Dared and Done Read online

  He turned the corner at Wimpole Street instead, going to see another woman friend, and later writing to Miss Barrett about it, penning this scene in the letter. His insecurities, the pounding of his heart, the headaches, the impatience—they all just turned the corner. He was as uncomplicated in his motivation as he would ever be again, as he waited to meet the poet.

  The writing portfolio (1840s) on which Robert Browning wrote his letters to Elizabeth Barrett

  DEATH OR LOVE

  ELIZABETH BARRETT was admired not only by the literati, including Robert Browning, whom she would marry; she was also idolized by fans. English fans sent her rosebushes; an American admirer wrote a letter to her addressed “Elizabeth Barrett, Poetess, London,” and the letter was delivered. Right before she left England she was well enough to visit her old friend the blind Greek scholar Hugh Stewart Boyd. He informed her that several well-born young ladies had asked to be present, dressed as servants, just for the chance to see her as they ushered her in. Some of them swore that, if she would allow, they’d go into service for her.

  Yet today, to the world at large, only one line of poetry points its hoary finger back in time to her: “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways”—the opening line of the penultimate sonnet from Sonnets from the Portuguese. This slim volume of forty-four love sonnets has had a life of its own. Printed and reprinted—in small format, large format, special editions brought out near the cash registers of bookshops before Valentine’s Day. These sonnets have been rendered impotent through popularity, demonstrating that when we take something for granted, we can easily cease knowing it at all. The Sonnets from the Portuguese are not an upscale Hallmark card. They are the deepest and at times the darkest thoughts of a woman of genius, in grave health, who finds in middle life not the death she waits for but the love she never expected.

  The earliest manuscript of the sequence is at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York. Each poem is on a single sheet of stationery, written in brown ink in the poet’s slender hand. Sonnet I had a title in its manuscript draft, “Death or Love.” Surprised, I pointed it out to an acquaintance reading next to me at the Morgan. “Look at this.”

  “Oh, yes,” was the response. “Duet of Love.”

  An understandable assumption at first glance. For the starkness of the title and the morbidity it reveals clash with the idealized version of an “old-fashioned” Victorian love affair. Yet “Death or Love” succinctly labeled not only the first sonnet of the sequence but the real choice confronting Elizabeth Barrett in London in 1845–46.

  When Robert Browning was finally admitted to the sick room of Miss Barrett in 1845, he did not find his picture. Feeling that inappropriate, she had taken it off the wall of her bed-sitting room. She lived her life in that room, protected from the London weather both by fireplace and by complete enclosure. She loved flowers and greenery, but had trouble keeping plants alive in her dark room. The ivy that her cousin John Kenyon had given her a few years back made an attempt to flourish, growing over her window, making patterns in front of the chimney tops beyond it, and giving the cloistered interior a greenish glow. Browning found an invalid whose body could have been the fine lines of her handwriting, whose black hair and soulful brown eyes shone out.

  Elizabeth Barrett was always conscious of being dark-complexioned, so one imagines that even in illness she wasn’t as pale as she was thin. Shielded from the public’s eye, writing inspired poetry, always on the verge of death, her image was mysterious, romantic, otherworldly, aloof. Her public had to see her in their imagination; she didn’t publish her picture in her books. She treated another correspondent, the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, to a verbal picture: “I am ‘little & black’ like Sappho, en attendant the immortality—five feet one high … eyes of various colours as the sun shines … & set down by myself (according to my ‘private view’ in the glass) as dark-green-brown—grounded with brown, & green otherwise; what is called ‘invisible green’ in invisible garden-fences. I should be particular to you who are a colourist. Not much nose of any kind; certes no superfluity of nose; but to make up for it, a mouth suitable to a larger personality—oh, and a very very little voice.” She compared it to Cordelia’s voice, which her father, King Lear, described as “Gentle, and low; an excellent thing in a woman.” Then short, quick brush strokes to complete her self-portrait: “Dark hair and complexion. Small face & sundries.”

  Browning saw a woman who looked so ill, so corporally unsubstantial on her couch, that he assumed she suffered from an incurable spinal disease and could never walk or lead a normal life. He loved her in spite of this terrible affliction and the limits it placed on physical fulfillment. Finding his prognosis was not the case was so overwhelming to him as a lover that, for months after, he wondered if he could control his emotions if he walked in on one of his visits and found her standing.

  “DEATH OR LOVE.” Manuscript of Sonnet I of EBB’s Sonnets from the Portuguese. Its original title reflected the choice EBB faced when RB entered her life in the winter and spring of 1845–46.

  What exactly was wrong with Elizabeth Barrett? She had been an extremely lively, precocious child, a tomboy who liked the outdoors, frogs and all. And a traveler—before her illness she’d been to Paris with her parents. Yet when she was fourteen, she and her two younger sisters, Henrietta and Arabel, came down with a similar ailment. Her sisters recovered; Elizabeth never fully did. Living in the elaborate Turkish-inspired mansion that her father had designed for himself on his country estate of almost five hundred acres at Hope End, near the Malvern Hills, she was privy to the best of medical care. By the time she was fifteen her illness was described from doctor to doctor. It had begun as a pain in the head, a pain which, after several weeks, traveled to her right side around the ribs. “The pain commences here, is carried to the corresponding region of the back, up the side to the point of the right shoulder, and down the arm. The suffering is agony.… The attack seems gradually to approach its acme, and then suddenly ceases.” There were generally three attacks during the day and none at night. Usually she was conscious, but at the end of the attack, there was confusion in her mind. She woke at night in fright and described in her own words that it was as if there were a cord tied around her stomach “which seems to break.” She was unable to rest on her right side. Her tongue was clean and her stomach and bowels were kept clean with physic and seemed little affected. Her physician was surprised by her love of spicy food. Since all three sisters had had this illness, it may have begun by eating “something deleterious.” “Opium at one time relieved the spasms, but it has ceased to have that effect.”

  The doctor found nothing wrong with his patient gynecologically, nor did he see any evidence of disease of the spine. What it appeared that Elizabeth Barrett had was the worst illness one could have then or now—an illness not typical enough to be diagnosed. Miss Barrett probably suffered from a “derangement in some highly important organ.” The doctor had seen a similar case, a woman who was helped after her vertebral column was treated. Though the doctor stressed that Miss Barrett showed no sign of spinal illness, she would be treated for disease of the spine.

  MARY MOULTON BARRETT (1781–1828). A self-portrait of EBB’s mother, who bore twelve children and was subservient to Moulton Barrett’s thunderous will. When she died, EBB, the oldest, was twenty-one; Octavius, the youngest, was four and a half.

  Her health continued to be precarious. Her lungs were weak. She could hemorrhage. “Congestion,” it has been called. But if it were tuberculosis, that would have been diagnosable.

  It may have been abscesses on the lungs. Her lifelong symptoms, attacks of racking coughs, pain, struggle for breath, phlegm, and complete loss of appetite, are similar to those of bronchiectasis, now treatable with antibiotics. Though both doctors and patient could see an emotional component to her physical decline, it was too early for the standard diagnosis offered in a later century for illnesses with atypical symptoms.

  SEPTIMUS (1822–
70) AND OCTAVIUS (1824–1910) MOULTON BARRETT. This watercolor by their mother, Mary, was done in 1825, three years before her death, when her next-to-youngest, Sette, was three and her youngest, Occy, was a year old. The grounds are those of the Moulton Barrett estate at Hope End.

  No doubt her deep sensibility, startling brilliance, and uncanny intuitiveness alerted her too deeply to the tears of things in her household. She spoke of never having been happy after childhood; she spoke of unspecified trials and sufferings that marked her life before Browning entered it. The specific event that turned her into a recluse she would find difficult to allude to throughout her entire life. It was the power of love that allowed her to broach the subject in a letter to Browning.

  She had been born on March 6, 1806, and on June 26, 1807, less than sixteen months later, her brother Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett was born—the first son for whom the drums beat in Jamaica. He would become her beloved “Bro,” the sibling and the human being closest to her in affection, spirit, and temperament. She loved him more than anyone in the world, though her two sisters, Henrietta and Arabel, were close to her and so was George, the barrister, who would, after her marriage, come back most directly into her life. “Stormie” (Charles John), the stutterer, carried her up and down the stairs at Wimpole Street, and Alfred and Henry bungled the ransoming of her dog, Flush, while Sette helped get him back. These young brothers, along with the youngest, Occy, would play less of a role—not in her love but in her life.

  GEORGE GOODIN (1816–95), ARABEL (1813–68), SAMUEL (1812–40), AND CHARLES JOHN “STORMIE” (1814–1905) MOULTON BARRETT, in a painting by William Artaud.

  Nicknames were rampant among the Barretts, who tended to keep from generation to generation the same Christian names. No one who knew of the poet ever called her Elizabeth. Outside her circle she was Miss Barrett; inside it she was known as “Ba.” Ba and Bro were as close as two siblings could be.

  In a revealing passage about her mother, the month before she married Browning, she wrote, “Scarcely was I woman when I lost my mother—dearest as she was & very tender … but of a nature harrowed up into some furrows by the pressure of circumstances: for we lost more in Her than She lost in life, my dear dearest mother. A sweet, gentle nature, which the thunder a little turned from its sweetness—as when it turns milk—One of those women who never can resist,—but, in submitting and bowing on themselves, make a mark, a plait, within, . . a sign of suffering.”

  The thunder that soured the milk was the temper of Moulton Barrett. The mother, like the poet herself and all her siblings, quaked before it. Certainly Moulton Barrett was a concerned father and an upright man of high if narrow values, but as every contemporary account verifies, he was also a domestic tyrant. Since he believed he had a God-given right to be obeyed, it would seem he did not have to temper his cruelty (“unkindness” is Elizabeth’s word); any disobedience against him called down the wrath of God—and after the thunder subsided, the calm of disdain. Sometimes, however, she or he who disobeyed was punished so severely by the thunder of the Father in Heaven that the father on earth could show compassion. So it was at the time of Elizabeth Barrett’s greatest tragedy, a tragedy that stemmed from the turmoil inside the Barrett household.

  THE BARRETTS AT WIMPOLE STREET, 1843. Watercolors by Alfred “Daisy” Moulton Barrett (1820–1904) of his siblings Henrietta (1809–60), Arabel, Henry (1818–96), Septimus, Octavius, and the last-known image of his father, Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett (1785–1857), which was done in 1847.

  After his wife died, Moulton Barrett found himself the father of both young and adult children. At the same time, his loss of a long, bitter lawsuit limited his great wealth and sent him from his castle at Hope End into the city of London. All of his children would live under his roof there except on the occasions when his sons went away to university or traveled, mainly to Jamaica to aid his brother Samuel, the one sent there after the lawsuit to manage the problemsome estates.

  The father’s system of denying marriage did not seem to affect Elizabeth as much as her siblings. She could echo Robert Browning’s words to her: “Do you suppose I ever dreamed of marrying?—what would it mean for me.” Conventional Victorian marriage, with its patriarchal rights, domestic squabbles, and materialistic concerns, was against her nature. She did have her admirers all through her life—apparently to correspond with her by letter or in person was to fall in love. But she seemed to have been a shrewd judge of men, wary of their words, attentive to their actions.

  As the oldest child, and as a child of incredibly precocious talents in languages, philosophy, and the writing of poetry, she had early seen the expense of her mother’s marriage and her father’s iron rule. Why would she even think of trading the known burdens she carried as a daughter for the unknown burdens of being a stranger’s wife? Her poor health helped her avoid the main area of her father’s strict prohibition. And since she alone of her siblings had an independent income from her grandmother’s and her uncle’s estates, she could see her role as dutiful daughter as an act of free will, not as an act of financial necessity.

  She was a person of high moral caliber, and she was conscious of being free under a slack yoke. Since she believed the yoke was wrong, she opposed it on behalf of others. In her poetry she spoke out eloquently against all forms of political tyranny, all systems of slavery. Within the bosom of her family, she helped her siblings snatch their enjoyment secretly, away from their father’s eyes. Even a strawberry pick at the kindly invitation of the older writer of the English countryside Mary Russell Mitford was not told to the father. Of course, Elizabeth was too ill to go. But she supported her siblings’ secret fun.

  “I have loved him better than the rest of his children,” she wrote to Robert. “I have heard the fountain within the rock, & my heart has struggled in towards him through the stones of the rock.” She knew what was excellent in him and had loved and been proud of his “high qualities.” She pointed particularly to “the courage & fortitude” she had witnessed when he lost the lawsuit and with it Hope End. She had loved him “as my only parent left, & for himself dearly, notwithstanding that hardness & the miserable ‘system’ which made him appear harder still.”

  Still, after his financial misfortunes came “trials of love,” and she was repulsed often and “made to suffer in the suffering of those by my side . . depressed by petty daily sadnesses & terrors.” She, too, was depressed to a point that “my friends used to say ‘You look broken-spirited’—& it was true. In the midst, came my illness,—and when I was ill he grew gentler & let me draw nearer than ever I had done.” During these years after her mother’s death, Bro had the deepest claim on her heart. In 1839, when Ba was thirty-three and Bro thirty-one, the father wanted to send Bro back to Jamaica on another business trip. There was a lot of trouble and confusion on the estates in the aftermath of emancipation. Bro felt the horror of the system and way of life in Jamaica, as did his sister, and did not want to go. He may have wanted to get married. Elizabeth wanted to help him out, perhaps financially. Something of that nature caused “a storm of emotion & sympathy on my part, which drove clearly against” their father.

  This storm further undermined her health, and she was sent to her aunt’s by the sea in Torquay in 1840. Dr. William Frederick Chambers had said she could not survive a London winter. Bro was sent along to take Elizabeth and her sister and then to return. But when the time came for him to leave, Elizabeth could not “master my spirits or drive back my tears—& my aunt kissed them away instead of reproving me as she should have done; & said that she would take care that I should not be grieved . . she! . . and so she sate down & wrote a letter to Papa to tell him that he would. ‘break my heart’ if he persisted in calling away my brother—As if hearts were broken so!”

  Her father answered in words “burnt into me, as with fire.” He didn’t exactly consent, he “did not refuse to suspend his purpose,” but at the same time “he considered it to be very wrong in me to exact such a
thing.” Month after month passed and she was sometimes better and sometimes worse, and the doctors said they could not answer for her life if she were agitated, so there was no more talk of Bro’s leaving. “And once he held my hand, how I remember! & said that he ‘loved me better than them all & that he would not leave me—till I was well,’ he said! how I remember that! And ten days from that day the boat left the shore which never returned; never—& he had left me! gone! For three days we waited—& I hoped while I could—oh—that awful agony of three days! And the sun shone as it shines to-day, & there was no more wind than now; and the sea under the windows was like this paper for smoothness—& my sisters drew the curtains back that I might see for myself how smooth the sea was, & how it could hurt nobody—& other boats came back one by one.”

  Bro’s body was not washed ashore for a month, and was identified in part by his long hair. He and two friends, all first-rate sailors, were inexplicably lost on a downed boat on a calm and windless sea.