Dared and Done Read online

  ALSO BY JULIA MARKUS

  NOVELS

  Uncle

  American Rose

  Friends Along the Way

  A Change of Luck

  EDITION OF

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s

  Casa Guidi Windows

  This Is a Borzoi Book Published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

  Copyright © 1995 by Julia Markus

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.

  My thanks to Hofstra University for its constant support of my work and for a special leave, and to the National Endowment for the Humanities, which helped me to complete this book with a summer research and travel grant and a Fellowship for College Teachers and Independent Scholars.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Markus, Julia.

  Dared and done: the marriage of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning / by Julia Markus. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-83297-9

  1. Browning, Robert, 1812–1889—Marriage. 2. Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 1806–1861—Marriage. 3. Poets, English—19th century—Biography. 4. Authors’ spouses—Great Britain—Biography. I. Title.

  PR4232.M27 1995

  821′.809—dc20

  [B] 94-11573

  v3.1

  FOR MY MOTHER, RUTH SELMAN MARKUS

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  A Note on Transcriptions

  Introduction

  PART ONE

  Death or Love

  Lovers’ Luck

  Riding an Enchanted Horse

  “The Runaway Slave”

  Pisa Postscript

  PART TWO

  The Marriage of True Minds: Hers

  The Marriage of True Minds: His

  The Roads That Led to Rome

  Ecco Roma

  American Marble Cutters and Yankee Titians

  PART THREE

  “Such a Wild Step”

  “Who’s There?” The Ealing Séance

  The Almost Miraculous Year

  Arabel and the “Untles”

  Surprise Endings

  PART FOUR

  Admitting Impediments

  We Poets of the People

  We Know Each Other

  La Vita Nuova

  A Word More

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Illustration Credits

  A NOTE ON TRANSCRIPTIONS

  ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING used a particular form of punctuation in her letters, two dots [. .], at times to indicate a pause, a comma, or a dash. I have turned this signature into a comma or a dash very rarely, only when necessary for clarity in the text. With very few exceptions, noted when possible, I retain the poet’s usage.

  In EBB’s time the Moulton was often dropped from her last name; she called herself Elizabeth Barrett Barrett. I do not hyphenate the family name Moulton Barrett when I am referring to her, her father, or her siblings. That came later. In some of the printed texts of the Brownings’ letters, there are occasional misspellings as well as occasional spellings and usages that we now consider American. In my transcribing from printed sources, as well as in my transcribing of manuscript material, I have been as faithful as I can to the text as it appears. Because of the signature two dots and the necessity of ellipses in the middle of quoted passages I have avoided ellipses at the beginning and ending of quotations as much as possible. Accuracy and readability have been my goals. All quotations from the Brownings’ poetry are taken from the volumes of their work listed in the bibliography.

  INTRODUCTION

  THE LETTER that began the most famous courtship of the nineteenth century opened, “I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett.” The writer, Robert Browning, was a young poet and playwright, respected in close literary circles, writing to a woman six years his senior, an invalid, and a poet of national and international fame. It must have delighted him that Elizabeth Barrett had recognized his own genius, that intense poetic heart of his that she had likened to a pomegranate, mentioning it and him by name in a poem of her own. To suggest that Browning’s first letter to Elizabeth Barrett was spurred by the slightest notion of self-aggrandizement would be to misunderstand the caliber of the man and to misrepresent the relation these two poets had to each other and to their times. Easy enough to misrepresent. Their courtship, their secret marriage, their fifteen years in Italy, were exceptional—even by the rigorous standards of their own time. Browning, introducing himself to Miss Barrett in that first letter, found his prose soaring ahead of his intentions: “In this addressing myself to you—your own self, and for the first time, my feeling rises altogether,” he told her. Then leaving literary allusions and Victorian propriety in his wake, Robert Browning dared to express his feelings: “I do, as I say, love these verses with all my heart—and I love you too.”

  One might say, at that very moment, as he wrote the words, he fell in love.

  “I thank you, dear Mr. Browning, from the bottom of my heart,” Elizabeth Barrett answered on the very next day, January 11, 1845, beginning a correspondence that would last for twenty months. The two would write each other 573 letters during that time—574 if we include the one Elizabeth asked him to burn. The last word was Elizabeth’s, written on a Friday night, September 18, 1846, on the eve of their journey to Italy.

  The letters confirm that the one myth about the Brownings that was absolutely true was the most romantic one—the drama of their courtship. Robert Browning fell in love with an invalid poet, wrote to her, visited. Their love took her from the couch she hardly ever left, down the stairs of the house on Wimpole Street, to the drawing room, to a walk in the park, and then to Italy—a climate that would support their art and her health.

  It was a remarkable correspondence and has been the basis of many an interpretation, among them an enormously successful stage play—The Barretts of Wimpole Street. Perhaps today, when the drama of family secrets is in and on the air, this play about what was going on in the Barrett household in London in the 1840s among a widowed father and his grown children seems dated, stereotypical, tame. But for an earlier generation, slowly coming to grips with Sigmund Freud and, through Eugene O’Neill, beginning to look at the family in a new way, Rudolph Besier’s 1930 work must have been a tantalizing way, a thrilling way, a less complicated way, of confronting some of the darker realities of respectable domestic life.

  The Barretts of Wimpole Street dealt with the tyrannical aspect of Elizabeth’s father, Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett, who wanted to keep his children, particularly his favorite daughter, Elizabeth, for himself and away from suitors. On the stage, when not stern, Moulton Barrett was overaffectionate toward Elizabeth—the whiff of incest, like one stick of incense burning through the darkened theater.

  Goodness knows what this play stirred up night after night, year after year, in its devoted audience. I often wonder what my own grandmother felt, with her early experience of a sick mother and a difficult stepfather, as she, like so many of her generation, picked up the pattern and knitted her own Barretts-of-Wimpole-Street blanket, modeled after the one the invalid Elizabeth threw over her lap on stage. What a beautiful cover it made.

  The play was inspired by a fact of Elizabeth Barrett’s life evident in the love letters, a fact again so crazily mythic in its post-Freudian significan
ce that it is difficult to look directly at the implications of its truth. Her father, a wealthy, landed gentleman, a responsible if stern father, and a widower, had twelve children, eleven of whom reached adulthood, nine of whom survived. He simply had one stipulation, as ironclad as it was unspoken: None of them, male or female, was allowed to marry. The three who did disobey in his lifetime were disinherited, not only from the material things he controlled but from any further contact with their father. To him, they were dead.

  Earlier audiences did not have to go far to see psychic roots for the physical maladies, the excruciating condition of the lungs, that wracked Elizabeth Barrett’s existence. Nor did they have to linger on the specific pain and guilt that precipitated her isolation on Wimpole Street to empathize with her escape from it. The father was cast as “the villain” and the daughter in her late thirties as the waif rescued by romantic love. Yet in the love letters the daughter does not blame her father for the steps she must take to live her own life. Her cross was heavier to bear. She took full responsibility for her actions, her free will, and the pain she would cause her father. The passion and love between Elizabeth and Robert was not a case of mutual self-absorption, and though it was first love for both, it was not the first love of children.

  Who Moulton Barrett really was is more complicated. He was born in Jamaica, the heir of a great fortune as the legitimate grandson of Edward Barrett of Cinnamon Hill. His grandfather was one of the richest landholders, rum and sugar exporters, and slaveholders in the West Indies. The Barrett family had been in Jamaica since it was colonized in the seventeenth century. His daughter Elizabeth was the first Barrett to be born in England in many generations. No wonder when his first son was born less than sixteen months later, drums sounded at Cinnamon Hill and the slaves were given a half-day holiday. Though Moulton Barrett, a deeply religious man, must have had religious scruples against slavery, he was a staunch supporter of the system that supplied his living until its end. His form of devout Christianity led him to a belief that a man’s household, wife and children included, were his chattel, and that all were morally obliged to obey his every word. His interpretation of the Bible was underscored by his early years in Jamaica and by his later business concerns. He was born to be the benevolent master.

  The miracle of his oldest daughter’s story was that, locked as she was into the drama of her own family, into illness, morphine, and dreams, life did come to her, did seek her out, in her draped and heated room at Wimpole Street. “I do, as I say, love these verses with all my heart—and I love you too.” Part of the miracle. A greater part was how she found a way, rooted at the very heart of her father’s dictums, to respond and find her liberty.

  Browning’s style of courting, as in his first letter, was much more straightforward than Elizabeth Barrett’s. One wonders if the path of indirection she would lead him along was not only frustrating and confusing to him at first, but contributed to those headaches of his that we hear so much about as the letters progress. This is not to suggest that Browning was unused to subtlety and indirection—or headaches. Even Elizabeth remarked that in his poetry he seemed to be purposely difficult at times. But in love, Browning was direct.

  “I never was without good, kind, generous friends and lovers … perhaps they came at the wrong time—I never wanted them.” Browning wrote this to Elizabeth Barrett six weeks after his first letter. And two weeks later, “You think … that I ‘unconsciously exaggerate what you are to me’—now you don’t know what that is, nor can I very well tell you.” What he is allowed to tell her he does: “I never yet mistook my own feelings, one for another—there!”

  There! indeed. These letters were all written months before they met.

  Elizabeth admonished him to watch his words. She was a middle-aged spinster, an invalid. Romantic love was absolutely out of the question for her. No one would even suspect her being up to it. She had lived her whole life in the bosom of her large family. Her mother had died when Elizabeth was twenty-two. She was doted on by her two sisters and many brothers. Her youngest sister, Arabel, slept on the sofa in her room. After the tragic death of her closest brother, the center of her life became her father. Her nature was uncomplaining, and she showed no one the depths of her loneliness. She had lived her whole life out of her imagination and through books. She was so otherworldly, and her health so wretched, that she often wondered why she was not totally otherworldly. The woman we meet at the beginning of this correspondence was prepared to die. But she didn’t show the extent of this willing preparedness to Browning in her letters, though his intuition of her sadness and failing strength was keen.

  That Browning was infatuated was obvious. She was very suspicious (Robert’s word) of his ardor’s duration. Still, this new correspondence with a poet who, she believed, cut through to the heart of human nature was giving her pleasure. Her second letter to him was quite playful. “Then you are ‘masculine’ to the height—and I, as a woman, have studied some of your gestures of language & intonation wistfully, as a thing beyond me far! & the more admirable for being beyond.”

  Double messages abound throughout the correspondence. The spoken word was that as long as Browning kept his ardor in check, was careful of the words he used in addressing her, stuck to indirect allusions to his love, they could correspond, and it was possible, when spring came and the chill left the air, they might even meet. The unspoken word was that as long as they were writing poet to poet, friend to friend, they could write about anything, could open up mind, soul, and heart.

  By March 20, 1845, poet to poet, she communicated to him in the most clear and inspired prose the central paradox of her existence: “And do you also know what a disadvantage this ignorance [of life] is to my art—Why, if I live on & 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—& from the habit of selfconsciousness of selfanalysis, 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 & man, for some—

  “But all grumbling is a vile thing.”

  It took Browning much longer than usual to answer this letter. He complained of a headache. This was the poet who in his earliest work pictured Andromeda fair, naked, and shackled to the rocks, and professed faith in the necessity of her being rescued. This was the poet who posted a picture of same in his study. But if he wished to stay in correspondence with Elizabeth Barrett, he could not make his solution to her plight plain.

  Why? Victorian conventions? Far from it.

  In every other area, Elizabeth Barrett wished them to go past the formalities of etiquette between the sexes. She told him to write to her just as if she were a man; that she was an invalid gave her absolute freedom of expression. She might know the world only through books, she might look younger than her age, but she was not girlish in the ways of the world. She discounted Browning’s infatuation and reached past it to the man and the poet. At the same time, subconsciously at the beginning, but more consciously as the correspondence progressed, what was left unspoken became her escape route.

  The laws of compensation and irony being what they are in human life, it is not startling that a woman who was world-famous in her time should be a shadow in the present, and that a man who was once known only to a few hundred literati would claim posterity for his own. It has often been considered a fair call. But by ignoring the substance of Elizabeth Barrett, we deprive ourselves not only of the best of her work, but of her person, her knowledge, her character. This was an extraordinary woman in her time, and her times knew it. The inner strength, the remarkable scope of mind, the deep understanding of human nature, all of this was part of the love letters. It was Elizabeth who had to search for answers. Robert Browning knew what he wanted. He wanted Elizabeth Barrett. He wanted her at the beginning of the
correspondence. He never wavered. He wanted her at the end.

  Why shouldn’t he know what he wanted, how he felt? No household could be more unlike, his from hers, though they were both strongly Protestant and attended “Independent Dissenting Chapels,” and both had West Indian roots. Robert Browning was the center of a middle-class household, the apple of his parents’ eye, and the adored brother of one sister, Sarianna. He was encouraged in his artistic leanings by an unworldly, eccentric father who worked as a bank clerk in London but lived for his own scholarly studies and his sketches, and by a Scottish mother who seemed to be the practical heart of the household. Age differences must have been quite normal for Browning; his mother was ten years older than her husband, and his parents’ marriage worked. Elizabeth Barrett’s mother, Mary, was twenty-four when the nineteen-year-old Moulton Barrett proposed, and their marriage drained her of life.

  John Maynard has written compellingly of the young Browning. The picture he painted was of a young man allowed to go his own way, loved unconditionally by his parents, even when he dropped out of university in the first year and returned home to devote himself to study and to art. Browning called himself spoiled as a child because of the loving range and emotional freedom his parents offered. But what other kind of upbringing could make a person so sure of what he felt as an adult, so direct in his love of a woman, when that love did occur?

  The sophisticated cynics who debunk the love between Robert and Elizabeth do it at the expense of two facts: the poets’ words, and their lifelong actions. Cynics can spare themselves the effort. There would be shadow enough in the poets’ situation beyond the clear light of their love.

  At the age of thirty-three, Browning was a fashionable young man in his yellow kid gloves, publishing his early work to the praise of the cognoscenti. He was favored by family and by friends and lovers, yet he had just found something more, something variegated and passionate.

  One chilly London day in early spring 1845, he was standing at the corner of Wimpole Street, a good-looking fellow of medium height, five foot eight, dark complexion, brown hair, gray eyes. He seemed to be brooding, or else he was deep in thought. Shelley and Byron were long gone, an age was ending, yet the young Browning was at his most Romantic. What should he do? Well, he did not allow himself to gaze up at Elizabeth Barrett’s window. He was too manly for that. He would wait until she gave him permission—not only to see her, when this damned chill was gone, but even to be on her street. He had no idea that Elizabeth Barrett, editing a collection of the new poets of the age along with his friend Henry Fothergill Chorley, had his picture as well as that of Alfred Tennyson on her bedroom wall. That knowledge might have cheered him and allowed him to walk down the block.