Dared and Done

by Julia Markus

  She spent time on her sofa imagining the dark interior of the house on Wimpole Street. In her mind she walked through all those rooms again. As she brooded in Florence, passing hours of uneasy nostalgia, realizing that she and her father could never be reconciled, her siblings in London were busy. As quickly as they could, they planned to leave 50 Wimpole Street. Their haste after their father’s sudden death was extraordinary. Arabel wanted to have her own house and live alone. George was thinking of giving up law and moving to the country. Some brothers returned from Jamaica, others went to Jamaica. There was no greater testimony to the economic hold the father had on the children than the rapidity with which they seized their freedom. Ironically, as they fled Wimpole Street, their oldest sister was once again drawn toward it. “They won’t break up everything at once in Wimpole Street—they can’t, I should think, though I know nothing.”

  But for Arabel a lifetime of submitting to the wishes of another was over—even if the strong Barrett voice this time was that of her oldest sibling. Ba wanted Arabel to come and stay with her and her family in Italy, and not just for a short while—for a few years perhaps. That’s exactly the kind of fate the stoic Londoner might have envisioned for herself when she thought it quite likely that any day her father might arbitrarily cut her out of his will.

  There had always been order in the Barrett household—an undisputed way of doing things that conformed to the father’s wishes. Rebellious children circumvented him when they could, but they paid lip service. On April 17, 1857, that reign ended. How the other Barrett children grieved we do not know, but in action they were united. The minute each person was free to do things his or her own way, liberty tore the house down quickly. Reform was more difficult for Barrett Browning to accept within the family than within her own poetry or her politics. Still, six weeks after Moulton Barrett’s death, his oldest daughter seemed to have made peace with the new regime. Of course Arabel should do precisely what she wished. “You see I was at the moment a little disappointed,” she explained to Henrietta, “but that is over; and from the first I have known that every human being who is able to choose a life should do it for himself and herself as he and she sees, and not as another sees.”

  AFTER HER FATHER’S DEATH Ba’s advice to both her sisters was unbridled. It might have been that she was now the oldest in the family, that she had just written an enormously respected book which flowed with her own ideas. It might have been a way of forgetting for a moment the finality of the breach with her father. There was a frantic quality to her unasked-for advice. Arabel should get out of London at first, take her time, spend a long summer with Henrietta by the sea. Come to Italy in any case. If she were going to take a house, why in London? She should live in the country. She shouldn’t put so much into the Ragged Schools. The London air, the social work, it was ruining her health. On August 4 she wrote to Henrietta, “Isn’t Arabel vexed with me? Tell me the truth.”

  After Arabel moved to her own house she thought of adopting a child. Here was one “subject on which I cannot advise.” But it did bring back the days when the two single sisters shared a dream. “Do you remember our fine plans for the Foundling hospital? Now, I wouldn’t have a child except my own.”

  Rather incredulously to contemporary eyes, but not to the readers of Victorian novels, Arabel would have liked to adopt her sister Henrietta’s only daughter, Mary. Ba saw nothing wrong with this plan, if it could help Surtees financially as well, though she was not surprised that Henrietta refused. Still, about Henrietta giving up her daughter, “people send their children to school—& this would not be worse as far as regards separation, & how much better otherwise?” Arabel’s next idea was to adopt a cousin’s, Sam Barrett’s, child, Emma. Ba felt Mary would be a much better choice: “Apart from other reasons, you could always send her home, if you cared to go anywhere without carrying her on your back. But what can one say against poor Henrietta’s wishes.”

  Arabel did take Emma in and asked Elizabeth for advice about keeping her. “Dear, how can I ‘advise’ you about Emma?… If the child is a comfort to you, keep her—if she burdens you, part from her at once. I agree quite that if you keep her you should not send her home [on vacation] at this time, but whether you shd. keep her or not is a matter of personal feeling—I dare say her parents will be disappointed, but that is not the question at all—only it will become one if you do not decide quickly.”

  The giving of all the unasked for (and asked for) advice in the world couldn’t help Elizabeth get over the death of her father. Five days before the first anniversary of his death, on April 12, 1858, she wrote a revealing account of her mental state. She was quite ill, but this time, she told Arabel, her bad winter was “not with my chest. The fact is that last summer when I wanted repose to recover from a great shock, I couldn’t get it—& my usual strength didn’t return the whole year.”

  Well, the summer of 1858 would be different; she would see Arabel once more. After that: “I have sworn to Robert to go with him not to Jerusalem, but to Egypt next winter. I am not equal to Jerusalem & the camels, but a water-journey of six or seven months” might be possible. “Robert made me swear because he distrusted my wishes & intentions, I think.—” Her husband wouldn’t have made her swear if she were in the throes of physical malaise. Going to Egypt might have been just what Browning needed to inspire him to write again and to shake his wife from her gloom. But the thing about her gloom was:

  “I don’t brood, in your sense, intentionally—I should be dead by this time if I brooded. I worked at the sort of work I could do even last year—(& worked off the back of a German dictionary)—Robert said he really ‘respected’ me for my application. But if one gets up and walks across the room, then comes … what I call, myself, ‘brooding,’ though it is not intentional . . not at all.”

  Any physical movement at all triggered depression: “I struggle against habitual sadness as against corruption & ignorance, & against ingratitude besides. But I have a horrible vibrating body. If I am uneasy in mind for half an hour, I am unwell; & then, being unwell makes me uneasy again. It acts and reacts.”

  Exactly the condition she was in when Browning first saw her on her sofa at Wimpole Street and assumed she was unable to walk. What might look like self-will or invalidism from the outside was a lifelong battle—body and soul—with habitual depression. Struggle against it she did, and with humor: “I go out regularly in the carriage now, & we have delightful drives through hedges of maybloom, the almond trees & peach trees blooming on the other side. Still I don’t get strong as I might do, & shall presently, I dare say,—though I have doubled my cod’s liver oil, taking two tablespoons a day. See how virtuous I am, Arabel. I don’t do everything I like, I assure you.”

  “MY FIG TREE,” drawn by EBB on October 7, 1860, in Siena. Browning noted after her death that this was the last time she sat under it.

  ADMITTING IMPEDIMENTS

  IN THE ELEVENTH YEAR of their marriage, a woman came between the Brownings—and Robert couldn’t threaten to throw her down the stairs.

  If Elizabeth’s insistence on the validity of D. D. Home maddened her husband at times, and gave the couple their most serious disagreement, Home was still in the realm of the abstract, an issue, not a man. Sophia May Tuckerman Eckley, the beautiful, rich, poetic, and “pure” American, came right into the Brownings’ lives. A cousin of Louisa May Alcott on her mother’s side and an extremely wealthy woman on her father’s side, she wrote unbodied, overallegorized poetry as well as her own theologically introspective travelogues. The Brownings met her, her husband, David, and their child—Pen’s age—Doady during the disastrous summer after Moulton Barrett’s death when they were vacationing at Bagni di Lucca.

  That summer of 1857, Elizabeth could not get the rest she needed to recuperate from her father’s death. The poet Robert Lytton, who followed the Brownings to the Baths, became dangerously ill. Much of Robert’s time and that of the Brownings’ friend Isa Blagden was spent nursing him
until the crisis passed. In the middle of these duties, Wilson suffered a bad pregnancy and had to leave service quickly. The Brownings were lucky to find a fine Italian woman, Annunziata, to replace her. Ferdinando stayed with them, a continuity in Pen’s life. Then, at the end of September, Pen fell ill, and what looked like measles or scarlet fever turned out to be a slight case of gastric fever. “Robert blamed me for looking like a terrified ghost. Could I help it?” Browning must have been terrified that this new shock was going to add to his wife’s increasing morbidity. Pen realized it as well: The sick eight-year-old cautioned his mother, “Don’t be unhappy about me. Fancy it’s a boy in the street, and be a little sorry of course, but don’t be unhappy.” Such a son was worth twenty Aurora Leighs, his mother wrote, and she repeated his words in more than one letter.

  By then the issue of the red shoes had been settled. As the boy recuperated, he wrote to his aunt Arabel—and here he sounded like a little boy again: “I hope that you will keep me my Parrot till I come to see you.”

  Browning’s recreation at Lucca amid his responsibilities combined his two solaces, riding and climbing to the top of mountains. Sophie’s husband, David Eckley, rode with him on the day that “Robert’s horse fell over a precipice of sixty feet, head over heels—A tree broke the fall. Robert rescued himself (by the grace of almost a miracle) by catching at a crag of rock, when the ground gave way beneath the horse’s hoofs.… I was not told of it until another day. Think of what an escape—I might be writing to you at this moment (or rather not writing to you) without a husband & without a child! Therefore thank God for me my beloved Arabel. I feel a good deal shaken all together, but I am not ill.”

  The trip to Egypt that Browning had insisted his wife swear to was made more viable by their new friendship with the Eckleys, who planned to travel there in the fall of 1857. They talked about it with the Brownings over the summer at Bagni di Lucca, trying to persuade the couple to join them—a suggestion that appealed to Robert but that Elizabeth obviously rejected. She regretted her decision, and by February 1858 wrote to Sophie Eckley, “If you knew how repentant I am of not going with you! If I had, I should have lost some cold things besides the weather here,” which “is nearly killing us all.” Robert and Pen had been sick, and in politics, Felice Orsini, in January 1858, attempted to kill Napoleon and his wife as they drove up to the opera house. “I myself feel crushed in body and spirit.”

  Still, she was able to leap into friendship with Sophie, via mail. She could share something with her that she could not share with Robert (or Arabel)—the spirit world. In December she wrote to Sophie that Jarves saw “Hume in Paris at his own rooms in the Champs Élysées, & saw the splendid gifts showered on him. Hume said he received no money, . . but that benefaction was showered on him from persons unnamed:—that, for instance, he found his tailors’ bills paid, & so with other bills.” On June 30, 1858, just as she left for Leghorn on her way to France in an attempt to regain her health by the sea in company with her in-laws and Arabel, Elizabeth told Sophie that Home’s Russian bride brought with her 25,000 crowns’ worth of dowry. The spirits were treating him well.

  As for her own news, “I am very tired, & not very bright, at leaving our Italy—but we are coming back, we are coming back, I say that to myself.” And in this letter the poet defines her relationship with Sophie: “Love me, pray for me, you who are to be (it is settled) my ‘sister’ of the spiritual world.”

  It was settled. The love of her spiritual sister for Elizabeth was reflected in her parting gifts. Sophie, recently returned from her travels, said goodbye with a brooch, a ring, Damascus slippers, a rosary from the Holy Sepulchre, a traveling bag, and some accessories, such as collars and sleeves. Ba, in a letter to Arabel, characterized the gifts as “overpowering.” Still, she thanked Sophie for the “voyage bag” she had sent “in time to replace one given to me by my sister Henrietta soon after my marriage, & now dropping to pieces. This bag is also from a sister—How I thank you, darling.” Browning would come to refer contemptuously to Sophie’s “wallet of wares.” But now, in return for her kindness, Elizabeth sent Sophie a locket, and Browning seemed to be willing to part with a strand from his true cross: “Robert gives you the hair (because it is his),” meaning of course hers.

  That summer by the sea in dismal Le Havre, surrounded by relatives, neither of the Brownings was happy. At its beginning, Elizabeth had not only to prepare Arabel for the commercial town and her inlaws, but for the fact that she could hardly walk. “I don’t walk as well as I did—but that will come. At present you see I am out of the habit of it, seeing that walking (even if I had been strong enough muscularly) was extremely bad for me—and I have done no more than walk about the house, you know, for months & months—Now I creep through the opposite houses by a way Robert has found to where I can look at the sea & sit down, so that this is a beginning of walking. You will see me looking well.” Arabel was shocked by this letter. “Dear, by some extraordinary awkwardness I seem to give you an impression of being ill when I mean to tell you I’m well.… I improve immensely & Robert says I could do more if I chose—which is quite true. But I’m afraid of tiring myself, because it might throw me back again.… I am well.” This recovery would be aided by her time with her sister both at Le Havre and Paris, though she wrote to Sophie that “In the Baths of Lucca you hide yourself in the woods, you lose yourself in the mountains and you are not vexed” as one is at commercial and ugly Le Havre.

  Robert found the daily life at Le Havre “dull,” and wrote to Isa Blagden, “You seem to have been passing your time pleasantly,—at least with amusing people.” His family obligations and Ba’s health ate into his writing time, not that it much mattered. “I go mechanically out & in and get a day through—whereof not ten minutes have been my own—so much for your ‘quantities of writing’ … I began pretty zealously—but it’s of no use now; nor will the world very greatly care.” As the time at Le Havre neared its end, Robert wrote to Isa on September 11, 1858, “the place has been wholly ‘unfructuous’ to me, unless Ba’s and Peni’s health turn out to be particularly the better for it.” It was a matter of place: “I wish we had gone to Nouville.” They were off to Paris.

  Sophie Eckley added to Robert’s discomfort in Le Havre. She had commissioned a portrait of his wife that had the scent of a memento mori. Browning was forced to write to her about the portrait, which her “kindest of kind hearted husbands” had paid for. It gave David his highest reward, “the pleasure he promised himself in giving you this particular pleasure.” David Eckley’s obsequiousness to his wife’s every demand was at least as unnerving as William Page’s passivity to his second wife’s lovers. Browning never failed to mention it. Browning had been upset by Sophie’s idea of leaving the portrait to Pen. She had forced him to think of his wife’s death. “Dear Mrs. Eckley: what you say about its [the portrait’s] ‘final destination’ is meant as only you mean such kindness—and I shall not be hindering any kindness of yours; only diverting it into its more fitting channel … without referring to eventualities which are in the hands of God, let your own dear child keep one day what may remind him of a face he will have forgotten—and let it remain in America. I dont care to write much about this but, let it be so!”

  Neither of the Brownings was impressed by the finished portrait by Michele Gordigiani. Elizabeth wrote to Arabel that he made her “a large buxom matron with a torrent of black ringlets at each cheek” and in parentheses: “(When Robert saw Gordigiani’s portrait at his return, he gave it up at once.)” By then, January 22, 1859, they were in Rome, and Robert Browning would probably have liked to give up Mrs. Eckley as well. Yet his wife had made up her mind that Sophie was an angel, a rose, a spiritual sister, the purest of all women.

  SOPHIA MAY TUCKERMAN ECKLEY (1821?–74) with her older half sister, HANNAH PARKMAN TUCKERMAN (1805–59). The beautiful Sophia, with a characteristic white rose in her hair, was the daughter of Edward Tuckerman of Boston and his second wife, Sophia May. Sh
e was left a fortune at her father’s death. A poet and traveler, as her mother had been before her, Sophia Eckley became EBB’s spiritual sister and Robert Browning’s nemesis.

  Sophie’s only fault was having too high an opinion of Ba. The poet was conscious of Sophie’s off-centered idealization that never before in her life would she have characterized as love. But now? “And I love you, dear. You have done me real good with your sweet pure harmonious spirit.”

  In Elizabeth’s letters to her spiritual sister, there is at times a theatrical tone that doesn’t ring quite true. Or perhaps it is that the two friends are inventing the nuances of their private language. On July 12, 1858, she wrote of her recovery: “Also, I am far less languid—& my eyes dont look quite so much out of caves of blackness at night after the fatigues of the day.” She ended her letter, “Dearest Sophie, my sister, may God love & bless you dear.” And from Le Havre, “Literally I love you.” That was just at the beginning of the 121-letter correspondence that Elizabeth would one day wish she could get back. But try as her husband might to open her eyes, she insisted they were wide open. On the subject of the spiritual world, the spiritual sisters were much more awake than he. “Because, you see, dear, dear, my own medium is what suits me.” Sophie Eckley would become Ba’s own medium, keeping the “constitutional evil” of her depression at bay.

  Back in Florence after the summer of 1858 in France, Elizabeth found her spiritual sister awaiting her. “You know the Eckleys,” Elizabeth wrote to Arabel, “& that Sophie had taken it into her enthusiastic head to fall into a sort of love with me (spiritual concordances & other worse reasons). They are rich people.” Now the fantastical, storybooklike Eckleys absolutely insisted that the Brownings travel with them to Rome in their two lavish pumpkins and that they send Ferdinando and the heavy luggage by sea. “The advantage [of their carriages] would be great to us, both as a cheapness, & the comfort—in that easy conveyance with good springs & cushions.”