When Robert met Elizabeth: literary letters of ‘perfect romance’ online
IT HAS been called a ‘‘perfect romance’’ and it began in January 1845 when a penniless upstart poet, Robert Browning, bravely penned a letter to a literary superstar.
‘‘I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett,’’ he wrote. Elisabeth Barrett replied: ‘‘I thank you, Mr Browning, from the bottom of my heart.’’ So began one of the Victorian era’s great real-life love stories.
Now, 573 love letters that capture the couple’s courtship, their blossoming love and their forbidden marriage have been put online.
The correspondence, which has long fascinated scholars, could previously be seen only at Wellesley College, in Massachusetts, where the collection has been kept since 1930.
The letters have been displayed as they exist – with creased paper, fading ink and messy crossings-out. The project is a collaboration between Wellesley and Baylor University in Waco, Texas, which houses the world’s largest collection of books and letters related to the Brownings.
Barrett was 38 when Browning, six years her junior, first wrote to express his admiration. Five months later, they met for the first time.
After more than a year of almost daily letters they married in secret, defying Moulton Barrett, Elizabeth’s tyrannous father, who had ordered all his 12 children never to marry. According to one account, he feared that his family had black ancestors and that one of his children might produce a black heir.
The Times played a small part in the couple’s getaway: an ambiguously worded marriage notice in its columns helped to buy the Brownings a week in London without their marriage being revealed, denying her father the chance to have it annulled.
They then fled to Italy, where Elisabeth, who had been battling ill health since childhood, hoped her condition might improve. Her father disinherited her and never spoke to her again. On hearing of the marriage, William Wordsworth remarked: ‘‘I trust that it will be a happy union, not doubting that they will speak more intelligibly to each other than they have yet done to the public.’’
It was only after the birth of their son in 1849 that Elisabeth would show her husband the sonnets she had secretly written during their courtship, including ‘‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways’’.
Their life together endured a rocky start; before they married the couple had mostly met under the watch of Moulton Barrett in Elizabeth’s overheated sickroom, and it seems that in Italy they realised they did not know each other as well as they had thought.
Their love appears to have grown. The Times