Letters of Love
Jean Mckenzie examines how perhaps the most romantic of love stories – that of poets Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning – began.
Between Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett
THAT most nostalgic of poems beginning “Oh, to be in England now that April’s there,” was written by a man who, for the sake of the woman he loved, became a voluntary expatriate for fifteen years.
Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett were aware of each other’s existence years before they met.
Elizabeth published a poem in which she praised three contemporary poets: Wordsworth and Tennyson together with little-known Browning.
The love affair that electrified literary London began with a thankyou note. On January 10, 1845, Robert Browning, expressing his gratitude added, “I love your verses with all my heart, Miss Barrett . . . and I love you, too.”
More letters were exchanged and on May 20, 1845, Mr Robert Browning was announced. He must have swept into the stuffy sickroom at Wimpole St like a refreshing breeze.
He was of medium height, with dark brown hair, grey eyes, oval face and a rounded chin. Detractors said he had an overbearing manner, a penetrating voice and was a bit of a ladies’ man.
Elizabeth Barrett was diminutive with large dark eyes, heavy brown
hair in unflattering ringlets and a long term unspecified disability. She was almost forty, six years his senior, and spent her days reclining on a couch with her dog, Flush. Like Browning, she had a formidable intellect and was given to writing obscure verse.
When the news broke, Wordsworth is reputed to have said that he hoped the two poets understood each other, because nobody else could.
It was more than love at first sight for Browning, enamoured as he was of the foremost woman poet of the day. At home in New Cross, he wrote a restrained note to which Elizabeth replied, asking him to call again.
His reply almost finished everything. Some say that his letter contained a proposal of marriage, others that he declared his intention of devoting his life to her care – at that time he understood that her ailment was incurable. She promptly returned this “wild” letter for him to burn.
Suitably repentant, he was then permitted regular weekly visits with flowers from his parents’ Surrey garden, interspersed with a stream of letters, sometimes two a day.
Browning lived with his doting family, being supported by his banker father while he travelled extensively abroad. He was lionised by society and was now conducting a passionate, if chaste, love affair.
Elizabeth, too, had a loving family of brothers and sisters,who called her by the pet name of Ba. It is a mystery why her tyrannical and possessive father did not discourage this liaison with the famous Mr Browning. He had forbidden all of his children to marry and had banned his daughters from having suitors.
None of her siblings dared to interrupt them because, they said, “Ba and her poet will be talking to each other in blank verse”. No-one seems to have guessed that romantic love was ripening in that overheated room.
Flush knew and was furiously jealous, nipping Browning when he had the chance. Wilson, her maid, guessed it; she carried messages and eventually aided in the elopement.
They were secretly married at St Marylebone’s church on September 12, 1846. A week later the runaway couple, with Wilson and Flush, fled by rail, ferry and carriage to Italy.
There they led a full and active life, becoming the centre of a group of highbrow expatriates.
Elizabeth flourished in the warm climate away from her father and wrote some of her finest verses. Browning, on the other hand, was homesick and could not write for a long time, but eventually was restored to his former powers. A surprisingly robust little boy was born just after Elizabeth’s 43rd birthday. He was christened Robert Wiedemann Barrett Browning and called himself Pennini, shortened to Pen.
The letters exchanged with all the members of her family (except those to her father, who never opened them), tell of their lives in great detail. The correspondence with her sister Arabella was published in two volumes as recently as October 2002.
Letters between Elizabeth and her sister, Henrietta, have long been known about and tell the sad tale of their father’s fury when Henrietta fell in love with her cousin, Surtees Cook of the militia. Their early troubles run alongside the elopement, as portrayed in the 1930 play by Rudolf Besier and the subsequent film, The Barretts of Wimpole Street.
Browning destroyed all his correspondence before he died except for the courtship letters. These he gave to Pen, who published all 573 of them 10 years later in two thick volumes with a touching preface.
His father had kept them in an inlaid box, all numbered and with the time and length of each visit on the tiny envelopes, (his are addressed to Mifs Barrett). They are now preserved at Wellesley College, Massachusetts.
Elizabeth died in 1861. As soon as his beloved wife was laid to rest in the Protestant cemetery in Florence, Browning returned with 12-year-old Pen to London and became once again part of the literary Establishment.
Hoping to make an English gentleman out of his son, Browning sent him to Oxford, but Pen didn’t take to the life. Eventually, with his father’s blessing, he set himself up as an artist in Italy.
Robert Browning lived for another 28 years alone in literary London, his reputation as a dramatic poet growing.
When he died in Venice in 1889, on a visit to Pen, he was brought back to lie in Westminster Abbey, not very far from his many haunts in London, his old home in New Cross and from number 50, Wimpole Street.