by Julia Markus
“We all get used to the thought of the tomb; and I was buried, that was the whole. It was a little thing even for myself a short time ago, and really it would be a pneumatological curiosity if I could describe and let you see how perfectly for years together, after what broke my heart at Torquay, I lived on the outside of my own life, blindly and darkly from day to day, as completely dead to hope.… Nobody quite understood this of me, because I am not morally a coward and have a hatred of all the forms of audible groaning. But God knows what is within.… Even my poetry . . was a thing on the outside of me, a thing to be done, and then done! What people said of it did not touch me. A thoroughly morbid and desolate state it was, which I look back now to with the sort of horror with which one would look to one’s graveclothes, if one had been clothed in them by mistake during a trance.”
She had chosen love over death. Yet far from Torquay’s cruel sea, in Orléans, there was a warrant out on her still. In the two days before she left Wimpole Street she wrote a letter to her brother George. It began, “I throw myself on your affection for me & beseech of God that it may hold under the weight—dearest George, Go to your room & read this letter.” After reading it, “George, dear George, read the enclosed letter for my dearest Papa, & then—breaking gently the news of it—give it to him to read.” It ended, “If you have any affection for me, George, dearest George, let me hear a word—at Orleans—let me hear. I will write—I bless you, I love you—” And she signed it
“I am
Your Ba—”
In Orléans, the mail arrived. When Robert brought “a great packet of letters,” she took them, “growing paler and colder every moment.” He wanted to sit by her, be with her as she read. “I had resolved never to let him do that, before the moment came—so, after some beseeching, I got him to go away for ten minutes, to meet the agony alone, and with more courage so, according to my old habit.”
The letters from her brothers, represented by George, were worse than she could have imagined. Whatever her intentions, to spare them trouble with Moulton Barrett, to spare herself a milder form of negative reaction, they on their part had had the wool pulled over their eyes and they were furious. An understandable human reaction to being tricked by one’s sister, though one imagines that for the sons of such a father, it was particularly painful to look foolish as a result. George, who had actually stood up for Elizabeth’s Italian plans in the face of their father’s objection, wrote to her “with a sword.” She told her sisters: “To write to me as if I did not love you at all.… Only he wrote in excitement and in ignorance.” Still, “They were very hard letters, those from dearest Papa and dearest George—To the first I had to bow my head—I do not seem to myself to have deserved that full cup.” Dearest Papa believed she had “sold my soul—for genius . . mere genius. Which I might have done when I was younger, if I had had the opportunity . . but am in no danger of doing now.”
One can imagine Robert’s consternation at this sword thrust of the brothers. Thank God for the sisters. “Now I will tell you—Robert who had been waiting at the door, I believe, in great anxiety about me, came in and found me just able to cry from the balm of your tender words—I put your two letters into his hands, and he, when he read them, said with tears in his eyes, and kissing them between the words—‘I love your sisters with a deep affection—I am inexpressibly grateful to them,—It shall be the object of my life to justify this trust, as they express it here.’ He said it with tears in his eyes. May God bless you—bless you!”
If they could have “seen him that day at Orleans. He laid me down on the bed and sate by me for hours, pouring out floods of tenderness and goodness, and promising to win back for me, with God’s help, the affection of such of you as were angry.… It is strange that anyone so brilliant should love me,—but true and strange it is . . and it is impossible for me to doubt it any more. Perfectly happy therefore we should be, if I could look back on you all without this pang.”
And then for some good news that had its own edge: “His family have been very kind,” she told her sisters. “His father considered him of age to judge, and never thought of interfering otherwise than of saying at the last moment, ‘Give your wife a kiss for me,’ this when they parted. His sister sent me a little travelling writing desk, with a word written, ‘E.B.B. from her sister Sarianna.’ Nobody was displeased at the reserve used towards them, understanding that there were reasons for it which did not detract from his affection for them and my respect.” One can only imagine with what concern the Browning family now waited for their own mail. Still, the kind letters from her sisters, her in-laws, her friends, and the love of Robert Browning constituted a stay of execution.
A letter from John Kenyon came in the same mail. It was addressed to Elizabeth, and it acknowledged receipt of “your husband’s letter yesterday.” He reassured her that “the very peculiar circumstances of your case have transmuted what might have otherwise been called ‘Imprudence’ into ‘Prudence,’ and apparent wilfulness into real necessity.” He called her “my dearest cousin,” and he delighted in the union. “If the thing had been asked of me, I should have advised it, albeit glad that I was not asked for the reason which I have given.” Whatever “reason” Kenyon gave for being glad he had not been asked did not appear in the transcription she sent her sisters.
Other helpful and soothing notes came, too, not the least being from Charles Trelawny Jago, the medical man who supplied her prescription for morphine, “with ever so many good wishes.”
Orléans was a turning point, as Mrs. Jameson told Lady Byron. “In short she is much comforted & certainly gaining strength in spite of the exertion & fatigue—as yet there is not a trace of animal spirits, tho evidently a sense of deep happiness, gratitude & love.…”
But Anna Jameson was not privy to the whole story. She and Elizabeth were quite close by now: In Paris, “Robert told Mrs. Jameson to call me Ba . . & I am to call her Aunt Nina which is her favorite name for relation or friend.” Though Mrs. Jameson would never agree to “Ba,” which she deplored even on Robert’s lips, she was, by Orléans, Aunt Nina. Before the letters arrived, she had assumed (as Elizabeth hoped) that the sympathy of her friend’s whole family was secure “except that of her father—& with him, the disapprobation—without designing to give a reason—seems like a madness.” At Orléans, Mrs. Jameson reported that all letters from her family offered comfort and that “there is no letter from her father—but she hopes he will relent.”
Part of what Mrs. Jameson was told was accurate. Elizabeth would always hope that her father would forgive her. She could be angry at every form of political and moral tyranny she found in the world, but anger for the position her father had put her in, anger at his letter? The fantasy in her evasion was that Papa’s letter actually hadn’t arrived. There was still hope. That eternally hopeless hope about dearest Papa, Elizabeth Barrett Browning carried with her to her new life.
But the highlight of this honeymoon was a poet’s (two poets’?) Victorian version of Niagara Falls. It occurred at Avignon, the birthplace of Petrarch’s lifelong love and obsession, Laura. The trip had been difficult physically. If it were not for Aunt Nina, we would not know how difficult: “We have brought our poor invalid so far in safety,” she wrote to Lady Byron on October 7. Because of Elizabeth’s condition, it had been a much slower trip than Anna had originally planned. There had not been any “increase of indisposition—or any return of her disorder—but the suffering has been very great—not only we have had to carry her fainting from the carriage but from her extreme thinness & weakness every few hours journey has bruised her all over—till movement became almost unbearable.” As always she bore bodily agony with patience: “The unselfish sweetness of the temper—the unfailing consideration for others, I did not quite expect.”
Elizabeth spared Arabel her bruised body. She informed her, briefly and simply, that the journey had been trying. At Avignon, however, there was consolation. They stayed a few days and made a pilgrim
age to “Vaucluse as becomes poets” to commemorate the love of Petrarch and Laura. “My spirits rose & the enjoyment of the hour spent at the sacred fountain was complete. It stands deep & still & grand against a majestic wall of rock & then falls, boils, breaks, foams over the stones, down into the channel of the … river winding away greenly, greenly.… A few little cypresses & olive trees—no other tree in sight … Robert said, ‘Ba, are you losing your senses?’ because without a word I made my way over the boiling water to a still rock in the middle of it . . but he followed me & helped me & we both sate in the spring, till Mrs Jameson was provoked to make a sketch of us.”
Of course Petrarch and Laura hadn’t a spaniel. “Also Flush proved his love of me by leaping (at the cost of wetting his feet & my gown) after me to the slippery stone and was repulsed three times by Robert … till he moaned on the dry ground to see me in such … danger.”
And so the lovers sat on the rocks under the spray of the fountain at Vaucluse, where the Italian poet Petrarch immortalized his Laura in his love sonnets. Dante had his Beatrice, Petrarch had his Laura in poetry and in heaven. The Brownings, through extraordinary circumstances, were to have each other in their lifetimes—they would add “as well.”
Aunt Nina told Elizabeth, “Well, it is the most charming thing to see you and Mr. Browning together. If two persons were to be chosen from the ends of the earth for perfect union and fitness, there could not be a greater congruity than between you two.” To Lady Byron she wrote, “he is on all the common things of this life the most impractical of men—the most uncalculating—rather,—in short the worst manager I ever met with—she—in her present state—& from her long seclusion almost helpless—now only conceive the menage that is likely to ensue & WITHOUT FAULT on either side!—” From Pisa on October 15, after their long, arduous trip, the poor woman sounded like an overburdened mother-in-law.
But almost immediately, the magic of Italy, the needed distance it provided between her old and new lives, between her father and her husband, granted the poet what she had predicted she would need to feel safe. Anna Jameson scarcely finished lamenting the utter greenness of the newlyweds when she found fit to crosswrite her postscript, squeezing it into the last letter of the series of five she wrote to Lady Byron on the subject. “I have just seen EB—looking wonderfully well—considering all the fatigue undergone—under her husband’s influence and mine she is leaving off those medicines on which she existed, ether, morphine, & I am full of hope for her.”
“THE RUNAWAY SLAVE”
SETTLED IN PISA FINALLY, Browning wrote to his new sisters, Arabel and Henrietta: “every day and hour reveals more and more to me the divine goodness and infinite tenderness of her heart;—while that wonderful mind of hers, with its inexhaustible affluence and power, continues unceasingly to impress me.… It is nothing to me that my whole life shall be devoted to such a woman,—its only happiness will consist in such a devotion.” If their brothers could see her now, “so changed as to be hardly recognizable, and with a fair prospect of life and enjoyment for many years to come . . they could not be very angry I am sure!”
Elizabeth wrote Julia Martin: “Every day I am out walking while the golden oranges look at me over the walls, and when I am tired Robert and I sit down on a stone to watch the lizards. We have been to your seashore too.… Also we have driven up to the foot of the mountains,… and we have seen the pine woods and met the camels laden with faggots all in a line. So now ask me again if I enjoy my liberty as you expect. My head goes round sometimes, that is all. I never was happy before in my life.”
Except for visits from Anna Jameson and Gerardine, who left Pisa for Rome in early November, and for an occasional talk with the Italian Professor Ferucci, who Jameson had introduced them to, they saw nobody. Elizabeth told her sisters she had many more visitors in her room on Wimpole Street. The two lovers had a daily, uninterrupted tête-à-tête. They ate like poets: “We have our dinner from the Trattoria at two, and can dine our favorite way on thrushes and chianti with miraculous cheapness, and no trouble, no cook, no kitchen.… It is a continental fashion which we never cease commending. Then at six we have coffee, and rolls of milk, made of milk, I mean, and at nine our supper … of roast chestnuts and grapes.”
Robert spoke of their uninterrupted time together as a test of true love, and Elizabeth remarked as well on their ability to get on so well together. Robert, who had seen much of the world, now wanted only to be by her side. She had to convince him to take his own vigorous daily walk by himself. And he had vowed never to go where she could not. Elizabeth was the one more willing to meet the world, and she convinced him finally to take a subscription to “a better library than the purely Italian one,” even though economy was a keynote to their plans. The access to more continental literature was worth the price, not to mention the bonus—a daily French newspaper, Le Siècle. Now, when they sat down to their daily coffee, which Elizabeth poured “(I pour out the coffee now . . it is my only ‘active duty’ I think—that and to keep Flush in sight, to prevent his barking),” they read. “We never see a creature, and to talk for four and twenty hours together, would be rather exhausting—and one is not always in a humour for writing prose or rhyme.”
Pisa was—for all its literary associations, and its tower and duomo—dull. In one sense the couple lauded the dullness, as they were living on their love. In another sense, the contemporary Italy they were viewing was one that had no vitality. They were in the land of what-had-been. There seemed to be no modern thinking: The modern writers were hackneyed. Professor Ferucci visited and praised a work by Alessandro Manzoni’s son-in-law. Robert, who had been reading the novel out loud to Elizabeth, among mutual yawns and sighs, tried to be polite. Elizabeth came right out against its banality: “I not being so humane.”
They had taken a six-month lease on what Robert called a pile of rooms—he counted some forty-seven doors and windows—at the front of a palazzo, Collegio di Ferdinando. “We sit there alone in mornings and evenings, seeing nobody in this strange silent old city.” What might sound like a lament was actually an exultation. Still, Elizabeth wished they had taken a shorter lease so that they could travel sooner.
At first everything in Pisa seemed inexpensive by British standards. They had no idea that their way of taking a lease and Wilson’s way of shopping was causing an avalanche of rumor. All the landlords and greengrocers in Pisa assumed the Brownings were wealthy. What else would explain why they accepted whatever price they were quoted and did not bargain? Landlords were so jealous of the padrone of Collegio di Ferdinando that they bragged they, too, could have rented to the English couple if their own integrity hadn’t demanded they honor previous commitments. No wonder their landlord sent the poets presents. How innocent Elizabeth still was in December in a letter to Mary Mitford: “The ‘padrone’ in this house, sent us in as a gift (in gracious recognition, perhaps of our lawful paying of bills) an immense dish of oranges.” So much for absorbing the customs of the country and not being seen as typical British travelers.
Elizabeth had said she needed distance from London to flourish—and flourish she did. Robert wrote that she had filled out remarkably. Mrs. Jameson told her, “You are not improved, you are transformed.” She was taking less morphine than she had on her difficult voyage from Wimpole Street—and the Italian druggist, seeing Mr. Jago’s prescription, cut it down. It seemed he at least was not cheating the British: “He really believes his morphine to be so superior to what we could get in England that he felt himself bound to diminish the quantity.” By early February, “Ba sleeps admirably—and is steadily diminishing the doses of morphine, quite as much as is prudent.” By the first week of March, “I gradually diminish to seventeen days for twenty-two doses which I used to take in eight days.”
Home thoughts continued to bring bittersweet memories, and during the early part of the honeymoon, Elizabeth and Robert were still explaining their actions by mail. “Am I bitter? The feeling … passes while I wri
te it out.” And write it out Elizabeth did to many of her correspondents. In this letter to Julia Martin she confided, “Assuredly,… however, my case is not to be classed with other cases—what happened to me could not have happened, perhaps, with any other family in England.” Were there many other families in England (in the world?) in which the father would not allow the marriage of any of his adult children?
Both Robert and Elizabeth attempted to bridge the rift with the brothers. The sisters acted as intermediaries. Robert wrote to them of how he believed Elizabeth’s life was at risk at Wimpole Street. If, after the brothers had had the time to think things through, they “can honestly come to the opinion that, by any of the ordinary methods applicable to any other case, I could have effected the same result,” he would “express all the sorrow they can desire.” The current winter in England was as brutal as the last winter had been mild, a fact both the Brownings repeated. Was it lost on the brothers that this might have been the London winter she would not have survived? Elizabeth wondered if it mattered as little to them as to her father that she was alive and happy.
At the beginning of the new year, 1847, Elizabeth dared not hope her brothers would accept “the peace offering I sent them.—I suppose they mean to salute me with the point of the sword for the rest of my life.” What they were attempting to do was reconcile with her while snubbing Browning. She told Henrietta that they must “have better taste than to dream of such an impossible thing.” She asked about all of them: “Does Alfred get on in the railroad? Has Occy made any good drawings lately? Did George go to Cambridge? How is the Law, too, with … Sette? And tell me of Henry. As to dear Stormie, I do trust that he has other plans than for that dreadful Jamaica.” She loved them all dearly, better than they loved her, or this rupture would not be continuing. Just that morning she and Robert were talking over breakfast “of O’Connell and the Irish,” and she described Stormie’s enthusiasm for both: