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The Rebellion Of A Dutiful Daughter: The Conflicted Life Of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
If your mental image of Elizabeth Barrett is of a sickly, ringlethaired, middle-aged virgin lying on a couch being lectured by her stern papa until she’s rescued by the poetic sex-god Robert Browning, you may have to think again.
She was born in northeast England in 1806, the eldest of 12 children. Elizabeth read everything. Before she was 10, she’d devoured histories of England, Rome and Greece, passages from The Tempest, Othello and Paradise Lost and Pope’s translations of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Aged 11, she produced a Homeric epic The Battle Of Marathon, 1,400 lines long, about the expansionist ambitions of Napoleon.
Her father, the subject of her first poems, was her first fan. With the arrival of puberty, though, he started clamping down on her freedom, refusing to let her take holidays in London. And, as though her body was conspiring to immobilise her, Elizabeth became ill.
Her symptoms included hallucinations, headaches, spasms, dizziness, racing heartbeat, loss of equilibrium, fainting and shortness of breath. Four doctors attended her and, unable to agree about treatment.
She shrank to the width of a stick and soon, says the author, ‘was living on diet of opium and coffee, novels and metaphysics’.
It didn’t affect her ability to create. In An Essay On Mind, anonymously published in 1826, she explored scores of world thinkers and discussed the individual’s right to intellectual freedom. She was still not yet 21. Her father, typically, responded by disparaging her writing. When she brought him a new work, The Development Of Genius, he said the subject was ‘beyond her grasp’ and advised her to burn it.
The book’s climax is the arrival of Robert Browning in Elizabeth’s life. He was 33, she 39. He’d read her two-volume collection Poems and was startled to find a reference to his own poetry in the work. He sent her a heartfelt letter that ended ‘I do, as I say, love these books with all my heart — & I love you too!’ Alarmed, Elizabeth kept him waiting six months before allowing a visit, but when she relented, their weekly meetings lasted three hours. Her maid recalled that Browning invariably ‘ran up the stairs’. Over the summer of 1845, they became mutually adoring – ‘I have loved you all my life unawares,’ she told him – and found she could walk again.
The story of Elizabeth’s slow emancipation from domestic slavery makes you want to cheer, as she embraces a new life: walking barefoot in the park and, after marrying in secret, left England for passionate exile in
France and Italy.
This is a warmly textured life of a brilliant woman enslaved by filial duty until a passionate soulmate ran up her staircase and showed her a path to freedom.