And Elizabeth herself? She has undergone the transformation from living, breathing woman – fluent, motivated, sometimes self-absorbed but always pushing herself onwards, fighting for breath, determined to stay alive and to speak – into a figure in the stories other people tell about her. Her own ‘low breath is gone’ from the social matrix. Yet she hasn’t fallen silent; far from it. Over the next century and a half her words will be read around the world. They continue to be heard today, in the third decade of the twenty-first century, changed into the currency of what’s now become conventional political and social thought – about slavery, child labour, rape, women’s rights – and transformed again into the more than two centuries of women’s writing that has appeared since her first book, The Battle of Marathon, was published.
Societies around the world would doubtless have changed, and women emerged as writers and poets in increasing numbers, even if Elizabeth Barrett Browning had never lived. But these more recent writing women are her heirs nonetheless. What they write – the poets among them in particular – would have been different without her. The whole direction of poetry in English would have changed. Flexible, tender, intimate: Elizabeth’s poetic voice, as she asks yet again, ‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways’, comes back to us with a directness that seems startlingly modern. It’s as if she’s looking back over her shoulder at us, her wide, sensual mouth dipping and rising in a curly bracket.
[Closing Frame]
Like Aurora Leigh, this biography is a portrait, not a self-portrait. But the imagination is greedy: as Elizabeth’s readers, we respond to elements of her life we feel mirror our own. Something that especially speaks to me, for example, is seeing what John Milton in his sonnet ‘When I consider how my light is spent’ calls ‘that one Talent which is death to hide’ squandered by family circumstance, ill-health, shyness, casual intellectual misogyny.
There’s surely nothing wrong with such feelings – let’s call them recognition, or complicity. It’s how humans have always used stories, and biographies are in the first place stories, after all. Besides, how else can we encounter our biographical subject, except by coming to meet her? Writing can never be wholly innocent of the writing self, and slowly I’m coming to accept that a biographer’s own self always frames her subject.
But Elizabeth’s poetry too composes a kind of self-portrait, or rather mirror. As she became herself through writing, her writing reflected that developing self. And so her body of work creates a kind of looking glass in which, dimly, we make out the person who wrote it: her choices and opinions, what moved her, habits and characteristic turns of phrase.
Though this is true of all writers’ work, it’s especially true for Elizabeth because poetry isn’t, to paraphrase that early hero Byron, ‘of her life a thing apart’, but her ‘whole existence’. She makes a brilliant case study in writerly self-invention: in the self on the page. Besides, this is a self that overwhelmingly repays our attention. Barrett Browning shows us that the way into good, even great, writing goes step by step, gradus ad Parnassum. You could say that her story works like a practice mirror for writers, even today.
Seven years after his wife’s death, in his four-volume verse novel The Ring and the Book, Robert describes the literal mirror in which Elizabeth saw her own face daily: the one with ‘twin Cherubs in the tarnished frame’ which hung in the drawing-room at Casa Guidi, ‘tall […] to the ceiling-top’. Today it hangs there once again, on the green wall above the red sofa, facing the windows, the balcony, and the side wall of San Felice; a shady view which it reflects only incompletely. Visitors to the apartment see their own reflections pass to and fro in the glass. Perhaps some even fantasise that they glimpse Elizabeth there too. But we don’t need to visit Florence or to believe in ghosts to encounter her. To read Elizabeth Barrett Browning is to witness how, unaware that she’s being observed, she reflects herself in her poetry. Which, with all its innovative brilliance, makes a fabulously ornate two-way mirror.
Notes
Both Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s work and Robert Browning’s writing is widely available, including online. So I’ve referenced only poem titles and (in longer poems) line numbers. However, an excellent Norton Critical Edition of Aurora Leigh is available, edited by Margaret Reynolds (New York & London: W. W. Norton, 1996); as is the comprehensive The Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (five volumes) edited by Sandra Donaldson et al. (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2010). The Norton Critical Edition of Robert Browning’s Poetry is edited by James F. Loucks and Andrew M. Stauffer (New York & London: W. W. Norton, 2007). The Wedgestone Press multi-volume and online edition of The Browning Correspondence, edited by Philip Kelley et al., www.browningscorrespondence.com, includes not only letters (here given as # numbers) but supporting documents (here given as SD numbers), images and portraits, and contemporary critical responses to the Brownings, and is by far the best resource for research. So authoritative and comprehensive is it that I have adopted its numbering throughout these references. Also indispensible for any Browning scholar is The Brownings: A Research Guide, www.browningguide.org/, also prepared by Kelley et al. Published before much of this material had been made available, the last full-length solo biography is Margaret Forster’s wonderfully readable and emotionally insightful Elizabeth Barrett Browning (London: Chatto & Windus, 1988). Robert is more recently and comprehensively served by Ian Finlayson’s authoritative Browning (London: Harper Collins, 2004).
Key to abbreviations
EBB – Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Edward B MB – her father, Edward Barrett Moulton-Barrett
Samuel B MB – her ‘Uncle Sam’
Edward MB – her brother ‘Bro’
Samuel MB – her brother Sam
Mary MB – her mother
Henrietta MB and Arabella MB – her sisters Henrietta and Arabella
RB – Robert Browning
Mitford – Mary Russell Mitford
DEDICATION
p. v
The last line of Aurora Leigh [AL].
FRONTISPIECE
Epigraph
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, AL Bk 2, L. 485.
p. 1
C. S. Francis & Co. commission this cheap successor to daguerreotype, taken on 18 September 1858. RB to Charles Stephen Francis 19 September 1858, #4243; RB to Edward Law 19 September 1858, #4244.
p. 2
Barlow is selected by William Michael Rossetti. Barlow’s offprint is held at the Armstrong Browning Library. Alicia Constant, ‘Artefacts Relating to EBB’s Aurora Leigh’, http://blogs.baylor.edu/19crs/2016/01/21/artifacts-related-to-ebbs-aurora-leigh/ [retrieved 11 September 2018].
Rossetti’s request for ‘the shoulder & back to be slightly lowered’ has been taken as evidence that EBB developed a humped back. D. A. B. Young, ‘The illnesses of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’ in British Medical Journal vol. 298 (18 February 1989), p. 441. Simpler and more likely is that she’s hunched over by chronic pulmonary disease.
‘An evening resort…’ Dante Gabriel Rossetti to William Allingham 18 December 1856, SD2023. ‘As unattractive a person…’ Rossetti to Walter Howell Deverell 30 August 1851, SD1501.
p. 3
RB to Edward Chapman 19 September 1858, #4246.
The ‘horrible libel’, a medallion by the sculptor Marshall Wood, is reproduced in The National Magazine (14 February 1857), p. 313. RB retains the original ambrotype, ‘so satisfactory that I keep it myself and only send a copy to Francis’. RB to Edward Chapman 19 September 1858, #4246.
Sent via the Fulton. RB to Charles Stephen Francis 19 September 1858, #4243.
Brady advertised in the New-York Daily Tribune.
p. 4
AL Bk 8, Ll. 283, 285. As famously argued in Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’ in Phyllis Johnson, ed, Aspen vol. 5 + 6 (1967).
p. 5
Lionel Trilling and Harold Bloom in Frank Kermode, John Hollander, Harold Bloom, Martin Price, J. B. Trapp, Lionel Trilling, eds, Th
e Oxford Anthology of English Literature (New York, London, Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 1475.
p. 6
The 1980s also see the last full-length biography, Margaret Forster’s Elizabeth Barrett Browning (London: Chatto & Windus, 1988). Important studies of EBB as a ‘woman writer’ published in this era include Angela Leighton, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1986) in their Key Women Writers series; Marjorie Stone, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995) in their Women Writers series; and Germaine Greer, Slip-Shod Sibyls: Recognition, Rejection and the Female Poet (London: Viking, 1995), pp. 95–101, 394–400, 424.
Woolf misses the verse novel’s grand narrative of becoming a woman poet.
Virginia Woolf, ‘Aurora Leigh’ in The Second Common Reader (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1932).
Virginia Woolf, Flush: A Biography (London: The Hogarth Press, 1932).
p. 8
Under the principle of coverture. Such non-professional occupations as governess or seamstress are open to unmarried women.
The father of Mary Ann Evans (1819–1880) invested in schooling because the future George Eliot was a plain child whose marriage prospects he considered poor.
EBB, ‘Glimpses into My Own Life and Literary Character’, in Philip Kelley and Ronald Hudson, eds, The Brownings’ Correspondence (Winfield, Kansas: Wedgestone Press, 1984), vol. 1, pp. 348–56, p. 351.
p. 9
AL Bk 2, Ll. 494–97.
AL Bk 1, Ll. 959–61.
Michael Field is a pseudonym for Katharine Harris Bradley and Edith Emma Cooper.
p. 10
AL Bk 2, Ll. 33–34.
‘The worthiest poets have remained uncrowned / Till death has bleached their foreheads to the bone’, AL Bk 2, Ll. 28–29.
AL Bk 1, Ll. 1049–52.
p. 11
AL Bk 2, Ll. 232–36.
AL Bk 2, Ll. 240–43. Even in the year of Elizabeth’s birth, when roughly 60 per cent of women (and 40 per cent of men) are illiterate, female literacy is not bizarre. David Mitch, ‘Education and Skill of the British Labour Force’, in Roderick Floud and Paul Johnson, eds, The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain, vol. I: Industrialisation, 1700–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 344.
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Hogarth Press, 1929), p. 6.
p. 12
Though EBB still hadn’t read Godwin’s Memoir in her forties. Charlotte Brontë, quoted in Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë (London: Smith, Elder, 1857), Bk 1, p. 140. By the time Aurora Leigh is published, biographies are bestsellers. Samuel Smiles’s 1857 The Life of George Stephenson and of his son Robert Stephenson sells 25,500 copies in its first six years. Richard Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public 1800–1900 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998), p. 388.
BOOK ONE
Epigraph
AL Bk 1, Ll. 1139–40.
p. 14
The Gentleman’s Magazine vol. 108 (September 1810), p. 202. ‘Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy vol. XII’ in The Monthly Journal vol. 93 (September–December 1820), pp. 161–62. Though still within the cool, thirty-year Dalton Minimum, in 1810, ‘Summer was generally dry and hot’: Lucy Veale, Georgina H. Endfield, ‘Situating 1816, the “year without summer”, in the UK’, in The Geographical Journal vol. 182, no. 4 (10 August 2016), pp. 318–30.
AL, Bk 1, L. 1083. A local but also central-northern English place name, ‘hope’ comes from the Old English ‘hop’. University of Nottingham Key to English Place-names http://kepn.nottingham.ac.uk/map/place/Herefordshire/Hope%20under%20Dinmore [retrieved 29 July 2018].
Notice of Auction Sale on 25 August 1831, London Morning Post (4 August 1831), p. 4.
AL Bk 1, L. 630.
Edward B MB to EBB 5 September 1809, #1. He offers £24,000 against an asking price of £27,000.
p. 15
EBB to Elizabeth Moulton c.15 July 1810, #3. Elizabeth Moulton to EBB 18 July 1810, #4.
Bro started life as ‘Buff’, Edward B MB to EBB 5 September 1809, #1. As an unaccompanied seven-year-old, E B MB crossed the Atlantic on a ship auspiciously bearing his mother’s name. The Elizabeth’s arrival in Bristol is recorded in Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal 29 September 1792, cited in Kelley and Hudson, eds, The Brownings’ Correspondence, fn. 2 to Elizabeth Moulton to EBB c.June 1826, #232. Elizabeth seems to have stayed behind because her youngest child, George Goodin, born at the end of 1789, was too young to travel; he died on 8 January 1793, just after his third birthday. R. A. Barrett, The Barretts of Jamaica (Winfield, Kansas: The Armstrong Browning Library of Baylor University, The Browning Society, Wedgestone Press, 2000), p. 184.
Pinkie is immortalised in Thomas Lawrence’s 1794 oil portrait, now at Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
Edward B MB to EBB 5 September 1809, #1.
p. 16
Mary MB to Arabella Graham-Clarke 12 May 1809, SD123. In this letter sent four months earlier to her mother, Mary both describes ‘a journey to the dear North, as the Summit of happiness’ and praises Hope End: ‘Nothing in short Ever was so picturesque and beautiful.’
Graham-Clarke co-owned the glassworks with executor, Joseph Lamb: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/42836 [retrieved 9 August 2018]. In 1774 he contributed to the subscription for a new Infirmary and in 1776 to that for the Assembly Rooms. John Charlton, Hidden Chains: The Slavery Business and North East England 1600–1865 (Newcastle: Tyne Bridge Publishing, 2008), pp. 120, 124.
In 1750 sugar, not wheat, was ‘the most valuable commodity in European trade – it made up a fifth of all European imports and in the last decades of the century four-fifths of the sugar came from the British and French colonies in the West Indies’. Clive Ponting, World History: A New Perspective (London: Chatto & Windus, 2000), p. 501.
The well-connected Arabella (b.1755) was the daughter of Roger Altham (b.1706). Called to the Bar in the year of her birth, his distinguished career included serving as Seal Keeper of the High Court of Admiralty, Registrar of the Archdeaconry of Middlesex, and for the Dean & Chapter of Westminster. In 1746 Roger married Mary Isaacson of Fenton in Northumberland; Fenton Hall later passed into John Graham-Clarke’s hands (see Charlton, op. cit., p. 121). Arabella’s elder sister Mary married Newcastle banker Aubone Surtees the Younger, and became sister-in-law to the Lord Chancellor.
Born John Graham in 1735/6, with Hull merchant relatives, Ba’s maternal grandfather came to Newcastle with the East Yorkshire Grenadier Militia, http://hector.davie.ch/misc/Graham.html [retrieved 5 July 2018]. The Rutters were merchants, master bakers, brewers, church wardens and a High Sheriff. Elizabeth Rutter died 20 August 1772.
p. 17
AL Bk 1, Ll. 1129–31.
A lengthy legal battle will follow Graham-Clarke’s death. The original will leaves his property to his wife and his two sons, and a cousin, Thomas Clarke. James Losh, a close friend although an abolitionist, testifies that he was mentally sound in 1817 when he created a codicil which added William Baker as an heir, and mentioned his five daughters. (Another son, John, takes on the running of both Newcastle business and his West Indian trade.)
The first Boulton & Watt steam-driven sugar-cane mill arrives in Jamaica in 1810; other steam mills have already been in use there for four decades. Veront M. Satchell, ‘Early use of steam power in the Jamaican sugar industry, 1768–1810’ in Transactions of the Newcomen Society vol. 67 no. 1 (1995), pp. 221–31.
Man-hours measured on the Indian subcontinent in 2003. R. N. S. Yadav, 1 Yadav, Raj Kumar Tejra, ‘Labour saving and cost reduction machinery for sugarcane cultivation’, Sugar Tech vol. 5, no. 1–2 (2003), pp. 7–10.
Graham-Clarke’s Arabella and Mayflower advertise ‘excellent accommodations for Passengers’. Newcastle Chronicle (31 January 1794).
p. 18
Edward sent his mother a tear-stained glove as a keepsake. Elizabeth Moulton to EBB c.June 1826, #232.
p. 19
Edward B MB to Philip Scarlett 30 November 1807, SD74. Edward’s father-in-law will never pay this debt; over half a century from now his own son George Goodin will be pursuing it. George Goodin Moulton-Barrett to John Altham Graham-Clarke Jr 7 January 1860, SD2317 et seq. ‘A sweet, gentle nature…’ EBB to RB 27 August 1846, #2565.
‘I rejoice…’ Mary Moulton-Barrett to EBB 4 April 1826, #229.
To say nothing of modern slavery. UCL Legacies of British Slave-ownership, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/project/context [retrieved 19 September 2019].
p. 20
AL Bk 1, Ll. 1132–35, 1137–38, 1143–44.
The Rt Hon C. W. Radcliffe Cooke MP is the Member for Cider.
Farm labourers receive on average less than half what building labourers are paid; in Herefordshire they earn less even than the national average.
If they have at least four children, as is usual, they can’t support their families. Gregory Clark, ‘The long march of history: farm laborers’ wages in England 1208–1850’ in New Economics Papers (24 September 2001), p. 10. https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cla:najeco:625018000000000238 [retrieved 29 July 2018].
The hop industry suffers particular transport difficulties. ‘Out of sight / The lane was: sunk so deep, no foreign tramp / Nor drover of wild ponies out of Wales’ could see out. AL Bk 1, Ll. 588–90.
Two-Way Mirror Page 31