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Porphyria’s lover waits quietly for the rain to stop and the wind to die down, the girl’s ‘smiling rosy little head’ propped up on his shoulder.

And thus we sit together now,

And all night long we have not stirred,

And yet God has not said a word! (ll. 58–60)

Just so the Duke goes down to—possibly—dinner with his guest, calling attention casually on the stairs to another interesting work of art:

Nay, we’ll go

Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though,

Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,

Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me! (ll. 53–6)

The Duke gave commands and his wife died; Porphyria’s lover wound her hair around her neck and strangled her: in neither case was there remorse or retribution; no police to break down the ducal door, no God to strike down Porphyria’s murderous lover with a thunderbolt. Like Johannes Agricola, similarly complacent, the murderers may have felt:

I have God’s warrant, could I blend

All hideous sins, as in a cup,

To drink the mingled venoms up;

Secure my nature will convert

The draught to blossoming gladness fast: (ll. 33–7)

The point about these characters—ruthless, cold, passionate, hot—is their natures, fully and subtly realized. Their actions depend upon in the act, and are informed in the aftermath, by their characters, and not vice versa. Murder is banal enough: it is the character who commits it who is the interesting subject, and Robert Browning is so much in complete control of the poem that gives the character to us fully-formed that we are largely unaware, on a first reading, of the artistry—the poetic authenticity, the artistic integrity—with which he does it.

Robert Browning, if his works were not often or generally read, was frequently and widely discussed among his friends. He breakfasted with John Kenyon, took six o’clock tea with the Carlyles, dined with Serjeant Talfourd, supped with Macready and William Johnson Fox. All these were social occasions that broadened his acquaintance and at which he was welcome for his confidence in conversation and aptitude for anecdote. Harriet Martineau, though mystified by Sordello, admitted that in conversation ‘no speaker could be more absolutely clear and purpose-like’ than Browning. ‘He was full of good sense and fine feeling, amidst occasional irritability, full also of fun and harmless satire, with some little affectations which were as droll as anything could be. A real genius was Robert Browning assuredly.’¹¹⁶

Joseph Arnould, writing in 1845 to Alfred Domett, described a dinner party at which Robert was also a guest: ‘Glorious Robert Browning is as ever—but more genial, more brilliant and more anecdotical than when we knew him four years ago.’ And yet, and yet, in this year, 1845, the polished social performance was becoming tedious to Robert, as though he were Macready toiling through a familiar role, night after night, in the same company of players, speaking the same words, throwing in a few ad-libs, in a long run of a popular play. Too often, it felt like an exercise in public relations.

In ‘Respectability’, published in Men and Women on 10 November 1855, Robert wrote:

How much of priceless time were spent

With men that every virtue decks,

And women models of their sex,

Society’s true ornament.

In a letter of 12 March 1845 to Elizabeth Barrett, he wrote, ‘So you have got to like society, and would enjoy it, you think? For me, I always hated it.—have put up with it these six or seven years past, lest by foregoing it I should let some unknown good escape me, in the true time of it, and only discover my fault when too late; and now that I have done most of what is to be done, any lodge in a garden of cucumbers for me!’ He does not ‘even care about reading now’, he confesses. ‘But you must read books in order to get words and forms for “the public” if you write, and that you needs must do, if you fear God. I have no pleasure in writing myself—none, in the mere act—though all pleasure in fulfilling a duty, whence, if I have done my real best, judge how heart-breaking a matter must it be to be pronounced a poor creature by critic this and acquaintance the other!’ He supposes Miss Barrett likes ‘the operation of writing as I should like that of painting or making music … After all, there is a great delight in the heart of the thing; and use and forethought have made me ready at all times to set to work—but—I don’t know why—my heart sinks whenever I open this desk, and rises when I shut it.’

A month earlier, Robert had been writing to Miss Barrett about critics, trying to be fair-minded and even-handed in response to her inquiry about his ‘sensitiveness to criticism’. What he had said then was, ‘I shall live always—that is for me—I am living here this 1845, that is for London.’ For himself—‘for me’—he writes from a thorough conviction of duty, and he does his best: ‘the not being listened to by one human creature would, I hope in nowise affect me.’ And yet, ‘I must, if for merely scientific purposes, know all about this 1845, its ways and doings’, and if he should take a dozen pages of verse to market, like twelve cabbages (or pomegranates, he might have said, but didn’t) he had grown himself, he should expect to get as much as any man for his goods. If nobody will buy or praise, ‘more’s the shame … But it does so happen that I have met with much more than I could have expected in this matter of kindly and prompt recognition. I never wanted a real set of good hearty praisers—and no bad reviewers—I am quite content with my share. No—what I laughed at in my “gentle audience” is a sad trick the real admirers have of admiring at the wrong place—enough to make an apostle swear.’

In this selfsame letter to Miss Barrett, a few lines previously, Robert had seized eagerly on her wish that they should ‘rest from the bowing and the courtesying, you and I, on each side’¹¹⁷ and given himself up to her—and their developing correspondence—entirely: ‘I had rather hear from you than see anybody else. Never you care, dear noble Carlyle, nor you, my own friend Alfred over the sea, nor a troop of true lovers!—Are not these fates written? there!’ These fates were written—what about Robert’s own? The work—far less, or far more, the life, the entire fate of Robert Browning—seemed in 1845 to be in the balance: the achievement so far, what did it amount to? ‘What I have printed gives no knowledge of me—it evidences abilities of various kinds, if you will—and a dramatic sympathy with certain modifications of passion … that I think—But I never have begun, even, what I hope I was born to begin and end—“R. B. a poem”—’. At most, ‘these scenes and song-scraps are such mere and very escapes of my inner power, which lives in me like the light in those crazy Mediterranean phares I have watched at sea, wherein the light is ever revolving in a dark gallery, bright and alive, and only after a weary interval leaps out, for a moment, from the one narrow chink, and then goes on with the blind wall between it and you.’

This is the letter of a man whose lightning or lighthouse flashes illuminate his world fitfully and reveal himself, though captain of his own ship, becalmed on a dark flood. Robert’s perplexity and discouragement was of long standing. In short, he was depressed: the weeks passed, Carlyle talked wisely and beautifully, there had been quarrels with Macready and Forster, the rarely positive critical response to his work was pleasing enough but misguided, the plays were defunct, the poems had sold disappointingly. On 9 October 1843 he wrote to Alfred Domett, who had thrown up the law and disappeared to the colonies, to New-Zealand, ‘People read my works a little more, they say, and I have some real works here in hand; but now that I could find it in my heart to labour earnestly, I doubt if I shall ever find it in my head, which sings and whirls and stops me even now—an evening minute by the way.’¹¹⁸ Perhaps to still his whirligig head, or to give it something substantial to dance around, Robert sailed for Naples in the late summer of 1844.

As is the case with his previous journeyings abroad, precious few relics survive to substantiate the itinerary or illuminate the events. There is some dispute as to whether Robert wrote the poems ‘Home Thoughts from the Sea’ and ‘How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix’ on this voyage or on the first voyage to Italy—Robert himself said the one, then the other. And if he could not remember, then attribution by others is just as credible one way or the other. Mrs Orr is virtually the sole source of information for Robert’s second trip to Italy, and she gives no circumstantial detail about how he met ‘a young Neapolitan gentleman’, by name of Scotti, ‘who had spent most of his life in Paris’ and with whom, very likely, Robert talked his proper French and improved his vernacular Italian. Quickly becoming good friends, they travelled together from Naples to Rome, Scotti helpfully haggling over their joint expenses. ‘As I write’, reported Robert in a letter to Sarianna, ‘I hear him disputing our bill in the next room. He does not see why we should pay for six wax candles when we have used only two.’¹¹⁹ One can see why Robert, who had learned to be careful of money, should warm to a man with a mind similarly concentrated on his own short purse. Says Mrs Orr of Scotti, ‘he certainly bore no appearance of being the least prosperous’. In Rome, Scotti was judged by Countess Carducci—an acquaintance of Robert’s father—‘the handsomest man she had ever seen.’ But Mr Scotti ‘blew out his brains soon after he and his new friend had parted; and I do not think the act was ever fully accounted for’.¹²⁰

We could wish to pause there, at that sensational moment, to inquire further about the impoverished Signor Scotti and his suicide: he sounds just the man, and his death just the circumstance, to stop Robert in his tracks to add his friend and his end to his repertory company of characters fit for a poem. But all we know of Robert’s time in Rome is that he visited Shelley’s tomb in the New Protestant Cemetery, in commemoration of which he wrote the few lines on ‘Fame’ which form the first part of ‘Earth’s Immortalities’, inspected the grotto of Egeria, the scene imagined by Byron of the supposed interview between King Numa Pompilius of Rome and the advisory nymph, and the recently restored church of Santa Prassede, close by Santa Maria Maggiore, where the tomb of Cardinal Cetive may have partly inspired the poem ‘The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church’. These are all occasions of the most tantalizing interest, and about which too little—if any—first-hand evidence exists.

We fall back upon Mrs Orr, too, for information about the journey home to Hatcham, via Livorno where he found Edward John Trelawny who had been an intimate of the poets Shelley and Byron. Trelawny might have been in a better condition to discuss the poets had he not been stoically—‘indifferently’, says Mrs Orr—enduring a painful operation to have a troublesome bullet dug from his leg by a surgeon. Trelawny’s cool fortitude struck Robert very much. That the veteran was able to talk at all, far less reminisce about poets and poetry, was very remarkable.

Robert returned from Italy in December 1844. During his absence, he had missed the much-acclaimed publication of Miss Elizabeth Barrett Barrett’s Poems in the summer of that same year; but once back in Hatcham he read the volumes, which, if they had not in themselves been of the greatest interest, would certainly have caught—or been brought to—his attention on account of two delicately allusive lines that ran:

Or from Browning some ‘Pomegranate’, which, if cut deep down

the middle,

Shows a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity.

What, in 1844, did Robert know of Elizabeth Barrett Moulton Barrett? No more than anyone else, which wasn’t much in the way of first-hand information, far less reliable gossip—though uninformed speculation (it was said that Miss Barrett was completely crippled, unable to move) was never short as a negotiable commodity. The poet, essayist, and former seafaring man Richard Hengist Horne, who had experienced enough maritime and military adventure to qualify him as a Baron Munchausen (except that most of his tales, like those of ‘Abyssinia’ Bruce, were largely true) put it about that she was in very delicate health and had lived for years hermetically sealed in her room, her only contact with the outside world being through the medium of letters very erudite and literary in tone. He was more authoritative than most, since she had recently collaborated with him on a two-volume book, A New Spirit of the Age, in which ‘Orion’ Horne, ably assisted by the contributions of others (including Robert Browning as well as Elizabeth Barrett) had aspired to make a general estimate of contemporary literature without, alas!, possessing much literary ability or even critical faculty himself.

In retrospect, from the distance of our own times, Horne’s judgement in 1844, when the book appeared, was naturally coloured by the florid taste of his age, lengthily praising the likes of Talfourd, who is now not much more than a literary footnote to the period. But critical perspectives inevitably alter: to Horne’s credit, he did rate highly those big guns who have survived as literary heroes: Carlyle, Macaulay, Tennyson, and Dickens—though he’d have found it difficult not to notice them respectfully at appropriate length; and he devoted generous space to the ‘little known works of Mr Robert Browning’, whose Paracelsus he praised over five pages and whose Sordello, at the length of a dozen pages, he sorrowfully judged would remain obscure but to have been treated unjustly by critics since the poem, in Horne’s estimation, ‘abounded with beauties’. And so, her hand dabbled in Horne’s book, Elizabeth Barrett, the famously reclusive poetess, would have known not only of Mr Robert Browning’s work but, less intimately, something of the poet himself.

In his book, Horne reflected upon his collaborator’s invisibility among her contemporaries, supposing that future generations might doubt her very existence. But some, he knew, had actually seen her. Miss Mitford, for one, told him that Miss Barrett ‘lies folded in Indian shawls upon her sofa with her long black tresses streaming over her bent-down head, all attention’ while having her new poems read to her by an unnamed gentleman who, we suppose, must have been John Kenyon. Through the medium of Kenyon, then, we may also suppose that Robert learned more even than Horne gleaned from the gossiping Miss Mitford about the interesting lady poet who preferred to call herself Elizabeth Barrett Barrett rather than to use her full family name of Barrett Moulton Barrett. From Kenyon, Robert received a manuscript poem, ‘Dead Pan’, written by Elizabeth, and Kenyon was happy to communicate Robert’s enthusiasm to its author.

In 1820, aged fourteen years, Elizabeth Barrett had privately published an epic, The Battle of Marathon, dedicated to her father, Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett. She had begun writing this at the age of eleven. Though imitative of the styles of Homer, Pope, and Byron, it was an impressive achievement—and would have been so if only by reason of its pastiche and precocious learning, far less as evidence of genuine poetic ability. This effort was followed the next year by ‘Stanzas, Excited by Some Reflections on the Present State of Greece’, published in the New Monthly Magazine (1821), and ‘Stanzas on the Death of Lord Byron’ in 1824. In 1826, at the age of twenty, she published an Essay on Mind, with Other Poems, the printing costs being paid by Mary Trepsack, a Barrett slave from Jamaica, who lived in the Barrett household. Elizabeth’s correspondence with a family friend, Sir Uvedale Price, contributed substantially to Price’s Essay on the Modern Pronunciation of the Greek and Latin Languages, published in 1827. On her own account, in 1832, she translated Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus, published with Miscellaneous Poems in 1833.

All these were given anonymously to the world, until she finally put her name to The Seraphim, and Other Poems in 1838, and followed these verses with occasional poems and translations published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and in the Athenaeum. In 1842, she published three hymns translated from the Greek of Gregory Nazianzen and ‘Some Account of the Greek Christian Poets’. In 1844, there appeared her Poems, which famously included ‘Lady Geraldine’s Courtship’ (the story of a beautiful, talented, high-born lady who chooses to marry Bertram, a low-born poet, rather than a suitor of her own rank) and, within that poem, the references to Robert Browning’s own poems. Elizabeth Barrett was, by 1844, esteemed by the best and most influential literary magazines. Her classical and metaphysical learning, her poetic accomplishments, her mysterious reluctance to make any public appearances, all astonished and somewhat intimidated the literary establishment. There were some who muttered ungraciously about poetical obscurity and mysticism, but by and large her work was treated more reverently, more indulgently, than the irredeemable obscurities and impenetrable mystifications of Robert Browning’s poetry.

Some three years before, John Kenyon had attempted to arrange a meeting between Robert and Elizabeth. He had enthusiastically told her about him, him about her; he had discussed his poetry with her, hers with him; and at one point this middle-aged romantic go-between had almost brought his plan to a satisfactory conclusion, only to have it frustrated by Elizabeth putting off the encounter with a perfectly plausible, believable plea of indisposition—though in fact, as she admitted, it was because of her ‘blind dislike to seeing strangers’. Still, there it was—the reference to Robert Browning, in ‘Lady Geraldine’s Courtship’, and in the best poetic company, his work linked favourably, equal in rank, with ‘poems/Made by Tuscan flutes … the pastoral parts of Spenser—or the subtle interflowings/Found in Petrarch’s sonnets’.

On 10 January 1845, Robert—having read the copy of Elizabeth’s Poems given to Sarianna by John Kenyon, having punctiliously asked Kenyon if it would be in order for him to write, and having been assured by Kenyon that she would be pleased to hear from him—posted a letter from New Cross, Hatcham, Surrey, to Elizabeth Barrett at 50 Wimpole Street. The first sentence of his first letter to her is this:

I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett,—and this is no off-hand complimentary letter that I shall write,—whatever else, no prompt matter-of-course recognition of your genius, and there a graceful and natural end of the thing.

Several sentences further into the letter, Robert declares, ‘I do, as I say, love these books with all my heart—and I love you too.’

And so it began.

But what was begun, and how was it begun? We know the upshot, the happy ending—the lovestruck drama has become the stuff of potent myth; but our sentimentality may misinterpret the beginning and our romantic predisposition may rose-colour our perceptions of the whole courtship correspondence as the simple singing of two flirtatious love birds, the coy cooing of two eroticized turtle doves. In The Courtship of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, Daniel Karlin points out that Robert, from his first letter, from the first sentence of that letter, knew what he was doing. Artless is the very last word that should be adduced to characterize Robert’s letters. Different in kind to Elizabeth’s, they are—insists Karlin—dramatic compositions. They may not be premeditated, but they are not spontaneous. Robert ‘composes his love for Elizabeth in the same terms as he composes the action of his poems’. In all Robert’s letters ‘there is not a single casual allusion, there is not a single pointless digression; an all-embracing objective cannot tolerate unconnected images or associations. Elizabeth Barrett’s best letters remind you of Byron; Browning’s of St Paul.’¹²¹

Karlin makes the original and persuasive point—though some, enticed by the fairy-tale aspects of the Browning-Barrett courtship, will find it startling—that Robert, the composer of the initiating letter, stands behind Robert, the character in the letter, whose apparently impetuous, ornamental, gallant sincerity is deliberately presented. Elizabeth also has a role scripted by Robert: ‘though’, says Karlin, ‘it is not made explicit until his second letter. He told her then, “your poetry must be, cannot but be, infinitely more to me than mine to you—for you do what I always hoped to do … You speak out, you,—I only make men & women speak—give you truth broken into prismatic hues, and fear the pure white light, even if it is in me …”.¹²² And so Elizabeth’s poetry, being pure white light, the very essence of her personality, is not dissociated from her being. In this sense, Elizabeth and her poetry are one, indissoluble, and thus Robert could write, ‘I do, as I say, love these books with all my heart—and I love you too.’

Elizabeth thought this fanciful—‘an illusion of a confusion between the woman and the poetry’, as she wrote much later to Mary Mitford. At the time, she remarked, ‘Browning writes letters to me … saying he “loves” me. Who can resist that … Of course it is all in the uttermost innocence.’ Nevertheless, her interest had been stimulated—tickled rather than touched, says Karlin—by this well-mannered, if superficially effusive, letter from a poet whose work she admired and who came well recommended by John Kenyon and Richard Horne, whose judgement she respected. The next day, the 11th, she replied. She responded rather formally as a fellow-poet, beginning by thanking ‘dear Mr Browning, from the bottom of my heart. You meant to give me pleasure by your letter—and even if the object had not been answered, I ought still to thank you. But it is thoroughly answered. Such a letter from such a hand! Sympathy is dear—very dear to me: but the sympathy of a poet, & of such a poet, is the quintessence of sympathy to me!’

Thus the correspondence—the long fuse, leading to the startling denouement—was sparked not simply by poetry but by the shared experience of being poets and, crucially, by the differences between them in that respect. Karlin defines this central concern: ‘The ways in which each praised the other’s poetry—Browning because Elizabeth Barrett seemed to him an examplar of “pure” poetry, she because of Browning’s “power” and “experience as an artist”—rapidly acquired a personal as well as an aesthetic edge. Browning and Elizabeth Barrett were to debate their relative status up to and beyond the altar, and it was in and through this debate that their feeling for each other defined and developed itself.’¹²³

It is not to be assumed, from Karlin’s demonstration, that Robert set out deliberately to seduce Elizabeth, though it is plain that he was powerfully attracted by the idea of the woman he identified with her poetry. But they had never met, knowing each other only by literary repute and conversational hearsay. It did not seem improbable to Robert that they would meet. From the very outset he hoped, and very likely intended, that they would. He had been rebuffed (like many others) once: through John Kenyon, Robert had once come so close, ‘so close, to some world’s wonder in chapel or crypt, only a screen to push and I might have entered’.¹²⁴ Now, tantalizingly, Elizabeth offered some renewed basis for hope: ‘Winters shut me up as they do dormouse’s eyes; in the spring, we shall see: and I am so much better that I seem turning round to the outward world again.’¹²⁵ Their first letters were ‘all in the uttermost innocence’ because, by and large, Robert and Elizabeth were innocents—at least in love.

Neither of them, though they had not been short-changed in their experience of the complete love and whole trust of family and friends, had been properly in love. Robert had fancied himself in love with one or other, or possibly both, of the Flower sisters, though had perhaps only played with the fancy of being in love with them; and he had flirted a little—though not seriously, not with intent—in his lively, youthful, teasing letters to Fanny Haworth, whose mature heart may (but we don’t know) have fluttered at the sight of his handwriting. Elizabeth’s experience of love had been not dissimilar: as Robert was adored and indulged by his mother and father, so Elizabeth was adored with a profoundly protective love by her father, and she in turn deeply loved the large litter of her younger brothers and sisters. As Robert had felt comfortable in the company of older women and was drawn to the values of a good mind complemented by feminine virtues, so Elizabeth had found pleasure in the learned company and erudite correspondence of older men whose intellects interested her and held her attention perhaps more than their persons, though she was not unaware of—greatly valued, indeed—the attractive power of a confident masculinity.

Both Robert and Elizabeth possessed a generous nature and a vitality of expression which informed their everyday lives and coloured their personal letters. For all that Daniel Karlin emphasizes the underlying Pauline rigour of Robert’s letters to Elizabeth, they possess a surface sheen of Robert’s delight in the exercise of writing, certainly, but also of having found a receptive and responsive correspondent—importantly and excitingly, an intelligent woman. Robert wrote spontaneously and instinctively within that Pauline style, being amusing, intelligent, sympathetic, and responsive to the nuances of Elizabeth’s less confident, more impressionistic replies. He was graceful, poetic, provocative, pressing, and often powerfully eloquent in images and assertive attitudes that displayed a degree of sophistication seemingly derived from a worldliness beyond Elizabeth’s personal experience. In short, irresistible even without declarations of love. If she had her doubts and anxieties about the constantly reiterated word ‘love’, Elizabeth was at least allured by Robert’s manner—‘you draw me on with your kindness’.¹²⁶

At first, Robert and Elizabeth contented themselves more or less with thoughtful, tentative criticism of each other’s work. She frankly admitted her faults (as they seemed to her): ‘Headlong I was at first, and headlong I continue … guessing at the meaning of unknown words instead of looking into the dictionary—tearing open letters, and never untying a string,—and expecting everything to be done in a minute, and the thunder to be as quick as the lightning. And so, at your half word I flew at the whole one, with all its possible consequences, and wrote what you read.’¹²⁷ But, she further admitted, ‘In art, however, I understand that it does not do to be headlong, but patient and laborious—and there is a love strong enough, even in me, to overcome nature.’

In Robert she recognized ‘What no mere critic sees, but what you, an artist know, is the difference between the thing desired and the thing attained … You have in your vision two worlds … you are both subjective and objective in the habits of your mind. You can deal both with abstract thought and with human passion in the most passionate sense. Thus you have an immense grasp in Art … Then you are “masculine” to the height—and I, as a woman, have studied some of your gestures of language and intonation wistfully, as a thing beyond me far! and the more admirable for being beyond.’

This appeal for informed criticism, signifying that Robert, as a masculine poet, had much to teach Elizabeth as a feminine poet, was also about the differences between them, between men and women indeed, and Elizabeth rather tended to assume that she had at last found her great instructor, a kindred poetic spirit whose abilities, deserving of admiration, would communicate themselves advantageously to her own art and abilities. Simultaneously, her use of words—‘passionate’, ‘masculine’—was unconsciously provocative to Robert. He, just as Elizabeth had feared that he conflated her with her poetry and perceived a unity that she did not herself understand to be true, similarly felt that Elizabeth estimated him by his poetry and, in a letter post-marked 28 January, told her, ‘you know nothing, next to nothing of me’.

He elaborated this in his next letter, post-marked 11 February, concluding: ‘when I remember how I have done what was published, and half done what may never be, I say with some right, you can know but little of me’. Elizabeth accepted some of this letter, and protested the rest of it in her reply of 17 February: ‘I do not, you say, know yourself—you. I only know abilities and faculties. Well, then, teach me yourself—you.’

And so it properly begins.

She had found out some small details already—Robert had offered to open his desk for her, that repository of things half begun, half finished. She was interested in the desk. She wrote: ‘if I could but see your desk—as I do your death heads and the spider webs appertaining’,¹²⁸ but he had not written of skulls and spider webs. In his reply, post-marked 26 February, Robert inquired, ‘Who told you of my sculls and spider webs—Horne? Last year I petted extraordinarily a fine fellow (a garden spider—there was the singularity,—the thin, clever-even-for a spider-sort, and they are so “spirited and sly,” all of them—this kind makes a long cone of web, with a square chamber of vantage at the end, and there he sits loosely and looks about), a great fellow that housed himself, with real gusto, in the jaws of a great scull, whence he watched me as I wrote, and I remember speaking to Horne about his good points.’

That might have been quite enough about spiders and intimations of mortality; but Robert continued, laying the skull to quiet contemplation of the view from the window in Hatcham and giving some intimate particulars of the room in which the skull reposed and Robert worked. ‘Phrenologists look gravely at that great scull, by the way, and hope, in their grim manner, that its owner made a good end. He looks quietly, now, out at the green little hill behind. I have no little insight to the feelings of furniture, and treat books and prints with a reasonable consideration. How some people use their pictures, for instance, is a mystery to me; very revolting all the same—portraits obliged to face each other for ever,—prints put together in portfolios. My Polidori’s perfect Andromeda along with “Boors Carousing,” by Ostade,—where I found her,—my own father’s doing, or I would say more.’

Robert had rescued the hapless Andromeda from his father’s portfolio, from insalubrious company, and adopted her as his principal muse. Much has been made of this engraving after the painting Perseus et Andromede by Caravaggio di Polidoro—‘my noble Polidori’—which hung in Robert’s room. Elizabeth naturally becomes identified with the captive Andromeda and Robert with her saviour, Perseus. Critics have had no difficulty tracing the powerful emblematic influence of Andromeda and the myth in which she figures throughout Robert’s work. Put shortly, Andromeda was chained to a rock at the edge of the sea by her father as a sacrifice to a monstrous sea serpent. She was saved from death by the hero Perseus, who slew the dragon, released Andromeda, and married her. The figure of Andromeda appears first in Pauline:

Andromeda!

And she is with me: years roll, I shall change,

But change can touch her not—so beautiful

With her fixed eyes, earnest and still, and hair

Lifted and spread by the salt-sweeping breeze,

And one red beam, all the storm leaves in heaven,

Resting upon her eyes and hair, such hair,

As she awaits the snake on the wet beach

By the dark rock and the white wave just breaking

At her feet; quite naked and alone; a thing

I doubt not, nor fear for, secure some god

To save will come in thunder from the stars. (ll. 656–67)

By some interpretations, the young Robert Browning was saved from despair by Andromeda—superficially a Shelleyan, romantically eroticized image but, more profoundly, a symbol of the feminine, signifying creativity—who came to represent the power of poetry and, by extension, the timelessness and thus the immortality of art. Andromeda, in these terms, continued to influence Robert throughout his work of a lifetime, until finally—in the ‘Francis Furini’ section of Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in Their Day, a late (1887) poem—the emblematic image of a beautiful, naked woman in art is examined for its deepest significance which, towards the end of his life, Robert asserted to be a vision that ultimately leads us to God and, by implication, redemption. The poet or painter, by representing such an earthly image, one of many fixed immutable symbols, may, through the transmuting power of art, convey a sense of the spiritual in eternity to the modern, temporal, rational evolutionist.

Meanwhile, with his customary omnivorous appetite for experience and knowledge, Robert set himself to knowing and revealing himself to Miss Barrett. Elizabeth had all but said they might meet in the spring, and now, in his letter post-marked 26 February, Robert wrote on ‘Wednesday Morning-Spring!’ to announce signs of its approach: ‘Real warm Spring, dear Miss Barrett, and the birds know it; and in Spring I shall see you, surely see you—for when did I once fail to get whatever I had set my heart upon?’ Such confidence! Elizabeth replied the next day, wittily temporizing. ‘Yes, but dear Mr Browning, I want the spring according to the new “style” (mine), and not the old one of you and the rest of the poets. To me, unhappily, the snowdrop is much the same as snow—it feels as cold underfoot—and I have grown sceptical about “the voice of the turtle,” and east winds blow so loud. April is a Parthian with a dart, and May (at least the early part of it) a spy in the camp. That is my idea of what you call spring; mine in the new style! A little later comes my spring; and indeed after such severe weather, from which I have just escaped with my life, I may thank it for coming at all.’

Elizabeth’s health, as usual, was her most useful, well-worn instrument for digging herself deeper into the life she had created for herself, and which allowed her pretty much to please herself. Illness enabled her to manipulate even, and especially, those she most loved to bind them to her own perceived, however irrational, benefit. To get her own way, she sacrificed much, but at some level she must have conceived the sacrifice to be worthwhile. In his own way, Robert too had established a modus vivendi that enabled him to suit himself as to when, or even if, he should do anything at any time not of his own choosing. He owed this considerable liberty to the largely passive indulgence of his parents and his sister, who, for whatever reasons of their own, colluded with him in the gratification of his personal desires, apparently against the prevailing social values of middle-class self-reliance and self-improvement. It is interesting to consider how these apparently opposed yet very similar character traits—there’s no easily getting around the words ‘selfishness’ and ‘ruthlessness’—contended to get their own way in the great things of their lives at the expense of their conventional personal comforts.

Among her family and friends, Elizabeth was considered ‘delicate’: at least they had become accustomed to her presenting herself as a semi-invalid and had collaborated in treating her as such. In a letter post-marked 6 May, Elizabeth recommended sleep to Robert on the ground that ‘we all know that thinking, dreaming, creating people like yourself, have two lives to bear instead of one, and therefore ought to sleep more than others’; and for herself, ‘I think better of sleep than I ever did, now that she will not easily come near me except in a red hood of poppies.’ What we might now call her habit had been acquired over twenty-five years. In March 1845, Elizabeth was thirty-nine years old. Since the age of fifteen, and perhaps earlier, she had regularly been dosed with opium.

The Barretts, like the Brownings, had derived their fortune from the sugar plantations of the West Indies—though Robert’s father had renounced the trade on moral grounds, while Elizabeth’s father had continued to rely upon it for his income. Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett, who came to England in 1792 at the age of seven and married Mary Graham-Clarke on 14 May 1805, was the grandson of Edward Barrett (usually known as Edward of Cinnamon Hill), a hugely rich Jamaican plantation owner who died in 1798. Edward’s father, Charles Moulton, was the son of another Jamaican family that also worked its plantations by slave labour. Charles seems to have been known for his savagery towards his slaves and, even for those times and in that place, acquired a bad reputation. Elizabeth, born to Edward and Mary on 6 March 1806, was formally christened with Edward, her younger brother by fifteen months, in February 1809. By that time, she had become known as Ba, an abbreviation for Baby—but the ‘a’ pronounced as in ‘babby’ rather than as in ‘baby’.

At the time of Elizabeth’s birth, the Barretts were living at Coxhoe Hall, near Durham, close to the Graham-Clarkes, but in 1809 Edward bought a property of some four hundred acres, Hope End, near Ledbury in Herefordshire, and moved his family (which by now included Henrietta, born on 4 March that year) to the house he almost immediately began—with an energy and taste for the exotic that William Beckford would have admired—to embellish, inside and out, in a Turkish style, to the extent of commissioning concrete and cast iron minarets from his architects. Edward’s neighbours might mutter about grandiosity and flamboyance, even of nouveau riche vulgarity, but he didn’t care; and Mary Barrett was captivated by a ‘beautiful and unique’ fantasy she thought worthy of an Arabian Nights story.

This extensive, expensive ornamentation of the house continued for nigh on ten years, in his absence as much as his presence. When Edward was not at Hope End, he was in London and Jamaica, attending to business. Mary’s business consisted in almost constant childbearing and child rearing: after Elizabeth, little Edward (known as ‘Bro’), and Henrietta (‘Addles’), at regular intervals of about eighteen months came Sam (known as ‘Storm’, ‘Stormy’, or ‘Stormie’), Arabella (‘Arabel’), Mary (who died young, aged four), Charles, George (‘Pudding’), Henry, Alfred (‘Daisy’), Septimus (‘Sette’), and—the youngest, born in 1824—Octavius (‘Occie’ or ‘Occy’). It was, by all accounts, not only a large but a mutually loving family, bossed by Elizabeth as the senior sister, and devoted to their sweet-natured, occasionally harassed mother. She in turn devoted herself to her dozen children, who occupied all her time. They were adored by their indulgent father, who took no great offence when his children were affectionately disrespectful. If anything, boldness and curiosity in his brood was encouraged: none of the children felt repressed, and they all looked forward eagerly to the fun they would have with him when he returned home from his business trips. They felt not just materially and emotionally safe, but, like little animals, secure in the predictable domestic routines and the regular disciplines of daily family prayers and other religious observances insisted upon by Mr Barrett. It was a fixed, solid world in which the Barretts, from eldest to youngest, were sure of their proper places—which did not exclude some natural jealousies and jostling for position—in the pecking order of Hope End.

If all this sounds like an idyll, it largely was. Hope End was an isolated rural property, deep in the agricultural west of the country, invisible from any road, silent but for bird song, and hedged from the outer world by dense foliage that to outsiders seemed oppressive. The Barretts lived in a quiet, secure, enclosed little world of their own, pretty much self-reliant and self-sufficient for their amusements. In this situation, Elizabeth discovered books at a very early age and her mother encouraged her to write about what she had read, nagging at her when her handwriting and critical standards didn’t come up to scratch. Supervised by Mary, Elizabeth ate up novels by Maria Edgeworth and Walter Scott, and begged for more. When a tutor was brought in to prepare Bro for school at Charterhouse, Elizabeth eagerly shared the lessons with her younger brother and learned Greek with him.

In April 1821, Arabel, Henrietta, and Elizabeth fell ill with headaches, pains in their sides, and convulsive twitchings of their muscles. They were treated, on the best medical advice, with a tincture of valerian, whereupon Arabel and Henrietta quickly recovered. Elizabeth did not, and in June she contracted a case of measles. It is at this time that she seems to have decided that she suffered from ‘natural ill health’, and her symptoms increased not only in quality but in quantity. She described her constant headache and her recurrent paroxysms—her ‘agony’—to her local and London doctors; how she swooned, the wild beating of her heart, her feeble pulse, the coldness of her feet, the constant pains in the right side of her chest that travelled round to her back, up to her right shoulder and down the arm. Margaret Forster succinctly describes how, ‘From the onset of menstruation middle-class women were encouraged to regard themselves as delicate creatures who must take great care of themselves. Vigorous exercise was discouraged, rest encouraged. Every ache and pain was taken seriously.’¹²⁹ The result, too often, was a debilitated condition—a chronic invalidism at best; at worst, symptoms resulting from hysteria or a narcissistic hypochondria that derived from or provoked the social attitude that women were naturally weak, dependent creatures. Illness was considered to be virtually the norm for upper-and middle-class women: to be ‘pale and interesting’ was quite the thing; robust health was not fashionable.

Elizabeth, whose health in childhood had been good, allowing for seasonal coughs and colds, nothing to worry about in normal circumstances, was prescribed purgatives that gave little or no relief. Advice, of course trustfully taken and dutifully observed, to confine herself ‘in a recumbent posture’ for long hours every day to a sofa or bed probably only reinforced her condition. Her paroxysms continued at the rate of three a day, though none at night, and she began to complain that her spine was ‘swollen’. Though medical examination could detect ‘nothing obviously wrong with the spine’, she was put in a ‘spine crib’—a kind of hammock suspended some four feet off the ground—just in case a disorder of the spine should develop. It was at this point that laudanum—dried and powdered opium dissolved in alcohol—was prescribed for Elizabeth, who took this universal panacea with just as much thought as we might take any mildly palliative over-the-counter nostrum or prescription drug today. A solution of opium or morphine enabled her to sleep in a ‘red hood of poppies’. At first, the dose would have been mild, but in time she would come to depend upon taking up to forty drops a day, a serious quantity, and claim she could not do without it.

After a few months, Elizabeth recovered some of her usual high spirits. Her appetite improved, her symptoms of upper body pain and paroxysms abated, and she felt rested. But she continued to believe that she was truly suffering from a disease of the spine and, despite medical prognoses that she would make a complete recovery from ailments both real and imaginary, she behaved as though she were a chronic invalid with no hope of cure. Her body was as passive as her mind was active. For the next year, strung up in her spinal crib or recumbent on a sofa, she read voraciously, wrote quantities of gloomy verse, ‘sickly’ as she herself eventually characterized it, in the form of odes dedicated to her family, and continued her study of Greek. She read Shakespeare and the best modern poets—Byron, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth—and became morbidly Romantic. She read Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman and became enraged about the sufferings of womanhood. Mary Wollstonecraft, in fact, affected her as deeply in her view of wedlock and subservience to men as Shelley’s atheism and vegetarianism had affected Robert. Elizabeth rejected romantic love and marriage as a snare she should take care to avoid. Robert had rejected the prospect of marriage less philosophically, rather as an unlikely adventure which, even if he should find a compatible partner, he could not financially afford.

In common, too, with the young Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett had determined in her teens that to be a poet was an honourable profession, that poetry was real work of deep spiritual and high artistic value, that she herself could become a proper poet—‘one of God’s singers’. Her ambitions extended far beyond the charming verses that young dilettantish women composed as prettily as they painted watercolours. Since Elizabeth’s parents, like Robert’s, were respectful of major poetry and serious poets, they made no difficulty about their eldest daughter’s devotion to such a creditable art and encouraged her aspirations. From the age of eleven, after all, she had shown not just promise, but uncommon ability. However they might privately enjoy the lighter-minded versifying of the other children, her parents and siblings soon learned that Elizabeth’s poems were no laughing matter and to tread warily if ever tempted to take them lightly. By the age of twenty-one, Elizabeth was a published poet. She had proved the worth of her work to herself and enjoyed the regard of those who valued it. To buy time to pursue her high vocation and continue her scholarly studies, she insisted on respect for the importance of her work and indulgence for her precarious state of health.

Her physical condition had markedly improved: she no longer rode or walked great distances or played boisterously with the younger children as she had done before her first illness, but she did stroll around the house and the gardens of Hope End and tutored her younger brothers in Latin. For the best part of the day, however, she closeted herself in her room, writing and reading in bed until late in the morning and preferring not to join the rest of the family when visitors were entertained. Now that her physical frailty had become established, accepted by custom and usage, she no longer had to emphasize her mysteriously non-specific weakness by regular consultations with doctors: coughings and a susceptibility to colds were enough to provoke sympathy and promote a collective agreement within her family that Elizabeth should be protected from anything that might worsen her delicate state of health. For intellectual stimulation, she corresponded lengthily with neighbours, older gentlemen such as Sir Uvedale Price (author, in 1794, of An Essay on the Picturesque, which introduced a new aesthetic category), Sir James Commeline (a local vicar and classical scholar), and especially with Hugh Stuart Boyd, a scholar, translator, and poet who lived at nearby Malvern Wells. She fell half in love with Mr Boyd, who was sadly afflicted with blindness, the only man outside her family that she consented to see and to make the effort to visit. But Mr Boyd, a gentleman of some moderate private means, happened to be married already and the father of children.

Mary Barrett, exhausted by the birth of her twelfth child, Octavius, in 1824, distressed by the death of her mother, Grandmother Graham-Clarke, and suffering from rheumatoid arthritis, died at the age of forty-seven in October 1828. Elizabeth was twenty-two years old. As the oldest daughter, she might have been expected to take over the running of the Hope End household, but no such duty was imposed upon her. Instead, Aunt Bummy, Arabella Graham-Clark, an unmarried sister of Mary Barrett, came to live with the Barretts. She was forty-three years old, the same age as her brother-in-law, and capably took over the management of the household, so relieving Elizabeth of any domestic obligations. The death of his wife deeply affected Edward Barrett, who turned to religion for spiritual comfort.

On his trips to London he had fallen under the influence of the powerfully charismatic Scottish preacher Edward Irving who, by 1825, had started to go seriously off his theological head—and not quietly. Irving’s big moment of revelation arrived when, sensationally, he predicted the imminent second coming of Christ. From 1828, he began teaching Christ’s oneness with humanity in all its attributes and thus, heretically, to assert to his followers the sinfulness of Christ’s nature. Edward Barrett’s mind became infused with the Irvingite belief that salvation lay in purity, that translation to the next world, preferment in the afterlife, could be achieved only by remaining uncorrupted by this wretched and sinful world. Irving preached zealously to large crowds that flocked to hear his dramatic denunciations of the errors of turpitudinous humanity. His authority, he claimed, derived directly from God, whose mouthpiece he had become. As an instrument of the divine, Irving was regularly inspired to invoke the wrathful retribution of the Almighty upon the godless and the guilty.

Bereft of her mother, Elizabeth adhered emotionally to her father. They had always been close, though never dependent on one another. Edward Barrett’s feelings towards his eldest daughter were sympathetic towards her physical fragility and psychological sensitivity. His general conduct as a good paterfamilias was not exceptional: he could be severe when necessary in his principles of good Christian conduct, and strict, though not abusive, about correcting any backsliding among the young Barretts, though he tended to be more indulgent towards Elizabeth than towards the rest of his children. But now Elizabeth became clinging, resentful of his business trips to London, anxious even when he was out of her sight at home. She wept pitifully when he went away and wept for joy when he returned safely. It is now generally accepted that, in the first years after his wife’s death, Edward Barrett did not become abnormally possessive of Elizabeth: quite the reverse, in fact. If anything, it was Elizabeth who felt, however irrationally, abandoned and insecure to the extent that she became virtually reclusive and sought comfort to an unusual degree in the powerful protective presence and reassuring company of her father.

Mr Barrett, in turn, looked to his family for solace in his grief and loneliness. He was liable to fall into rages, justifiably or not, but he could generally put on a good-humoured face. If he was sometimes a beast, he was at least—like Dr Arnold of Rugby—a just beast. In whatever temper, thunderous or sunny, it was perfectly evident that he greatly missed his wife. As he turned inward upon himself and his children, so he excluded friends and barely tolerated the intrusions by various remote members of the Barrett and Graham-Clarke families. Like Elizabeth, he conceived a horror of visitors and refused to make visits to other houses. His children amply and affectionately returned his love for them, and so for a while their mutual need for security coincided. For the most part, harmony reigned throughout Hope End. Then, in 1830, just two years after the death of his wife, Edward Barrett’s mother died. His shock was unspeakable. He had no words to describe the immensity of his loss. For that matter, the entire Barrett family was shocked to the extent that they were all shackled even more securely together in the isolated house and in their passionate, almost exclusive involvement with one another.

Edward Barrett was experiencing other difficulties, beyond the deeply wounding, irreparable losses in his private life. Some long-standing business and financial worries, caused by sustained mismanagement of his interests in the West Indies and a damaging lawsuit, were brought to a head by a slave rebellion in 1832 on the Jamaican plantations managed by his brother Sam. Additionally, the imminent prospect of the complete abolition of slavery (which eventuated in 1833) implied higher production costs and an inevitable tumult in the price of sugar. The monetary losses would be severe. Hope End, a significant drain on his resources (it was heavily mortgaged and creditors were pressing), would have to be sold. He kept much of the land, but the loss of the house was bad enough. It represented, even worse, a loss of his fundamental security in the world after the deaths of his wife and mother, and a serious loss of face—humiliating evidence of failure. If such precious things could so easily slip from his grasp, what might he lose next? In fact, Edward Barrett was far from ruined: the prospect before him was not that he would be a poor man, but he would no longer be a rich man.

The Barretts left Hope End on 23 August 1832. Mr Barrett had taken a large, comfortable house by the sea at Sidmouth in Devon, and the family settled more or less cheerfully, at least without protest, into their new lives. Elizabeth slept soundly, her appetite increased, and her cough was less troublesome: perhaps the sea air had something to do with the revival of her health, and probably, too, the stimulation of a new, more open and extroverted environment after the backwater of Hope End was beneficial. It was as though a heavy burden of gloom had been lifted from the Barretts. The whole family, buzzing around the beach and enjoying a more active social life, felt better and looked healthier. They received local visitors and returned their calls—all except Elizabeth, who refused to visit or be visited by anyone and mostly stuck to her books.

Bro, Stormie, and George, the older brothers, were by now judged by their father to be adult enough to prepare themselves for employment in the world. Bro, twenty-five years old, travelled to Jamaica to help his Uncle Sam, while Stormie and George, aged sixteen and nineteen respectively, left to attend Glasgow University. Elizabeth experienced her familiar feeling that, as soon as any of the family disappeared from her sight, she might never see them again, lose them altogether; but she put up a brave front, appeared compliant of inevitable changes in family life, and applied herself even more diligently to her proper business of reading and writing until the family situation should, with any luck, return to normal.

The three Barrett brothers returned to Sidmouth in 1835. At the end of the year Mr Barrett announced that, for the sake of his sons, the family would move immediately to London. George, who intended to become a barrister, would enter the Inner Temple, one of the Inns of Court; Bro (who had acquired first-hand experience of the West Indian estates) and Stormie (who stammered so badly that he could not take his viva voce examination and thus had failed to take his degree) would join the family business; and the younger boys would be properly educated. Elizabeth, who had found little intellectual stimulation in Sidmouth—not that she had made much effort to seek it out—was better pleased than not at the prospect of a literary life in London. For two years the Barretts lived at 74 Gloucester Place before moving permanently, in 1838, to 50 Wimpole Street.

London winters were cold, daylight turned a depressing grey, and dense, chilling fog hung like a malevolent yellow miasma about the streets, clutching at the throat and lungs. Elizabeth’s health deteriorated. In contrast to the open situation of Sidmouth, the reflective light of the sea and the green of the surrounding Devonshire countryside, she felt immured, ‘stuck to the fender’, almost literally bricked in. There was hardly a leaf or a blade of grass to be seen except if she drove out to Hampstead Heath, which hardly qualified as real country. As for acquiring stimulating literary and intellectual acquaintance, her sole resource and only constant visitor was her portly, red-faced, fifty-two-year-old cousin, John Kenyon whose advantage, in addition to a kindly and sociable nature, was that his house in Devonshire Place was a notable focus for literary men and women. He contrived, with some difficulty, to introduce Elizabeth to Wordsworth, Walter Savage Landor, and—more successfully—Mary Russell Mitford, chatty and opinionated and well-connected with literary persons, who became one of her few close friends and a regular recipient, until her death many years later, of Elizabeth’s most personally confiding and wittily conversational letters.

As the result of a cold contracted in the winter of 1837–8, Elizabeth began to cough again. She continued to feel unwell into the spring. When she consulted the eminent Dr Chambers, he recommended even more rest, to the point that she was rendered virtually immobile, moving only from sofa to bed and back again, hardly stirring from her room, which was closely sealed from the least possibility of a draught. Despite all precautions, she caught another cold, and Chambers gravely diagnosed an affection of the lungs. In August 1838, he advised a change of climate. Elizabeth should winter somewhere warm, and Mr Barrett was persuaded, with some difficulty, that she should go to Torquay with her maid, Elizabeth Crow. During the three years of her convalescence at Torquay, usually attended by one or other of her brothers and sisters, Elizabeth was fairly constantly unhappy. She didn’t like Torquay, she worried about the expense of it all, the climate was not particularly mild, and her health did not noticeably improve. At times, it took decided and distressing turns for the worse. She became increasingly reliant on laudanum to help her sleep. She wanted to be well for her father’s sake, and strenuously put her mind to feeling better, but she was convinced she was dying.

Many explanations have been given for Elizabeth’s chronic ill health: Betty Miller suggests that it derived from sibling rivalry, from jealousy of Bro. As a boy—it seemed to his elder sister—he was given the advantage by being sent to school to be properly, formally educated while she was obliged more or less to instruct herself. It is certainly true that Elizabeth was intellectually much cleverer than Bro. Mrs Miller’s theory implies that Elizabeth was malingering: perceiving herself as largely powerless, she put on suffering and incapacity as a means to obtain control of her life and so avoid the domestic and social duties of a woman of her class (she never liked sewing, for example), perhaps even deliberately to restrict the possibility of being obliged to marry. Illness attracted and focused the attention of her parents, and the household was at least partly run on the basis of her requirements. She imposed what she called a ‘rigid rein’ upon herself in order not to be ‘hurled with Phaeton far from everything human … everything reasonable!’¹³⁰ In her own estimation, by imposing the restraint of immobility upon herself, she saved herself from acting upon the ‘violent inclination’ that remained in her ‘inmost heart’. Elizabeth at least partly acknowledged that her ill health might be a desirable condition.

The modern consensus is that Elizabeth was truly ill. There seems little doubt now that she contracted a form of tuberculosis in her mid-teens and, as Daniel Karlin comments, ‘Tuberculosis is an impressionable disease. Elizabeth Barrett’s health fluctuated according to variations in climate and state of mind; she had periods of remission followed by crises, and the crises generally corresponded with times when she was under nervous strain. In these circumstances, there is little point in drawing distinctions between “physical” and “psychological” illness.’¹³¹ This fits very well with Margaret Forster’s view that ‘It is impossible to over-emphasise how tension of any kind—pleasurable excitement just as much as unpleasant—had an immediate physical effect on Elizabeth. She was, as she described herself, “intensely nervous”.’¹³²

In February 1840, the Barretts learned that Sam had died in Jamaica at the age of twenty-eight. The loss of a brother struck Elizabeth down instantly. She became delirious, fainting into unconsciousness when she was not in an opium-induced sleep, and could be comforted only by her father, who came down to Torquay to stay with her for several weeks. He rallied her with pious exhortations. He urged Christian submission to God’s will and invoked devotional feeling for His grace. She gave pious thanks for Sam’s life and everything she had loved in him—his amiability, his goodness, his wit, his delight in dandyish dress—but it was difficult not to be overwhelmed by his loss. She made the effort, however, to such an extent that Mr Barrett was gratified by his beloved daughter’s beauty of character as revealed in her staunch belief that love never dies, that Sam was but in another room, in another, better world, not dead to those who loved him. What she did not yet (if she ever did) know was that Sam had died—or so it was reported by missionaries who had worked to save his soul—of evil influences: the tropical climate, in part, but more perniciously of having resorted to native women and other carnal pleasures that had broken his health and imperilled his soul.

At about this time, Arabel and Bro had discovered romance. Bro’s affair seems to have been the more serious of the two, or perhaps it was merely more advanced than Arabel’s. Bro was thirty-three years old, an age at which his father had been married for eleven years and had sired eight children. Bro was refused paternal permission to marry. Mr Barrett set his face against any argument: he would hear no plea in favour of his son’s proposed nuptials. This was not unexpected. First of all, the fact was that Bro had no money of his own and stood in no position to marry without financial support from his father. Secondly, there exists the possibility that Mr Barrett had reasonable objections to the proposed bride, though we know no grounds on which they might have been well founded. Thirdly, it was well known among the Barretts that Mr Barrett had adopted the Irvingite principle, bolstered by his own reading of the Bible, that a father exercised absolute authority over his children. It was his first duty to lead them from the paths of corruption, to save them from sin, to preserve their purity. He might grieve for Sam, but—and we may assume he knew the disgraceful details of the wage Sam had earned from sin—the circumstances leading to his son’s spiritual ruin and consequent death would have surely confirmed his moral beliefs. For Mr Barrett to permit Bro to marry a woman who did not meet the exacting standards of the most rigorous morality would be to risk losing another son to perdition.

To an extent, from love, rather than from fear, the Barrett children were somewhat awed by the implications of their father’s attitude: no suitor other than a saint would be worthy of any of them, and a saint would hardly be the most likely material from which a spouse might be made. They might privately, among themselves, poke affectionate fun at their father’s protective concern for their spiritual salvation; but it was one thing to feel proud that they were special in his eyes, quite another when his interdict, as final as a ruling of the Last Judgement, frustrated their genuine emotions and commonplace desires. In a letter of 12 December 1845 to Robert Browning, Elizabeth summed up a situation that had unexpectedly arisen to affect her personally and to which she had once referred in jest to Arabel:

‘If a prince of Eldorado should come, with a pedigree of lineal descent from some signory in the moon in one hand, & a ticket of good-behaviour from the nearest Independent chapel, in the other’ …

‘Why even then,’ said my sister Arabel, ‘it would not do.’ And she was right, & we all agreed that she was right. It is an obliquity of the will—& one laughs at it till the turn comes for crying.

The rectitudinous Mr Barrett was not in principle opposed to the institution of marriage—he was himself a living testament to its virtues, beauties and benefits; but he was absolutely opposed to any occasion for sin, and, in that respect, an inappropriate attachment could not be countenanced. Where he suspected sin he generally discovered it. When one looks for devils, it is not difficult to find them. His religious principles had not descended upon him suddenly. There had been no voice in a thunderclap or vision in a lightning flash. He had experienced no moment of sudden revelation. They had waxed gradually within him, secreted like amber that, on exposure to the moral dilemmas of life, had hardened and trapped the insects of his intolerance. Irvingism had taken deep root, nourished by Edward Barrett’s naturally devout Protestantism and his cautious, conservative Liberal politics. It was partly this slow evolution of his character into something grim and forbidding that inhibited the Barrett children from recognizing the process of transformation until it was too late to do anything to modify it. And so, by and large, it had become accepted as an element influencing their own lives.

The Barretts might admit that their father had their own good at heart, but that concept of the absolute good was utterly inflexible and did not yield to the more elastic idea of good as conceived by weaker characters. Edward Barrett’s love was as oppressive as his ire. G. K Chesterton puts it precisely: ‘He had, what is perhaps the subtlest and worst spirit of egotism, not that spirit which thinks that nothing should stand in the way of its ill-temper, but that spirit which thinks that nothing should stand in the way of its amiability … The worst tyrant is not the man who rules by fear; the worst tyrant is he who rules by love and plays on it as on a harp.’¹³³ In his deep anxiety about loss, to prevent any further harm to the Barrett family, he perversely suffocated the children by his insistence on the family’s self-sufficiency, by his efforts to exclude any external threat to their well-being, and by his belief that they should be all in all to one another and be kept together.

Elizabeth, though strong-willed as a child, perfectly capable of throwing books and other objects around a room when she fell into a pet at being thwarted in her desires, did not as a mature woman challenge her father’s authority directly in the matter of marriage. Instead, she secretly attempted to make over her own money to Bro so that he could marry as he pleased. She was foiled in this underhand strategy. Mr Barrett had no legal right to stop any of his children marrying, but his personal wishes and his threats to disinherit any of them who defied those wishes were intimidating enough. He would cut any of them off without a shilling and cast them out of his life—regretfully, no doubt, but unhesitatingly.

For one thing, Elizabeth was afraid of her father’s anger and would not confront it directly. She could not in general bear, as she wrote to her brother George after her own marriage, ‘agitating opposition from those I tenderly loved—& to act openly in defiance of Papa’s will, would have been more impossible for me than to use the right which I believe to be mine, of taking a step so strictly personal on my own responsibility.’ For another thing, she retreated into her perceived weakness less as a self-professed invalid and more as a helpless woman. To Robert Browning, who had lost his temper over Mr Barrett’s apparent tyranny, she wrote on 12 June 1846: ‘You said once that women were as strong as men, … unless in the concurrence of physical force. Which is a mistake. I would rather be kicked with a foot, … (I, for one woman! …) than be overcome by a loud voice speaking cruel words … being a woman, & a very weak one (in more senses than the bodily), they would act on me as a dagger would … I could not help dropping, dying before them—I say it that you may understand.’ So much for the invigorating spirit of Mary Wollstonecraft’s feminism. There was a third factor, however: Elizabeth, like the rest of her brothers and sisters, had been inculcated with a strong sense of family, and the Barretts were not only profoundly loyal to one another, they loved one another deeply. The children’s loyalty and love for their father was no less real and no less committed than among themselves.

Bro, who had come to Torquay to be with Elizabeth, went sailing with three friends at midday on 11 July 1840. The sea was calm and the weather was fine, except for a brief squall that blew up suddenly in the afternoon. By nightfall, the boat had not returned. It never did. The Barretts explored every strategy they could devise to convince themselves that Bro could be alive. Every possible eventuality was examined and analysed until, at last and reluctantly, they gave up hope after three days. Bro’s body was not discovered until three weeks later when it was washed ashore, with the corpses of one of his friends and the boatman, in Babbacombe Bay on 4 August. They were buried in a local churchyard two days later. Elizabeth despaired: she had quarrelled with Bro on the morning of the 11th. Her last words to her beloved brother had not been friendly. She convinced herself, too, that her illness had been the primary—the only—reason for Bro being in Torquay at all. He had stayed with her at her request, and she felt responsible for having kept him with her. It was her fault that he had been there, she reasoned, and so it was her fault that he had died. The blame was hers. Her guilt was fathomless.

For the three weeks between Bro’s disappearance and his funeral, Elizabeth was scarcely conscious. Her mind, when not blank, was tormented—delirious visions of ‘long dark spectral trains’ and ‘staring infantine faces’ filled it; dreams were ‘nothing but broken hideous shadows and ghastly lights to mark them’, driving her, she said later, almost to ‘madness, absolute hopeless madness’. For three months, she did nothing. Her father stayed with her, every bit as despairing and suffering as his daughter in their mutual loss. He returned to London in December. Elizabeth had finally felt strong enough to write a letter to Miss Mitford in October. Mary Mitford offered very practical comfort: understanding her friend’s grief, empathizing sincerely with her loss, she tactfully offered Elizabeth a puppy from her own golden cocker spaniel’s recent litter. It was a generous offer—such a dog was a very valuable gift—and Elizabeth at first refused. But she was persuaded to accept.

Flush, when he arrived in January 1841, was six months old and irresistibly pretty. Of course, he became thoroughly spoiled and as devoted to his new mistress as she to him. Vitally, Flush became the object of her adoring attentions; Elizabeth became responsible for this scrap of excitable animal life. Flush pulled her out of her self-absorption, relieving some of her guilt about Bro—though not entirely. She pushed the painful memory of Bro to the back of her mind, to inhabit some dark place where nobody was permitted to enter. For the rest of her life, she would not talk of him and others learned not to refer, within her hearing, to Bro or the tragedy at Torquay.

Elizabeth returned to London on 11 September 1841. Her three years’ absence had been the most wretched of her life. The house in Wimpole Street, and her niche within it, seemed a haven of security from which she intended never again to be plucked and thrown into the difficult, dangerous world beyond it. Even to let anyone beyond Elizabeth Wilson (known as Lily), her capable and companionable personal maid who had replaced Crow, her immediate family and Flush into her room seemed unnecessarily hazardous. Not that visitors were encouraged or made welcome to the house at all: Mr Barrett, who had been reasonably outgoing, cheerful, and obliging in the days of his great prosperity, had withdrawn into himself as his resources had been depleted. His confidence had diminished and he turned, as it appeared to those who had known him in better days, gruff in manner with friends, grudging and curmudgeonly with strangers.

Elizabeth attributed his change of manner to shyness, about which she expressed some exasperation; but the truth of the matter was that Edward Barrett now felt inadequate. To compensate, he refused all occasions on which he thought he might not act with advantage—worse, be perceived to his disadvantage. Within his own house and family circle, he generally showed kindness and tenderness and was persuaded by Elizabeth to permit the amiable John Kenyon to visit and to meet Miss Mitford, who was also regularly admitted to Elizabeth’s room. He was delighted with Mary Mitford, but his success with her did not encourage him to push his luck further with others, such as Mrs Anna Jameson, who thrust herself into 50 Wimpole Street in November 1844.

There was no keeping Mrs Jameson out. She had read and admired Elizabeth’s latest publication, Poems, and nothing would do but that she should meet the author. Anna Jameson was not unknown in her own right among respected and respectable London society. Obliged to make her own living, she had established herself as a popular authority on art, travel, and literary criticism (mostly about women in Shakespeare and poetry), producing well-received, profitable books that enabled her to travel widely at a fast clip and in modest comfort to research more books on these improving subjects. Her works were not scholarly, perhaps, but they demonstrated some artistic taste and good sense; they were well researched at first hand, vividly written, and they sold well.

As a self-sufficient woman, Mrs Jameson was a convinced feminist in the Harriet Martineau mould, and naturally wished to exchange sisterly views with the celebrated Miss Barrett. She saw no good reason why this ambition should not be achieved, and so she politely left a note at 50 Wimpole Street announcing herself. But many people had left notes at the Barrett house, to no positive advantage. Mrs Jameson, turned away unsatisfied from the doorstep the first time, made a second attempt. She left another note, and this time she was admitted by Wilson. Elizabeth had read at least one of Mrs Jameson’s dozen books and her curiosity about the woman’s determination seems to have overridden her habitual inclination to close the door against even the most distinguished callers.

Anna Jameson was no beauty—Elizabeth, who paid close attention to physical appearance, noted that her complexion was pale and so were her eyes, she possessed no eyebrows to speak of, her lips were thin and colourless, and her hair was a very pale red. Carlyle briskly described her as ‘a little, hard, brown, red-haired, freckled, fierce-eyed, square-mouthed woman’. But Carlyle was not one to varnish a plain portrait. He spoke as he found—and so, for that matter, did Mrs Jameson. She was Irish, which largely accounts for her colouring and partly for her character. Like Miss Mitford, Anna Jameson was of middling years. But with the coincidence of their ages, any resemblance to Miss Mitford ended.

Whereas Mary Mitford indulged Elizabeth’s taste for writing and receiving long, confidingly effusive letters rapturously devoted, for the most part, to the incomparable beauties of Flush, his adorable character, and detailed accounts of his daily doggie activities, Anna Jameson spoke forth uncompromisingly and brusquely on all manner of matters within her competence, and they were many, including the subject of women’s superiority of mind and the uselessness of what she called ‘carpet work’ to which the female sex was condemned and confined. ‘Carpet work’ was injurious to the female mind, she said, because it led, fatally, to the vapid habit of reverie. Elizabeth faintly protested this blanket condemnation, though she had never worked a carpet, far less knitted or plied a needle and thread, in her life. Mrs Jameson, taking stock of Elizabeth, generously made an exception for her on the ground that she might do carpet work with impunity because she could be writing poetry at the same time. Anna Jameson’s vigorous, sharply intelligent, unreserved discourse, and the underlying kindliness of her nature, endeared her immediately, and so this good woman was admitted to the small, exclusive pantheon of Elizabeth’s closest and most trusted allies. She could hardly have chosen anyone truer in friendship or more stout-hearted in the defence of her reputation and interests than Anna Jameson when such unqualified support was required and mattered most.

As Elizabeth’s spirits improved, as her work became more widely known and widely appreciated, and as she took more interest in the activities and gossip of London’s social, political and literary life—in response to her frequent letters, friends wrote back despatches from all these fronts and her chosen ambassadors reported to her in person—so her health also improved. In her letter to Robert of 5 March 1845, she wrote: ‘I am essentially better, and have been for several winters; and I feel as if it were intended for me to live and not die, and I am reconciled to the feeling … I am not desponding by nature, and after a course of bitter mental discipline and long bodily seclusion, I come out with two learnt lessons (as I sometimes say and oftener feel),—the wisdom of cheerfulness—and the duty of social intercourse.’

In her darker moments, Elizabeth felt she had been deprived of social and intellectual opportunities, ground to a husk in the mill of suffering, and she contrasted Robert’s luckier, fatter experience of life to date: ‘I do like to hear testimonies like yours, to happiness … it is obvious you have been spared, up to this time, the great natural afflictions, against which we are nearly all called, sooner or later, to struggle and wrestle … Remember that as you owe your unscathed joy to God, you should pay it back to His world. And I thank you for some of it already.’ She made some judicious criticism of attitudes towards her: ‘People have been kind to me, even without understanding me, and pitiful to me, without approving of me’: and now Robert—‘How kind you are!—how kindly and gently you speak to me! Some things you say are very touching, and some, surprising; and although I am aware that you unconsciously exaggerate what I can be to you, yet it is delightful to be broad awake and think of you as my friend.’

Robert retorted in his letter post-marked 12 March that ‘You think—for I must get to you—that “I unconsciously exaggerate what you are to me.” Now, you don’t know what that is, nor can I very well tell you, because the language with which I talk to myself of these matters is spiritual Attic, and “loves contradictions,” as grammarians say … but I read it myself and know very well what it means, that’s why I told you I was self-conscious—I meant that I never yet mistook my own feelings, one for another—there! … Do you think I shall see you in two months, three months? I may travel, perhaps.’ That last, apparently throwaway but more probably well calculated, line had its effect. Elizabeth replied eight days later, ending her letter by saying, ‘If you mean “to travel”, why, I shall have to miss you. Do you really mean it?’ She knew she was being pressed, that Robert’s patience had been tried and was running short. This long letter of 20 March opened with the assurance that ‘Whenever I delay to write to you, dear Mr Browning, it is not, to be sure, that I take “my own good time,” but submit to my own bad time … I have not been very well, nor have had much heart for saying so.’

The weather—‘this east wind that seems to blow through the sun and the moon!’—had been implacable and ‘I only grow weaker than usual, and learn my lesson of being mortal, in a corner—and then all this must end! April is coming. There will be both a May and a June if we live to see such things, and perhaps, after all, we may. And as to seeing you besides, I observe that you distrust me, and that perhaps you penetrate my morbidity and guess how when the moment comes to see a living human face to which I am not accustomed, I shrink and grow pale in the spirit. Do you? You are learned in human nature, and you know the consequences of leading such a secluded life as mine—notwithstanding all my fine philosophy about social duties and the like—well—if you have such knowledge or if you have it not, I cannot say, but I do say that I will indeed see you when the warm weather has revived me a little, and put the earth “to rights” again so as to make pleasures of the sort possible.’

The letter goes on, very affectingly, very emotionally, and in important respects quite misleadingly, to summarize her life, to draw comparisons between Robert’s full, heady experience of an active, happy life—‘You are Paracelsus’—and the life that Elizabeth has lived ‘only inwardly; or with sorrow, for a strong emotion. Before this seclusion of my illness, I was secluded still, and there are few of the youngest women in the world who have not seen more, heard more, known more, of society, than I, who am scarcely to be called young now. I grew up in the country—had no social opportunities, had my heart in books and poetry and my experience in reveries. My sympathies drooped towards the ground like an untrained honeysuckle—and but for one, in my own house—but of this I cannot speak.’ Here Elizabeth drew a veil over the memory of Bro.

It was a lonely life, growing green like the grass around it. Books and dreams were what I lived in—and domestic life only seemed to buzz gently around, like the bees about the grass. And so time passed and passed—and afterwards, when my illness came and I seemed to stand at the edge of the world with all done, and no prospect (as it appeared at one time) of ever passing the threshold of one room again; why then, I turned to thinking with some bitterness (after the greatest sorrow of my life had given me room and time to breathe) that I had stood blind in this temple I was about to leave—that I had seen no Human nature, that my brothers and sisters of the earth were names to me, that I had beheld no great mountain or river, nothing in fact. I was as a man dying who had not read Shakespeare, and it was too late! do you understand? And do you also know what a disadvantage this is to my art? Why, if I live on and yet do not escape from this seclusion, do you not perceive that I labour under signal disadvantages—that I am, in a manner, as a blind poet? Certainly, there is a compensation to a degree. I have had much of the inner life, and from the habit of self-consciousness and self-analysis, I make great guesses at Human nature in the main. But how willingly I would as a poet exchange some of this lumbering, ponderous, helpless knowledge of books, for some experience of life and man, for some …

And here she gives up, helpless and speechless after such a powerful passage of self-confession and self-revelation. She felt, perhaps, she had gone too far and cut it off with a bathetic moral banality—‘But all grumbling is a vile thing’—promptly followed by a pious platitude—‘We should all thank God for our measures of life, and think them enough for each of us.’

We can read all this more objectively than subjectively, Elizabeth wrote it with passion, some element of self-pity and, in the light of what we now know about her early life, some self-delusion and self-dramatization. To take only the most glaringly self-serving example, if she had been lonely it had been through her own choice to avoid company. The impression she gave (by omission rather than direct statement) of being all but a solitary orphan child brought up by the fairies, was hardly fair to her two devoted parents or the eleven younger brothers and sisters who doted upon their demanding older sister. She might have felt solitary from time to time, she might have longed to be less alone sometimes, she might have felt intellectually isolated, but rarely could she have felt lonely in a social sense. At some cost to others, Elizabeth had bought time and space for her reveries, for her inner life, beyond which the Barretts buzzed like bees in the domestic environment, conscientious and generous in their efforts to care for her health, keep her amused, run her errands, and cater to her every comfort.

Nevertheless, there can be little doubt that what she wrote on 20 March 1845 was true to her deepest feelings, to her perceptions of her situation, if not strictly accurate as to domestic reality and psychological truth. The letter also seemed to mark a real and profound desire that she should move towards a more active life, that time was no longer on her side—‘I, who am scarcely to be called young now’. In March 1845, on her thirty-ninth birthday, she entered her fortieth year, though the anniversary merited no mention in her letters to Robert. There is a suggestion, in Elizabeth’s appeals to Robert to make the imaginative effort to understand, to believe her self-assessment, after her observation that he distrusted her, that personal revelations had by now become necessary and that Robert, himself free to move, represented some hope (not yet quantifiable) of her own release to her personal benefit and the benefit of her poetry.

On the contrary, Robert, surfeited with being active in the world, understood that inwardness and seclusion were desirable and essential conditions for creative activity, for the poetic art, and that the products of the cultivated imagination were of more value than mere representations of reality. Elizabeth’s ‘lamentable disadvantage’ was in fact her most priceless advantage. Robert valued very highly the ‘visionary utterances’ in Elizabeth’s poetry and exalted her professed ‘disadvantage’ above what Daniel Karlin characterizes as ‘the process of interaction between the mind and “external influences” out of which his own “dramatic” poetry was made.’¹³⁴ Elizabeth had the measure of Robert and his poetry when she wrote on 17 April, ‘I have a profound conviction that where a poet has been shut from most of the outward aspects of life, he is at a lamentable disadvantage. Can you, speaking for yourself, separate the results in you from the external influences at work around you, that you say so boldly that you get nothing from the world? You do not directly, I know—but you do indirectly & by a rebound. Whatever acts upon you, becomes you—& whatever you love or hate, whatever charms you or is scorned by you, acts on you & becomes you.’ No critic was ever more acutely perceptive about the well-springs of Robert’s work than Elizabeth.

Her estimations of his character were, at this early stage, less sure—though, to be fair, she was working with inadequate information. Elizabeth had read Robert’s poems, but she had not yet fully read the man. The two were not, as he had warned her, to be confused. Robert had provided some personal information about himself and his family, of course, and she had gleaned a little more from John Kenyon and Miss Mitford: the former biased in Robert’s favour, the latter mildly prejudiced against him. The curtain had been rung up on the play, but neither of the principals had yet made their first entrances. They were still exchanging dialogue as offstage voices.

The preliminary scenes had been carefully set, principally by Robert. He had posed himself solitary at his desk with spiders and skull; he had pictured himself amidst a glittering crowd of celebrated men and women—a wealth of writers, an amplitude of artists, a surfeit of society beauties—weary of their dinner tables and ballrooms. Elizabeth had already conjured him, largely through his poetry, as a heroic figure, and Robert himself had impressed upon her his resolve in getting his own way in whatever he set his heart and mind upon gaining. What she did not yet fully understand, but had begun to suspect, was that he had cast her, sight unseen, as his leading lady, the romantic heroine. There were several objections to this, and she managed to play for time whenever Robert pressed for a meeting. Robert at first tended to assume that she deferred a face to face encounter on account of her invalidity, which, not having inquired too closely of Kenyon for particulars, he took to be greater and more debilitating than it was. In Robert’s letter, postmarked 13 May, he wrote to say, ‘I ask you not to see me so long as you are unwell or mistrustful of—No, no that is being too grand! Do see me when you can, and let me not be only writing myself.’

In her reply to Robert post-marked 16 May, she protested: ‘But how “mistrustfulness”? And how “that way?” What have I said or done, I, who am not apt to be mistrustful of anybody and should be a miraculous monster if I began with you!’ She excused herself: ‘I have made what is vulgarly called a “piece of work” about little; or seemed to make it. Forgive me. I am shy by nature:—and by position and experience by having had my nerves shaken to excess, and by leading a life of such seclusion, … by these things together and by others besides, I have appeared shy and ungrateful to you. Only not mistrustful.’ She relented: she said that if Robert cared to come to see her, he could come. It would be her gain, she said, and not Robert’s. She did not normally admit visitors because, she wrote, ‘putting the question of health quite aside, it would be unbecoming to lie here on the sofa and make a company-show of an infirmity, and hold a beggar’s hat for sympathy.’ To the extent that she did exploit her condition of health, she was obscurely repulsed by it herself and thus certain that others would also be disgusted.

It is a convention that romantic and operatic heroines, especially if pale, languorous, and dying of consumption, should be beautiful, and so it is sentimentally assumed that Elizabeth was chiefly worried by the effect her looks might have on Robert. It is difficult to conceive a more banal idea than that Elizabeth, hearing Robert’s footsteps on the stair for the first time, should primp herself, pinch her cheeks for a little colour, and have Wilson, her maid, fuss with her hair to present herself to best advantage. She possessed no idea of herself as a tragic heroine, and still further from her mind was any concept of herself as a flirt, a coquette. Personally, she affected no mystery. To whatever extent she had been invested with glamour and mystery, that image of beauty unrevealed had arisen in the minds of others from her curious reclusiveness and invisibility. Conscious of public interest in her, and perhaps aware that her disinclination to put herself obligingly on show only served to fuel that curiosity, she feared, if anything, a constant troop of rubber-necking visitors curious to inspect her as a sort of freak show.

More to the point, Elizabeth worried that Robert would find her colourless in person, tongue-tied, less interesting than her poetry. He would be disappointed in her. ‘There is nothing to see in me;’ she warned him, ‘nor to hear in me—I never learnt to talk as you do in London; although I can admire that brightness of carved speech in Mr Kenyon and others. If my poetry is worth anything to any eye, it is the flower of me. I have lived most and been most happy in it, and so it has all my colours; the rest of me is nothing but a root, fit for the ground and the dark.’ The most he could expect should be ‘truth and simplicity for you, in any case; and a friend. And do not answer this—I do not write it as a fly trap for compliments. Your spider would scorn me for it too much.’¹³⁵

Having consented to a meeting, Elizabeth promptly took fright and retreated a little, disingenuously procrastinating not on her own account but by offering Robert an excuse for delay, a mediator, or the opportunity to create an obstacle to his visit. In her letter post-marked 16 May she reminded Robert that he had not been well, that he had had a headache and a ringing in his ears, and she entreated him ‘not to think of coming until that is all put to silence satisfactorily. When it is done, … you must choose whether you would like best to come with Mr Kenyon or to come alone—and if you would come alone, you must just tell me on what day, and I will see you on any day unless there should be an unforeseen obstacle, … any day after two, or before six.’

Robert in turn had his anxieties. In his Friday evening reply postmarked 17 May, amusingly as he thought, he played with Elizabeth’s alleged ‘mistrust’ of him—not that he would make away with the Barrett cloaks and umbrellas downstairs, or publish a magazine article about his meeting with her, rather that she mistrusted his ‘commonsense,—nay, uncommon and dramatic-poet’s sense, if I am put on asserting it!—all which pieces of mistrust I could detect, and catch struggling, and pin to death in a moment, and put a label in, with name, genus and species, just like a horrible entomologist; only I won’t, because the first visit of the Northwind will carry the whole tribe into the Red Sea—and those horns and tails and scalewings are best forgotten altogether.’ Robert then conjured an elaborately facetious encounter between himself and an imaginary Mr Simpson, an avid admirer of Mr Browning’s poetry who earnestly wishes to meet its maker and is disappointed in the banality of Robert’s conversation about the weather and politics and makes his excuses to leave after five minutes, saying to himself, ‘Well, I did expect to see something different from that little yellow commonplace man.’ Robert then said that he would call on Miss Barrett—allowing for any adverse circumstances—on Tuesday at two o’clock.

Elizabeth, discontented with his letter, replied the same day that ‘I shall be ready on Tuesday I hope, but I hate and protest against your horrible “entomology.”’ Robert’s light-hearted little fantasy of Simpsonism had not been well received by Elizabeth, who crossly considered that ‘you, who know everything, or at least make awful guesses at everything in one’s feelings and motives, and profess to pin them down in a book of classified inscriptions, … should have been able to understand better, or misunderstand less, in a matter like this—Yes! I think so. I think you should have made out the case in some such way as it was in nature—viz. that you had lashed yourself up to an exorbitant wishing to see me, … (you who could see, any day, people who are a hundredfold and to all social purposes, my superiors!) because I was unfortunate enough to be shut up in a room and silly enough to make a fuss about opening the door; and that I grew suddenly abashed by the consciousness of this. How different from a distrust of you! how different!’¹³⁶ Elizabeth and Robert had both, by this point, worked themselves up to such a pitch of apprehension that their hypersensitivity crackled like static electricity in the air between them. Of the two, Elizabeth was only marginally the less confident. Mr Barrett had been squared—he did not object to ‘Ba’s poet’ paying her a visit so long as he did not have to meet him. In any case, Mr Barrett, like his sons, was usually out during the afternoons, until about seven o’clock. From two to six was the quietest part of the day in the house. It wasn’t likely, in any case, that anyone would burst unexpectedly into Elizabeth’s room: she saw her brothers and their noisy friends ‘only at certain hours’ and, she later told Robert, ‘as you have “a reputation” and are opined to talk in blank verse, it is not likely that there should be much irreverent rushing into this room when you are known to be in it.’¹³⁷ At three o’clock in the afternoon of Tuesday 20 May 1845, Robert was led up the stairs and shown into Elizabeth’s room. He left ninety minutes later, at half past four. Robert afterwards noted the date and time and length of the first meeting, as he would note all subsequent meetings, on the envelopes of Elizabeth’s letters.

And that was all he noted. Neither Robert nor Elizabeth directly referred in their letters, then or later, to what passed between them during their times together in her room. It is as though the letters are one dialogue, the conversations quite another. They seem rarely to have overlapped, or flowed into one another; at most, the letters may have continued discussions initiated verbally, but the written correspondence is remarkably self-contained. Perhaps, after all, Robert and Elizabeth at first confined themselves to polite ‘Simpsonisms’ about the weather and politics. We can make some guesses, but we not know. We know, nevertheless, what Robert saw when the door closed behind him and he sat down to talk privately with Elizabeth. The room she had described to a Devonshire friend, Mrs Martin, on 26 May 1843, would not have substantially changed over two years:

The bed, like a sofa and no bed: the large table placed out in the room, towards the wardrobe end of it; the sofa rolled where a sofa should be rolled—opposite the arm-chair; the drawers crowned with a coronal of shelves fashioned by Sette and Co. (of papered deal and crimson merino) to carry my books; the washing table opposite turned into a cabinet with another coronal of shelves; and Chaucer’s and Homer’s busts in guard over these two departments of English and Greek poetry; three more busts consecrating the wardrobe which there was no annihilating; and the window—oh, I must take a new paragraph for the window, I am out of breath.

In the window is fixed a deep box full of soil, where are springing up my scarlet runners, nasturtiums, and convolvuluses, although they were disturbed a few days ago by the revolutionary insertion among them of a great ivy root with trailing branches so long and wide that the top tendrils are fastened to Henrietta’s window of the higher storey, while the lower ones cover all my panes.

For the occasion of Robert’s first visit, Elizabeth had made at least one adjustment to the decor of the room: she had taken down his portrait (reproduced from Horne’s New Spirit of the Age) from the wall where it normally hung with portraits of Wordsworth, Tennyson, Carlyle, and Harriet Martineau. ‘In a fit of justice’, she also took down the picture of Tennyson.

The room, rich with crimson, was dimly lit: blinds were partly pulled against the afternoon sun, and the ivy (a gift from John Kenyon) further filtered whatever light was left. In this crepuscular atmosphere, perhaps she intended to blend with the shadows and fade, half-glimpsed, into the general obscurity she had pulled around herself. To complement this chiaroscuro, she would have been wearing a black silk summer dress (for winter, she wore black velvet), in perpetual mourning for Bro. Since she never went out, her complexion would have been pallid, in stark contrast not only to the deep black of her dress but to the glossy black of her thick hair, a mass of ringlets framing her small, worn face in which her eyes were sunk like ‘two dark caves’. She looked at Robert directly, caught his gaze, when he made his first entrance, but thereafter, for several months, she averted her eyes from his. Elizabeth reclined on her sofa, a small figure in a large dress. Robert sat on a chair drawn up close to her sofa. He conversed in his confident, resonant voice; she replied in her thin, high, reedy voice. On his sixth visit, on Saturday 28 June, and thereafter, Robert would bring flowers from his mother’s garden, roses especially, their fresh colour and heady scent filling the room with—he deliberately intended—a reminder and invocation of the living world outside.

The result of their first meeting was satisfactory: their letters, each thanking the other for the encounter, will not, however, satisfy those readers who wish for an immediate coup de foudre: ‘I trust to you’, wrote Robert immediately afterwards, ‘for a true account of how you are—if tired, not tired, if I did wrong in any thing,—or, if you please, right in any thing—(only, not one more word about my “kindness,” which, to get done with, I will grant is excessive) … I am proud and happy in your friendship—now and ever. May God bless you!’¹³⁸ Elizabeth replied the next day, the Wednesday morning: ‘Indeed there was nothing wrong—how could there be? And there was everything right—as how should there not be? And as for the “loud speaking,” I did not hear any—and, instead of being worse, I ought to be better for what was certainly (to speak of it, or be silent of it,) happiness and honour to me yesterday.’ And, her fears allayed, she looked forward to seeing Robert again: ‘But you will come really on Tuesday—and again, when you like and can together—and it will not be more “inconvenient” to me to be pleased, I suppose, than it is to people in general—will it, do you think? Ah—how you misjudge! Why it must obviously and naturally be delightful to me to receive you here when you like to come, and it cannot be necessary for me to say so in set words—believe it of your friend, E.B.B.’¹³⁹ So far, so good—but no further. One letter is missing from the courtship correspondence, which is otherwise entire: the sixteenth letter from Robert to which Elizabeth replied on Friday evening, 23 May. The letter no longer exists, having been deliberately destroyed by Elizabeth. What it contained, we do not know, only that Elizabeth read it ‘in pain and agitation’.

The supposition has been, by some who wish it to have been so, that it contained a proposal of marriage. Perhaps it did—there is no telling for a certainty that it did not, though Daniel Karlin’s close analysis of the letters immediately following the initial meeting and Elizabeth’s letter of 23 May tends to cast doubt upon the traditional interpretation. My own view is that a proposal of marriage is most unlikely. Robert was rash in his letter, undoubtedly—but not that rash. It is much more likely that Robert’s letter touched, too prematurely and too precipitately, upon Elizabeth’s most vulnerable point of self-estimation, misunderstanding and misinterpreting her perception of herself, possibly expressing overt and over-confident love for what she could not yet find to love in herself. Robert had trampled on sacred ground. A truth she could not face—would not face—was forced upon her and she felt, very acutely, the violation, the attempted ruin, of everything she had so carefully constructed to protect herself.

This is what Elizabeth wrote:

I intended to write to you last night and this morning, and could not,—you do not know what pain you give me in speaking so wildly. And if I disobey you, my dear friend, in speaking (I for my part) of your wild speaking, I do it, not to displease you, but to be in my own eyes, and before God, a little more worthy, or less unworthy, of a generosity from which I recoil by instinct and at the first glance, yet conclusively; and because my silence would be the most disloyal of all means of expression, in reference to it. Listen to me then in this. You have said some intemperate things … fancies,—which you will not say over again, nor unsay, but forget at once, and for ever, having said at all; and which (so) will die out between you and me alone, like a misprint between you and the printer. And this you will do for my sake who am your friend (and you have none truer)—and this I ask, because it is a condition necessary to our future liberty of intercourse. You remember—surely you do—that I am in the most exceptional of positions; and that, just because of it, I am able to receive you as I did on Tuesday; and that, for me to listen to ‘unconscious exaggerations,’ is as unbecoming to the humilities of my position, as unpropitious (which is of more consequence) to the prosperities of yours. Now, if there should be one word of answer attempted to this; or of reference; I must not … I will not see you again—and you will justify me later in your heart. So for my sake you will not say it—I think you will not—and spare me the sadness of having to break through an intercourse just as it is promising pleasure to me; to me who have so many sadnesses and so few pleasures. You will!—and I need not be uneasy—and I shall owe you that tranquillity as one gift of many. For, that I have much to receive from you in all the free gifts of thinking, teaching, master-spirits, … that