Dared and Done

by Julia Markus

  On one occasion Pen went up to a boy of twelve who had taunted him, and exclaimed, “ ‘Don’t be impertinent, sir,’ (doubling his small fist), or I will show you that I’m a boy!’ ” The twelve-year-old may have doubted this, given Pen’s Renaissance frock and long curls.

  “Of course, ‘mine untles’ are charmed with this ‘proper spirit,’ and applauded highly. Robert and I begged to suggest to the hero that the ‘boy of twelve’ might have killed him if he had pleased.

  “ ‘Never mind,’ cried little Pen, ‘there would have been somebody to think of me, who would have him hanged’ (great applause from the uncles).

  “ ‘But you would still be dead,’ said Robert remorselessly.

  “ ‘Well, I don’t tare for that. It was a beautiful place to die in—close to the sea.’

  “So you will please observe,” Elizabeth summed up for Julia Martin, “that in spite of being Italians and wearing curls, we can fight to the death on occasion.…”

  Happy memories of a reunion at Ventnor, of a first and last time.

  SURPRISE ENDINGS

  AURORA LEIGH was published a year after Men and Women. The novel in verse Barrett Browning believed would fly in the face of convention did so. But it was also an immediate and resounding success. Society seemed ready to read about Aurora Leigh, a woman artist who chose her art over a man, her cousin Romney Leigh, an idealistic socialist, and Marian Earle, a young girl from the lower class who was the loving mother of an illegitimate child born of treachery and rape. It seemed ready to acknowledge the excesses of the drawing room and to reach out to the poverty-filled London streets, where women prostituted themselves to stay alive. The reader was also treated to a view of lower-class life in which brutish parents prepared their girls for the life of the street through harshness, contempt, and greed. Romney’s well-meaning socialism set against this view of human nature was parodied throughout.

  The difficulties of being a woman—whatever the class—in the real world seemed of immediate concern to readers. The woman poet, Aurora Leigh, sang not of Italian politics but of modern life. And a wealth of experience and wisdom was tied to a charged and suspenseful, page-turning plot. “That divine book,” Robert called it. “I am surprised, I own, at the amount of success,” Elizabeth wrote to her sister-in-law in November 1856. “Golden-hearted Robert is in ecstasies about it—far more than if it all related to a book of his own.”

  By January 1857, the book was already in a second edition, and she wrote to Arabel that the American reviews “are ecstatical—I am said to have ‘put down all my faults & have gone miles beyond myself in all ways’—The Americans especially delight in the scene in the church & the dialogue of the fine people.” One American “can’t understand how an Englishwoman could so perfectly see & represent English peculiarities as I have done in this book.” The intellectual and artistic detachment from England did nothing to separate her from a major emotional concern there: “Tell me if Papa has made any observation about the second edition of ‘Aurora.’ I think so much of these things in reference to him—but I dare say he is absolutely indifferent to me and my writings.

  CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN by William Page, ca. 1853. In Rome, the American actress and friend of the Brownings performed excerpts from EBB’s well-received novel in verse, Aurora Leigh. Known for her roles as Romeo and Hamlet, she met the Brownings in Paris in 1852 when she and a female companion had “made vows of celibacy & of eternal attachment to each other—they live together, dress alike.” EBB wrote, “it is a female marriage. I happened to say, ‘Well, I never heard of such a thing before,’ ” to a friend who answered, “ ‘Oh, it is by no means uncommon.’ ”

  “In Florence the poem has found great favour. People say ‘it magnetizes them,’ though it wasn’t written by the spirits after all,” as had been rumored. The English bookseller there told Robert “he had been foolish enough to order only a few copies—which had been sold instantly, so that he had had to send for others.” It had to be the story and bold plot that moved people. The poetry? “I never will believe that the masses are moveable by mere poetry.” After all, look what happened to golden-hearted Robert’s poetry little more than a year before.

  The poet Leigh Hunt wrote her a twenty-page letter. The poem so moved her American publisher that he cried. And the American actress and friend of the Brownings, Charlotte Cushman, “is giving or about to give ‘readings’ of ‘Aurora’ in Rome.”

  However, “on the other side … there’s a party in England holding up their hands at the scandal of a woman’s writing such a book. And Mrs Ogilvy tells me that ‘the mamas won’t allow their daughters to read it’—Well the daughters must be very young—& my comfort is that they will grow older.”

  The enormity of the success could also be gleaned from the fact that a woman so self-effacing would write so much about Aurora Leigh in one letter. Still, there were things “my shyness won’t let me repeat.”

  Robert took up the slack, writing to their publisher Edward Chapman of Ruskin’s praise of Aurora Leigh as being “the greatest poem in the English language.” Ruskin said Elizabeth was second only to Shakespeare, but in the realm of pure poetry she surpassed Shakespeare himself. When people “write & talk of the ‘jealousy’ of authors & husbands, let them look at him!” Ba wrote to Arabel of Robert Browning.

  At the time of Aurora Leigh’s enormous success, Robert Browning came into his own money. It had nothing to do with the sale of his poetry but with the death of a dear friend. John Kenyon died in December 1856. At first it looked as if the poets had been passed over. “Robert has come in,” Elizabeth wrote to Arabel from Florence, “& there is no letter. He still expects one, he says. It may come (I say) but it is not likely.… Of course I would not write of these things to any but yourself.” But this time Robert was right; notice of a bequest did finally arrive. The Brownings were left eleven thousand pounds. Robert inherited the major share, sixty-five hundred pounds. Kenyon had divided the inheritance with his usual sensitivity to the couple. No one could ever say again that Browning lived off his wife.

  Although Kenyon’s legacy to the Brownings has always been assumed to be a boon for which they were unequivocally grateful, they had misgivings.

  Arabel wrote asking her sister if she had been disappointed by their share of the inheritance. “No, Arabel, I may truly say I was not ‘disappointed’—On the contrary—for I imagined we were passed over. But as you ask me, I will confess frankly to you that we should not have disliked the Devonshire Place house.” That was where the Brownings had spent the previous summer. Although “we could not have lived there—it wd. have been a branch to light upon when we went to London,—& we should have had pleasure in keeping things together as a memorial. Never mind … we both feel that what has been actually done for us was most sufficient & kind.”

  After that visit with Arabel and the “untles” the previous summer, the Brownings had in fact traveled to the north of the Isle of Wight to be with John Kenyon at his summer place. The family was led by servants to where the ill man sat waiting for them in the drawing room. “So frightened I was at the idea of seeing him that my heart beat to take my breath away.” When John Kenyon saw these favorites of his, his spirits revived: “I put my arm round his neck & kissed him once, twice . . & over perhaps. I was [touched] to be there & see him—overjoyed to see him so much better than I expected.… Thinner he is certainly.… He is thinner & paler—& he stoops more.… The only real malady is the breath,” a condition which “he has been liable to all his life.” Once more, Elizabeth attempted to look over death.

  In the grand, quiet house with its view of parade and sea, she read proofs and with Robert’s help prepared Aurora Leigh for the press. Solitary Pen, away from his “untles,” blew the ivory whistle Kenyon gave him, went out in the coach-box, and in his own room played “ ‘minister’—reading the Bible aloud from a pillow on his table.”

  But there could have been no real doubt that Kenyon was dying. “I never wit
nessed suffering of so distressing a kind, before. It was like a prolonged death agony.” There was that “peculiar look in the eyes which you cant mistake.” Kenyon’s struggle for breath made him say “he desires death—death, to have rest in it.” And there was no doubt that Kenyon’s will was on both the Brownings’ minds—in terms of provisions for Henrietta. “Robert spoke warmly of dear Surtees—he took an opportunity of doing that: but, you see, everything was determined in a hurry and agitation, and between wanderings of mind, at last.” The Brownings’ disappointment was only for her. “For ourselves, if we had expected anything considerable, (but, as you know, we did not) there would have been some disappointment on our own part. As it is, we are very thankful and contented. I only wish the same had been done by you.”

  “But oh,” she would write to Arabel, “that it had been more for Henrietta, oh that it had. And how strange, when you come to think, . . that it was not! To you, the need is not likely to come, in spite of imaginary contingencies Arabel; but a few thousands to Henrietta would have been a great help.”

  Henrietta’s inheritance of one hundred pounds was hardly worth her father’s refusal to give Kenyon’s solicitors Henrietta’s address. But Moulton Barrett was very angry about being left out of the will. Elizabeth wrote to Henrietta, “Arabel represents papa as much vexed. If the principle of relationship had been recognised at all, (which it was not) he had his undoubted claim.”

  Sitting in the Jamaican coffeehouse, Moulton Barrett must have heard from others, if he wouldn’t read it himself, of his daughter’s two-paragraph dedication of Aurora Leigh to their Jamaican cousin. It began: “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.” And it ended with his daughter sending their cousin “this book, the most mature of my works, and the one into which my highest convictions upon Life and Art have entered;… 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.…” She signed it from under Kenyon’s roof, “39 Devonshire Place: October 17, 1856.”

  In private, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s tribute to Kenyon was even warmer. From Florence, two months later, at a time when she was sure she had been passed over in Kenyon’s will, she wrote to Arabel, “In the last ten years he has put himself in the place of my own father, in taking care, for me & mine, that we do not want. We should have wanted much, except for him. His last act with regards to that book of mine” was proof to Elizabeth that he appreciated her dedication to him. The same act was also quite fatherly. Just before his death John Kenyon bought forty-seven copies of Aurora Leigh and distributed them among his friends.

  Still, would Moulton Barrett have paused over the auspiciousness of his daughter’s public dedication? It might not have been a bad idea, during all those years his cousin came to Wimpole Street, to have once invited him to stay for dinner.

  A more immediate loss to the Moulton Barrett household occurred in February 1857—the death of Treppy, Mary Trepsack, the daughter of a slave mother and planter father who had been adopted by Edward of Cinnamon Hill. Her passing marked the passing of an era. Her end was very difficult. She had grown “so mortally ailing & decrepit & joyless” in her dotage. But as Ba wrote to Arabel, with Treppy, “so many tender memories of years full of love are also swallowed up & disappear, that the heart faints within us to think them over.” She thought of putting Pen in mourning, but “I had not the heart for it.” She described her own dress: “Crepe sleeves & collar, black net & long ribbon for the hair—the black cloth jacket & silk skirt (without crepe trimming) will do, I think. Is that what you will wear? I wish to be right in these respects because it seems to me that this dear spirit would care …”

  The dear spirit’s distribution of her meager effects was a slap in the face to Arabel. Elizabeth wrote on April 3 to let the silver cup left her to stay where it was, “and if Papa should say a word on the subject, I enjoin on you or others to answer that … ‘she would rather not have it.’ ”

  Elizabeth was so angry at this departed spirit “that it cancels the tender gratitude which I ought to feel.” Good reason she had. Her sister Arabel, the daughter who remained at home and had tended to the ancient woman, was left with not one silver glint of acknowledgment. “All we can say is—may it have been pure madness; for other excuses are impossible.”

  Not only was Arabel ignored, but the only possible justification for the madness was canceled. “How strange that George, who was always accused in common with you, should have been forgiven apparently at last. Perhaps because of his having been of use in business.” One wonders what that accusation was. Treppy had grown paranoid in later years, often thinking the Barretts were trying to poison her.

  Elizabeth was certainly on the side of her sister this time, but her understanding of Arabel was limited. The symptoms of Arabel’s new illness astounded her, that feeling “of being squeezed to death by the chest in an iron vice.… I have felt that for years & years—but why you should, I don’t understand.”

  There had been a bequest for Pen, too. A watch and a parrot. His mother knew Pen would like to have the parrot. She wanted to tell him that Aunt Arabel would take care of it (who else?) and he could visit it when he was in England. Robert, however, didn’t want Pen to know a thing about the bequest. His scruples did not come from anger at the way his sister-in-law had been mistreated. Instead, they came from misgivings that reveal his mixed feelings about having been the benefactor of Kenyon’s will at all. Houses were not on his mind. He emphatically did not want the child to know of any bequest, any possible benefit derived from the death of another human being. His reason? “A belief in the wickedness of human nature deep within him.” He didn’t want to pass this on. And he could not help but remember a vivid image that had appalled him since his first trip to Rome when little Joe Story died. He never got it out of his mind, having seen the eight-year-old Edith Story after the death of her brother: “Robert cant forget Edith Story’s walking about proudly in her poor little brother’s red shoes.”

  Barrett Browning’s enjoyment of her success was marred by the death of John Kenyon and the lack of success of Robert’s Men and Women. Still, for all of her private nature and timidity in a crowd, she had wanted fame. From the age of eight her works had been published, first within the family, then without. She had always felt she had a mission in life and that to be a poet was a sacred vocation. Now she had written the long work that best expressed her mature intentions, a work she held so important that she would have herself judged by it alone. And within a few years it would go into five British editions. But her father had recently been ill. An attempt through Julia Martin to reconcile him to his married daughters had failed, and the thought of him “has been hanging like a stone about my heart for ever so long,—now when I ought to be elated & delighted I suppose at the success of my poem.” Instead, “how little happy this reaching in a degree, what has been with me an object in life, has made me. If there was nobody to be uneasy about, how different it would feel, I say to myself. Robert, at least is happy.…” And her unease was founded. Four months later a third death robbed her of any joy in her greatest accomplishment.

  On April 17, 1857, a month before his seventy-second birthday, Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett died. An hour before his death he dismissed Arabel and her aunt “with a cheerful or careless word about ‘wishing them goodnight.’ ” His last words were connected with sleep and being made comfortable for the night. He was suffering from what Arabel wrote to inform Elizabeth was a minor illness—it actually was erysipelas (St. Anthony’s fire), an acute skin disease that could spread and poison the blood. George wrote the next day to inform the Brownings of the end.

  “So it is all over now,” Robert wrote to Julia Martin on May 3, “all hope of better things, or a kind answer to entreaties such as I have seen Ba write in the bitterness of her heart.” H
ow could one understand his father-in-law’s unyielding rejection of his married children? “There must have been something in the organisation, or education, at least, that would account for and extenuate all this; but it has caused grief enough, I know; and now here is a new grief not likely to subside very soon.” He quickly added that his wife was reacting reasonably: “she does not reproach herself at all; it is all mere grief, as I say, that this should have been so; and I sympathise with her there.”

  But mere grief did turn to self-reproach. By the following month she wrote to Arabel, “my soul is bitter even unto death.” Her father had died “without a word, without a sign. It is like slamming a door on me as he went out.” She continued to believe “that what he did & the extreme views he took” were taken conscientiously, the result of “a false theory—He did hold by the Lord & walk straight as he saw.” But “As for me, in these days of anguish I have wished—

  “Well there is no use now of writing what—but I did love him.… Certainly I would have given my life for his life—yet he went without a word.” She had her compensations: “Robert is perfect in tenderness,” and “It has helped me, . . writing this letter.” For Arabel knew that “my misfortune is that I cant always cry freely, which makes one turn into stone.” In Elizabeth’s case this inability turned into a specific lifelong reaction, “that hysterical choking which prevents swallowing.” She became physically unable to eat.

  Elizabeth could not even write a letter outside of the family until July 1, when she told Julia Martin, “There has been great bitterness.” That was natural, she understood. But there had also been “some recoil against myself, more, perhaps, than is quite rational.” Morbidity returned. “My temptation is to lie on the sofa, and never stir nor speak, only I don’t give up, be certain.”