Dared and Done
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The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. Frederic G. Kenyon, 2 vols. New York/London: The Macmillan Company, 1894.
The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Mary Russell Mitford, 1836–1854, ed. Meredith B. Raymond and Mary Rose Sullivan, 3 vols. Waco, Texas: Armstrong Browning Library, 1983.
Letters of Robert Browning
Browning’s Trumpeter: The Correspondence of Robert Browning and Frederick J. Furnivall, 1872–1889, ed. William S. Peterson. Washington, D.C.: Decatur House Press, 1979.
Browning to His American Friends, ed. Gertrude Reese Hudson. London: Bowes & Bowes, 1965.
Dearest Isa: Robert Browning’s Letters to Isabella Blagden, ed. Edward C. McAleer. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1951; reprinted 1977.
Letters of Robert Browning Collected by Thomas J. Wise, ed. Thurman L. Hood. London: John Murray, 1933.
New Letters of Robert Browning, ed. William Clyde DeVane and Kenneth Leslie Knickerbocker. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1950.
Robert Browning and Alfred Domett, ed. Frederic G. Kenyon. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1906.
Robert Browning and Julia Wedgwood: A Broken Friendship as Revealed by Their Letters, ed. Richard Curle. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1937.
EDITIONS OF THE POETRY
Casa Guidi Windows, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. Julia Markus. New York: The Browning Institute, 1977.
The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, with a new introduction by Ruth M. Adams. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1974.
Browning: Poetical Works 1833–1864, ed. Ian Jack. London: Oxford University Press, 1970.
La Saisiaz: The Two Poets of Croisic, by Robert Browning. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1878.
BOOKS, ARTICLES, COMPILATIONS
Barrett, Richard. Richard Barrett’s Journal, ed. Thomas Brott and Philip Kelley. Winfield, Kansas: Wedgewood, 1983.
Bosco, Ronald A. “The Brownings and Mrs. Kinney: A Record of Their Friendship,” Browning Institute Studies 4 (1976):57–124.
Brandon, Ruth. The Spiritualists: The Passion for the Occult in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. New York: Knopf, 1983.
The Browning Collections: A Reconstruction. Compiled by Philip Kelley and Betty Coley. Waco, Texas: Amstrong Browning Library, 1984.
The Brownings’ Correspondence: A Checklist. Compiled by Philip Kelley and Ronald Hudson. Winfield, Kansas: Wedgestone Press, and New York: The Browning Institute, 1978.
Forster, Margaret. Elizabeth Barrett Browning. New York: Doubleday, 1989.
Furnivall, F. J. “Robert Browning’s Ancestors,” Browning Society Papers III (February 1890): 26–45.
Griffin, W. Hall, and H. C. Minchin. The Life of Robert Browning. London: Methuen & Co., 1938.
Hayter, Althea. Mrs. Browning: A Poet’s Work and Its Setting. London: Faber & Faber, 1962.
Hayter, Althea. A Sultry Month: Scenes of London Literary Life in 1846. London: Faber & Faber, 1965.
Hayter, Althea. Opium and the Romantic Imagination. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1970.
Hewlett, Dorothy. Elizabeth Barrett Browning: A Life. New York: Knopf, 1952.
Home, D. D. Incidents in My Life, second series. London: Tinsley Bros., 1872.
Hudson, Ronald. “Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Her Brother Alfred: Some Unpublished Letters,” Browning Institute Studies 2 (1974): 135–60.
Irvine, William, and Park Honan. The Book, the Ring, and the Poet: A New Biography of Robert Browning. New York: McGraw Hill, 1974.
James, Henry. William Wetmore Story and His Friends. 2 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903; reprinted by the Library of American Art, 1969.
Kaplan, Cora. Introduction, Aurora Leigh and Other Poems. London: The Women’s Press, 1978.
Karlin, Daniel. The Courtship of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Mahony, Rev. Francis. Introduction by Blanchard Jerrold. The Final Reliques of Father Prout. London: Chatto and Windus, 1876.
Marks, Jeannette. The Family of the Barretts: A Colonial Romance. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1938.
Markus, Julia. “Andrea del Sarto (Called ‘The Faultless Painter’) and William Page (Called ‘The American Titian’),” Browning Institute Studies 2 (1974):1–24.
Markus, Julia. “Bishop Blougram and the Literary Man,” Victorian Studies 21 (Winter 1978):171–95.
Maynard, John. Browning’s Youth. Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1977.
McAleer, Edward C. The Brownings of Casa Guidi. New York: The Browning Institute, 1979.
Meredith, Michael. Meeting the Brownings. Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 1986.
Miller, Betty. Robert Browning: A Portrait. London: John Murray, 1952.
O’Reilly, Bernard. A Life of Pius IX, 16th ed. New York: Peter F. Collier, 1878.
Orr, Mrs. Sutherland. Life and Letters of Robert Browning. Cambridge, Mass.: Riverside Press, 1891.
Peterson, William S. Browning’s Trumpeter. Washington, D.C.: Decatur House Press, 1979.
Peterson, William S. Interrogating the Oracle: A History of the London Browning Society. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1969.
Porter, Katherine H. Through a Glass Darkly: Spiritualism in the Browning Circle. Lawrence, Kans.: University of Kansas Press, 1958.
Ritchie, Anne Thackeray. Records of Tennyson, Ruskin, and Browning. London: The Macmillan Company, 1896.
Ryals, Clyde de L. The Life of Robert Browning. Oxford and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1993.
Sherwood, Dolly. Harriet Hosmer, American Sculptor 1830–1900. Columbia, Mo., and London: University of Missouri Press, 1991.
Steegmüller, Francis. The Two Lives of James Jackson Jarves. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1951.
Taplin, Gardner. The Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. London: John Murray, 1957.
Thayer, William Roscoe. The Life and Times of Cavour. Cambridge, Mass.: Riverside Press, 1911.
Thomas, Clara. Love and Work Enough: The Life of Anna Jameson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967.
Treves, Giuliana Artom. The Golden Ring: The Anglo-Florentines, 1847–1862, trans. Sylvia Sprigge. London, New York, and Toronto: Longmans, Green & Co., 1956.
Tuscan Athenaeum, October 30, 1847, to January 22, 1848, thirteen issues published in Florence. The only complete file is at the New York Public Library.
Ward, Maisie. The Tragi-Comedy of Pen Browning. New York and London: Sheed and Ward, 1972.
Ward, Wilfrid. The Life and Times of Cardinal Wiseman, 2 vols. New York and Bombay: Longmans, Green & Co., 1899.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THIS BIOGRAPHY is the result of twenty years of interest in Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, and I have the pleasure of many people and institutions to thank. For much of my historical work, which resulted in the first modern editon of EBB’s Casa Guidi Windows as well as some of the background for “A Marriage of True Minds, Hers,” I am grateful to the Biblioteca e Archivio del Risorgimento in Florence and the Museo di Firenze com’era. In Rome, I was assisted by the staff of the Museo Centrale del Risorgimento and the Biblioteca Nazionale. Once upon a time Giuliana Artom Treves helped me to locate pictures and generously answered questions, Dorothy Amisano assisted me and sent me material from Rome, and Frank R. DiFederico encouraged my work with enthusiasm and with his knowledge of Italy. The only appropriate words of thanks seem to be from Casa Guidi Windows: “If we tried / To sink the past beneath our feet, be sure / The future would not stand—.” Or the present.
I decided to write a biography of the poets’ married years because I wondered how that marriage fared. The rich resource of letters by and about the Brownings fueled this study and led me to track the poets’ married life through their own words and actions. Four institutions particularly made this exploration a pleasure. The Berg Collection of the New York Public Library holds 113 unpublished letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to her sister Arabel
and the unusual 121 unpublished letters between EBB and Sophie Eckley, among other riches. I thank the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations for permission to quote from them. The Margaret Clapp Library, Special Collections, at Wellesley College houses the love letters, much correspondence, including Christina Rossetti to John Ingram, and the papers of Jeannette Marks. I thank the library for permission to quote from them. The Pierpont Morgan Library granted permission to quote from Anna Jameson’s letters to Lady Byron, MA 1325. The Armstrong Browning Library of Baylor University, which houses the largest collection of Browning letters and material, has aided me in every way and granted permission to quote from its collection and to publish many illustrations it generously afforded me. I am also particularly indebted to the Butler Library at Columbia University, the Beinecke Library at Yale, the Harvard College Library, the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe, the Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, the Rare Books Collection of the Boston Public Library, and Eton College. Further permissions to quote from unpublished letters appear in my notes, and I append a separate list of permissions to publish illustrations that have come from many generous institutions and individuals. I thank Philip Kelley for lending me many illustrations in his possession. And my bibliography stands also as thanks to so many scholars and critics who have written on the Brownings.
JUST AS I WAS about to submit my manuscript to copyediting, one of those enormous changes at the last minute occurred. The senior member of the Moulton-Barrett family, Captain Gordon E. Moulton-Barrett, allowed me to read and to take notes from the more than 115 letters from Elizabeth Barrett Browning to her sister Arabel that are in his possession. Not only that; he made photostatic enlargements of this grand correspondence so that I could read through it with greater ease. I am very grateful to him for his generosity and his support of scholarship. Having access to the entire correspondence of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Arabel Moulton Barrett (an enormous correspondence—if published, I imagine it would amount to at least four volumes) has been a great privilege. It has also confirmed my opinion that Elizabeth’s letters to her sister Arabel rank with the love letters in literary and historical importance. The correspondence is one of the jewels of the nineteenth century. I thank Captain Moulton-Barrett for his courtesy, for his permission for my quoting excerpts from the correspondence, and for many interesting conversations about the family as well.
Although so many people have supported this project, no one except myself is responsible for my conclusions or for the occasional (I hope) error that must accompany any work, no matter how well edited. I have attempted to lift Elizabeth Barrett Browning from certain myths, only because she showed me the way. Her real relationship to her father, her African blood, her painful battle with depression, and her relationship to Sophie Eckley, are in her letters. No one was more of a spontaneous letter writer than she, and at the same time no one was a greater advocate of allowing one’s private words to be read at a later time. Letters and journals made “Death less deader,” she wrote. Robert Browning might not have agreed. But he certainly emerges in his letters and in hers—and in all of his traceable actions, as who he was—a constant lover and devoted husband as well as a great poet. It is a quiet sign of his stature to say simply that this combination was and is unique. After his wife’s death, Robert Browning’s entire life changed. I hope to follow him in his “after life” and write that story one day.
I want to end these acknowledgments with my thanks to those who have supported me and encouraged me in this project. My editor, Victoria Wilson, has been a champion of this book since the beginning, and with that fine eye of hers immediately saw that the drawing by Robert Browning’s father, which has at times been considered to be the earliest image of the poet, was really a drawing of his close friend Alfred Domett. My literary representative, Harriet Wasserman, has been an inspiration to my work year in and year out. My former thesis adviser and good friend William S. Peterson read this work for the first time in galleys and generously offered significant editorial advice. I thank him, as always, for his intelligent reading, his love of the printed page, and for his very high standard of scholarship which has served as a model for many of us who have studied with him. Roberta Maguire, also at the University of Maryland, read the galleys against my text and I thank her for her painstaking care and enthusiasm—both of which were invaluable to me. Adrian Thompkins saved me from insanity one rainy day by making out my bibliography cards and helping me to locate certain references. My thanks to Frank Mattson, the knowledgeable curator of the Berg Collection, and to Stephen Crook and Philip Milito for so much help. At the Special Collections of the Wellesley Library, my thanks to Ruth Rodgers, the librarian, and her staff—especially to Jill Triplett for her assistance and enthusiasm. Warm thanks to Roger Brooks, director of the Armstrong Browning Library, and to Betty Coley and Rita Humphrey for every form of kindness while I was at Baylor University, as well as when I requested help by phone and letter. Michael Meredith, the librarian at Eton College, enthusiastically photographed some of the collection left the library by the recently deceased Edward Barrett Moulton-Barrett, allowing the reader many new images of the family. And I want to thank Jeanne Reinert for her hospitality while I was in Miami. I thank Hofstra University for awarding me research grants and special leave. I am most grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities, from which I received a summer research and travel grant and later a Fellowship for College Teachers and Independent Scholars to complete this biography.
Certain friends have supported me in this project with their faith in my work: Richard Bausch, Diane Cleaver, Rebecca Goldstein, Oscar Hijuelos, John Lane and Miriam Levine, Rena Levitt and Stanley Konecky, Marjorie Markus, Michael Montlack, Bob Sargent, Susan Berns and John Rothchild, Mariolina and Zeno Zeni. There are so many of you who have added life to this project. I hope you’ll all enjoy reading the book as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it.
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
PART I
Robert Browning’s writing portfolio. Courtesy of the Armstrong Browning Library, Baylor University.
DEATH OR LOVE. Manuscript of Sonnet I. Courtesy of the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, MA 933.
MARY MOULTON BARRETT. Self-portrait of EBB’s mother, ca. 1825. Courtesy of the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.
SEPTIMUS and OCTAVIUS MOULTON BARRETT, by Mary Moulton Barrett. Courtesy of Mary V. Altham.
GEORGE, ARABEL, SAMUEL, AND CHARLES JOHN MOULTON BARRETT, oil by William Artaud, 1818. Reproduced by permission of the Provost and Fellows of Eton College; in the school library, Eton College.
THE BARRETTS AT WIMPOLE STREET, by Alfred Moulton Barrett, 1843, including Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett, 1847. Reproduced by permission of the Provost and Fellows of Eton College; in the school library, Eton College.
EDWARD BARRETT MOULTON BARRETT. Courtesy of Captain Gordon E. Moulton-Barrett.
RB’S FIRST LETTER TO EBB, January 10, 1845, pages 1 and 4. Courtesy of the Wellesley College Library.
EBB AS AN INVALID WITH HER DOG, FLUSH, by Alfred Moulton Barrett, 1843. Reproduced by permission of the Provost and Fellows of Eton College; in the school library, Eton College.
ROBERT BROWNING, from an engraving by J. C. Armytage in R. H. Horne’s Spirit of the New Age. Courtesy of the Armstrong Browning Library, Baylor University.
EDWARD BARRETT MOULTON BARRETT, detail of an oil of EBB’s father by Henry William Pickersgill. Courtesy of Captain Gordon E. Moulton-Barrett.
BENJAMIN ROBERT HAYDON, SELF-PORTRAIT. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London.
ROBERT HEDLEY. Reproduced by permission of the Provost and Fellows of Eton College; in the school library, Eton College.
MARY RUSSELL MITFORD, engraving after a drawing by P. R. Say, 1837.
FLUSH, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Courtesy o
f the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.
50 WIMPOLE STREET. Courtesy of the Armstrong Browning Library, Baylor University.
ANNA JAMESON at age sixteen, from an engraving of a miniature by her father, the artist Denis Brownell Murphy.
EDWARD BARRETT OF CINNAMON HILL, miniature by John Barry, 1791. Courtesy of John Altham.
SAMUEL BARRETT MOULTON BARRETT, watercolor of Elizabeth’s uncle. Courtesy of Mary V. Altham.
MARY TREPSACK, “TRIPPY” OR “TREPPY” Reproduced by permission of the Provost and Fellows of Eton College; in the school library, Eton College.
EDWARD BARRETT MOULTON BARRETT AS A YOUNG MAN. Reproduced by permission of the Provost and Fellows of Eton College; in the school library, Eton College.
MARY GRAHAM-CLARKE BEFORE HER MARRIAGE. Courtesy of Mary V. Altham.
MAP OF JAMAICA. Courtesy of Frederick A. Praeger, Inc.
JOHN GRAHAM-CLARKE. Courtesy of the British Museum.
ARABELLA GRAHAM-CLARKE. Courtesy of Mary V. Altham.
RICHARD BARRETT. Courtesy of Greenwood House, Jamaica.
ROBERT BROWNING, SR., the poet’s father. Courtesy of the Wellesley College Library.
MARGARET TITTLE. Courtesy of the Wellesley College Library.
ROBERT BROWNING, the poet’s grandfather. Courtesy of the Wellesley College Library.
JOHN KENYON, a sketch by Sir George Scharf from a portrait bust by Thomas Crawford, made in Rome in 1841. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London.
PART II
RB, photo; EBB, painting. Robert Browning, first known photograph. Courtesy of Michael Meredith. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, oil by Michele Gordigiani. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London.
THE BROWNINGS’ DRAWING ROOM IN THE CASA GUIDI, an engraving after the oil by George Mignaty. Courtesy of the Armstrong Browning Library, Baylor University.