The words ‘cousin’ and ‘friend’ are constantly recurring in this poem, the last pages of which have been finished under the hospitality of your roof, my own dearest cousin and friend […] therefore [… I venture to leave in your hands this book […] that as, through my various efforts in literature and steps in life, you have believed in me, borne with me, and been generous to me, far beyond the common uses of mere relationship or sympathy of mind, so you may kindly accept, in sight of the public., this poor sign of esteem, gratitude, and affection from your unforgetting E.B.B.
This is the public acknowledgement that fame allows. It’s also a personal farewell. When Elizabeth leaves Cowes on 22 September, she and Kenyon must know that they won’t see each other again. For all the pleasure with which she goes on to Taunton to spend a week with Henrietta, that sadness – and a linked sense of her own mortality – colour the book’s final revisions. Her ‘dearest cousin and friend’ will die on 3 December, but he lives just long enough to see and celebrate the masterpiece his protégée has dedicated to him. He even manages to send friends several copies of the achievement she calls ‘the most mature of my works, and the one into which my highest convictions upon Life and Art have entered’.
Elizabeth’s Poems (Fourth Edition) is published on 1 November; a fortnight later, on 15 November, Aurora Leigh appears. It’s issued simultaneously in New York by C. S. Francis, who has in the past pirated her work and ‘is said to have shed tears over the proofs .. (perhaps in reference to the hundred pounds he had to pay for them)’, as she mordantly comments. The book is an instant success. ‘All the best people shout […] rapturously’, as John Ruskin notes in the course of two letters buzzing with enthusiasm:
I think Aurora Leigh the greatest poem in the English language: unsurpassed by anything but Shakespeare—not surpassed by Shakespeare[’]s sonnets—& therefore the greatest poem in the language.
Which may be a touch overstated, but puts a finger on why Aurora Leigh is so important: it is ‘the first perfect poetical expression of the Age’. This is not just down to the fresh Victorian language (not yet a contradiction in terms). The story of conflicting models of duty and vocation speaks to contemporary concerns. It’s also a vivid exploration of changing ideas about womanhood. Both its dramatisation of forced prostitution, refusing, like ‘The Runaway Slave’, to blame the victim of rape, and its advocacy of an unconventional but stable family unit in which to bring up the child of that rape, are provocatively up to the minute. Its final vision of building a new Jerusalem is deeply, fashionably Christian – yet also the contemporary secular vernacular in a Britain still proud of the novel feats of manufacture and engineering that its Industrial Revolution has ushered in.
Leigh Hunt, too, sends Elizabeth twenty admiring pages. Though many of the nearly eighty reviews the book receives – in France, Italy, and Ireland as well as in Britain and America – comment on the rarity of the verse novel genre, they’re mostly enthusiastic. First out of the gate, five days after publication, The Globe and Traveller decides, ‘ “AURORA LEIGH,” MRS. Browning’s new poem, is a wealthy world of beauty, truth, and the noblest thoughts, faiths, hopes, and charities that can inform and sanctify our human nature’, while the Edinburgh Weekly Review sees it ‘marking an epoch in literature, for it is, in many respects, an innovation on long-accepted uses in poetry.’ In The Athenaeum, H. F. Chorley says that ‘our greatest English poetess of any time has essayed […] to blend the epic with the didactic novel’ in:
her contribution to the chorus of protest and mutual exhortation, which Woman is now raising, in hope of gaining the due place and sympathy which, it is held, have been denied to her.
Although declaring the book’s advocacy of women writers ‘unnatural’, he concludes that for some readers it will afford ‘almost a scriptural revelation’ – and so it proves, particularly among writing women.
Elsewhere, the New-York Daily Times calls Elizabeth’s blank verse ‘a phenomenon. Pure, simple, lively, flexible, it is such verse as no living pen can command in greater perfection.’ But it’s that new fictional form blending epic poetry with the novel that is Aurora Leigh’s most radical adventure and greatest achievement. Coventry Patmore, in a lengthy essay in the North British Review making clear his reservations about both this genre and what he sees as a great deal of hasty, under-polished writing throughout the poet’s oeuvre, clarifies the nature of this accomplishment: ‘There is a vital continuity, through the whole of this immensely long work.’ This sense of ‘disciplined energy, that unflagging imagination, which were necessary for the composition of the greatest poem ever written by woman’, is taken up by the Daily News. The Albion is ‘mastered […] by the form and beauty of the whole’. And so on.
Perhaps predictably, it’s George Eliot, writing in the Westminster Review, who best gets the ‘grand source of the profound impression produced in us’ by Aurora Leigh’s integration of form with content: ‘the idea of ample being’. Turning the role of ‘poetess’ from a handicap to a strength, Elizabeth is:
perhaps, the first woman who has produced a work which exhibits all the peculiar powers without the negations of her sex; which superadds to masculine vigour, breadth, and culture, feminine subtlety of perception, feminine quickness of sensibility, and feminine tenderness.[…] Mrs. Browning has shown herself all the greater poet because she is intensely a poetess.
What is the high tide of a life, and how do we know when we’re afloat on it? By the time Aurora Leigh appears, the Brownings are back in Casa Guidi. Travelling their usual route via Paris, Dijon, Marseille, Genoa and Livorno, they arrived home on 30 October. The first months of 1857 are defined by the book’s continued success. It’s in its third edition by March. Harriet Beecher Stowe visits Casa Guidi in April; the meeting of these two famous literary women abolitionists another confirmation of Elizabeth’s international standing. But as ever the private human experience is different. There’s artistic esprit de l’escalier:
There has been an enormous quantity of extravagance talked & written on [Aurora Leigh…]. I wish it were all true. But I see too distinctly what I ought to have written—Still, it is nearer the mark than my former efforts .. fuller, stronger, more sustained, .. and one may be encouraged to push on to something worthier: for I dont feel as if I had done yet—no indeed.
And there’s the ever-present threat of mortality. Treppy dies on 9 March. Though she was eighty-eight, and dementia had made her increasingly remote, Elizabeth’s mourning for her is heartfelt.
But it is upstaged five weeks later when she endures a far more complex loss. On 17 April 1857 Edward Barrett Moulton-Barrett dies, and takes with him any hope of reconciliation. For the last couple of years Elizabeth has understood it would end this way. When Papa rebuffed her in summer 1855 she told Henrietta, ‘I shall try nothing more—[…] It is absolutely useless—& it is irritating on one side & painful on the other.’ But emotions run deeper than understanding: ‘Yet when it came, it seemed insufferable as if unforseen.’ This is ‘closure’ of the wrong kind, as Elizabeth writes to Arabella: ‘Without a word, without a sign—Its like slamming a door on me as he went out—’
There are consolations. Julia Martin tells her that Papa had written of ‘forgiving’ Elizabeth, Henrietta and Alfred, his married, disinherited children. Stormie, who as the oldest surviving son is his father’s heir, makes over a total of £15,000 out of his inheritance to the trio. And maybe the long wait for resolution of any kind has muted the intensity of Elizabeth’s feeling, or allowed her to grieve already. For though in the first days after her father’s death she can’t even write a letter, Robert is surprised how well she bears up. Unlike at earlier bereavements there is no physical collapse; instead she even manages to weep.
But still the losses aren’t done. This summer, a month into their stay at Bagni di Lucca, Wilson’s second pregnancy starts to go wrong. Premature labour or miscarriage threaten and she’s ordered to bed. Once a replacement is found she has to go back to Flo
rence; she will never return to work for the Brownings, though Ferdinando stays in their service. Instead, with a loan from the Brownings, she rents a lodging house right by Casa Guidi, where she can stay in touch with the household, keep an eye on Ferdinando – and make more money than she did as a maid. Later, she’ll move to better accommodation still, as Robert arranges for the elderly Walter Savage Landor, now suffering from dementia, to become a paying guest when his confusion and violence cause Mrs Landor to throw him out. Though this is perhaps a mixed blessing, it’s this extra income that will allow Wilson to pay for Orestes to join her in Italy.
In mid-September 1857, Wilson’s place with the family at Bagni di Lucca is taken by Annunziata Lena, a local woman of just under thirty, who has experience in working for the very particular constituency of Englishwomen. Robert and Elizabeth remain at the spa town until the second week in October, but this summer is haunted by a gastric fever that Robert Bulwer-Lytton brought with him from Florence in early August; Annunziata falls ill with it almost immediately. Worse, Pen is ill for much of the second half of September. All three recover, but on top of new bereavement this mortal maternal terror is almost too much for Elizabeth: ‘When I wanted repose to recover from a great shock, I could’nt get it […]—& Peni’s illness ended by breaking me to pieces when I was peculiarly brittle—.’
It’s all driving her closer to a new friend, an amateur medium called Sophie Eckley. By now spiritualism divides the Brownings. In London last summer they attended a séance in Ealing at which the famous Scottish medium Daniel Dunglas Home ‘manifested’ Robert’s ‘dead infant son’ – which turned out to be Home’s bare foot. (One can see why Robert would seize on such ‘evidence’ with fury, with its niggling implication of an earlier child, abandonment, and infidelity added to sheer clumsy cheek.) Famously, in 1864’s Dramatis Personae Robert will make his feelings clear with the excoriating poem ‘Mr Sludge, “The Medium”’. Now he suspects Mrs Eckley of manipulating his wife. Yet he doesn’t resist when more distinguished visitors turn to the subject, for example on the June evening at Casa Guidi when they’re joined by the American poet William Cullen Bryant, Robert’s old friend the poet Fanny Haworth, and Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne.
Hawthorne will record that he finds this visit haunting in another way: his hostess is kind, but so small and frail she seems ‘scarcely embodied at all’. As Elizabeth tells Arabella:
A bad winter have I had? In some ways, but not with my chest. […] Altogether I am not as strong as usual […] I have a horrible vibrating body—If I am uneasy in mind for half an hour, I am unwell,—& then, being unwell makes one uneasy again. It acts, & reacts.
At fifty-two, she’s probably coping with the wear and tear of menopausal symptoms on top of her usual weakness. But even Robert, who’s bought a skeleton and a chest of homeopathic remedies, seems newly preoccupied by the body and its ills.
Altogether it’s a subdued party that leaves Casa Guidi for France on 1 July 1858. This year they’ll spend just two weeks in Paris catching up with old friends: Anna Jameson, ‘Father Prout’, and Lady Elgin, now horribly disabled by a series of strokes. On 19 July they move out to the Normandy port of Le Havre. The idea is to take a halfway house for a family summer. In many ways this works. Sarianna and Robert Senior house-share, Arabella, George and Henry (with his new wife Amelia) cross the Channel to visit, and Robert’s best friend Joseph Milsand comes to stay. And it’s at the end of this busy stay that Elizabeth sits for Cyrus Macaire for the photograph that will become Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s famous portrait. But ‘hideous’ 2 rue du Perrey, destined to disappear under twentieth-century apartment blocks, is a quite astonishingly bad choice for all this activity. Le Havre, by the 1870s confirmed as the European capital for tuberculosis deaths, is already being mapped street by street for infection rates, and it’s the low-lying harbour-side areas like this that are worst affected. Do Robert and Elizabeth not notice that, despite the handsome eighteenth-century houses, the neighbourhood is poor and unsanitary? Are they simply blinded by the English dogma of healthy sea air? There will be no radical symptomatic changes in Elizabeth’s subsequent health to suggest that she does get infected. But it’s a foolish place to stay for any invalid, particularly one already suffering from respiratory disease.
The very day after Elizabeth’s photographic session with the Macaire brothers the Brownings return to Paris, where they rent at 6 rue de Castiglione for a month before setting off for home. En route to Italy, storms turn the Genoa to Livorno sea-leg into an eighteen-hour nightmare, a brutal reminder that these are the very waters where Shelley drowned. But this time home, when they finally get there, offers no safety either. Elizabeth’s health has deteriorated so much that the Florentine winter is simply not warm and dry enough for her any more. She must go further south. Travelling with the Eckley household, the Brownings set out straight away for Rome, whose winter climate seems healthier than its summers, and by 26 November are reinstalled at Via Bocca di Leone. Here Robert resumes his social life, while Elizabeth rests up after all the travel, and assiduously revises Aurora Leigh: she has her changes for what becomes the fourth edition sent off by the middle of January 1859.
The couple now seem to be leading almost parallel lives. While Elizabeth sits for her portrait thrice – in March to Field Talfourd and Eliza Bridell Fox, and in May to Rudolf Lehmann (who also paints Robert) – her husband is learning to draw, tutored by a young lady, Mary Mackenzie. He has also become a particular fan of Adelaide Ristori’s acting, and, in the first week of January 1859 alone, he goes to three productions in which she stars. The artist Frederic Leighton and actress Charlotte Cushman are among the many acquaintances, often celebrated, that Robert now sees ‘sometimes two or three times deep in a one night’s engagements’; so are older friends like Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Page, and the Storys. ‘So plenty of distraction, and no Men and Women’, Elizabeth frets. Political turmoil is intensifying, and Robert also meets up with ‘the really instructed people’: former ambassador Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, diplomat Odo Russell, and Times correspondent Henry Wreford. In mid-March, he even briefs the Prince of Wales on the Italian situation over a dinner.
Elizabeth, equally riveted by the political events unfolding around them, tries to get Robert writing by proposing that they publish together again: this time, poems celebrating the end of Austrian rule. But Austrian rule is not at an end. On 3 May 1859, roughly a week after Austria sends troops into Piedmont-Sardinia, France declares war on Austria; by the end of the month, when Elizabeth and Robert return home to Florence, French troops are in the city and the Austrian Grand Duke has fled. In June, the French ally with the Piedmontese to defeat the Austrians twice, at Magenta and Solferino. But they suffer such heavy losses that they throw away the liberation they’ve won at so much cost. On 11 July, at Villafranca, they make a peace, which, while it unites Lombardy with Piedmont, returns much of northern Italy to Austrian control.
This shocking decision has wide-reaching effects. The end of the ‘beautiful dream’ of a free Italy is felt within the Brownings’ relationship too. Robert destroys his celebratory poem; Elizabeth keeps hers, ‘Napoleon III in Italy’, but as usual when she’s faced with a grief too big for expression, her health collapses. She’s in bed for nearly three weeks. When the time comes for the usual summer move to the country – this time to Marciano, a hilltop village that’s almost a satellite of Siena – she has to be carried from the train, and is confined to bed for her first ten days at ‘grim square’ Villa Alberti. Advised by Elizabeth’s Roman doctor E. G. T. Grisanowsky to seek a healthier climate, the Brownings won’t return to Florence this year till mid-October.
The air in Siena is undeniably fresher than it is in Rome: it is out of the Tiber basin and a little further north, while not as northerly as Florence. The Brownings squeeze in just six weeks at home in Casa Guidi before setting out once more for Rome on 28 November, harried south by the approaching winter. For Elizabeth, life itself is feeli
ng increasingly unsustainable; travel is the most exhausting of remedies. Yet through all the comings and goings she continues to write. The enormous set-piece efforts of her achievement – elopement, child-bearing, the compositions culminating in Aurora Leigh, not to mention the sheer effort of surviving chronic illness – all demonstrate her fierce will to embrace life. Possibly writing helps concentrate that will by narrowing its focus. Morphine certainly helps. But if this were widely known it could cause a scandal. Already at the start of this year Robert called on Louisa Crawford to protest about her sister Julia Ward Howe’s allegations, in a spitefully slanderous poem baldly titled ‘One Word More with E.B.B.’, that Elizabeth’s ‘unearthly’ verse, her ‘ill-directed flight / And sentence, mystical, and hard’, is the result of a ‘nameless draught […] a drug’. Elizabeth’s own response was to admit ruefully to Sophie Eckley that morphine was indeed her lifeline.
But now even this isn’t quite enough to manage her symptoms, though her imagination is certainly undimmed as she writes ‘An August Voice’, ‘A Tale of Villafranca’ – and ‘Where’s Agnes?’, a grief-struck debunking of spiritualism. Here, as she has before, she approaches autobiographical material ‘slant’, through fiction. The poem’s narrator has lost a dear friend, Agnes, who cannot come back from the dead because she’s too good to have any truck with things hellish. Her ghostly ‘manifestation’ must therefore be a fake; which means that Agnes is now nothing more than ‘That sort of worm in the clay’. Embodiment, the ‘worm in the clay’, means mortality for all of us – the poem’s speaker and its reader too. ‘And my mouth is full of dust / Till I cannot speak’, Elizabeth concludes.
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