he only would look like a small angel travestied. For he is’nt exactly like a girl either—no, not a bit. He’s a sort of neutral creature, so far. But it vexes Robert when people ask if he is a boy or a girl—(oh, man’s pride!).
This is ironic. It’s not so long ago that Robert was himself the ring-letted one, rather than the high-handed husband of this cameo; a little earlier still and Elizabeth was that ‘sort of neutral creature’, the child Ba. Certainly, enough of the literary dreamer remains in both Brownings for them to retrace Lord Byron’s routes through city and lagoon three decades ago. They visit the Lido, and the Armenian Mekhitarist Monastery on San Lazzaro degli Armeni where, as part of his anti-Ottoman crusade, Byron had studied Armenian with the Superior, Haroutiun Aukerian, and collaborated on an English–Armenian dictionary and grammar that contributed to the Armenian Renaissance. Thrillingly, they even bump into Aukerian himself, ‘an old man with a white beard long below his waist, sitting under a rose-tree in full bloom’.
The third week of June sees more cultural pilgrimage. The family continues north via Padua, Petrarch’s house at Arquà, Milan Cathedral and Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper, the Italian Lakes, th
e St Gotthard Pass, and Lucerne. Here, on 24 June, they discover the reason that Elizabeth’s annual ‘ship money’ has been delayed: the David Lyon has only generated one quarter its usual profit. This shortfall puts an abrupt end to further sightseeing. They take the quickest, cheapest route to Paris, where they arrive on 30 June, and, as on their honeymoon journey, take rooms in the Hôtel aux Armes de la Ville de Paris.
A highlight of their three-week stopover in the French capital is meeting the Tennysons. Alfred already knows Robert, though neither he nor his wife Emily has met Elizabeth. Now the couples meet up three times in quick succession, getting on so well that Alfred even offers the use of his Twickenham home. But Robert has suddenly got cold feet about crossing the Channel. Apparently he remains his mother’s boy, still more concerned by his own grief than the needs of his widowed father, sister or wife:
The idea of taking his wife & child to New Cross & putting them into the place of his mother, was haunting him day & night, & I was afraid to think how it might end. As soon as we had decided not to go, the imagination became quieted & he was better at once. Then, […] suddenly ‘he could’nt bear to disappoint Arabel’, and ‘he would go to a lodging in London near her, &, so, visit his own home by himself & get it over’.
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