1. Elisabeth Barret Browning
Elizabeth Barrett Browning was one of the most
prominent poets of the Victorian era. Her poetry
was widely popular in both England and the
United States during her lifetime.
2. Her life..
•
Born in 1806 at Coxhoe Hall, Durham, England, Elizabeth Barrett, was an English poet of the
Romantic Movement. Among all women poets of the English-speaking world in the nineteenth
century, none was held in higher critical esteem or was more admired for the independence
and courage of her views than Elizabeth Barrett Browning. During the years of her marriage to
Robert Browning, her literary reputation far surpassed that of her poet-husband; when visitors
came to their home in Florence, she was invariably the greater attraction. Both in England and
in the United States she had a wide following among cultured readers. An example of the reach
of her fame may be seen in the influence she had upon the recluse poet who lived in the rural
college town of Amherst, Massachusetts. A framed portrait of Mrs. Browning hung in the
bedroom of Emily Dickinson, whose life had been transfigured by the poetry of "that Foreign
Lady." From the time when she had first become acquainted with Mrs. Browning's writings,
Dickinson had ecstatically admired her as a poet and had virtually idolized her as a woman who
had achieved such a rich fulfillment in her life. When Samuel Bowles, a close friend of the
Dickinson family and respected editor of the Springfield Republican, went to Europe for the first
time, he took with him two books: the Bible and Mrs. Browning's Aurora Leigh (1857). So highly
regarded had she become by 1850, the year of Wordsworth's death, that she was prominently
mentioned as a possible successor to the poet laureateship. Her humane and liberal point of
view manifests itself in her poems aimed at redressing many forms of social injustice, such as
the slave trade in America, the labor of children in the mines and the mills of England, the
oppression of the Italian people by the Austrians, and the restrictions forced upon women in
nineteenth-century society.
3. •
As a child and a young woman Elizabeth Barrett was extremely fortunate in the
circumstances of her family background and environment. Her father, whose
wealth was derived from extensive sugar plantations in Jamaica, was the
proprietor of "Hope End," an estate of almost 500 acres in Herefordshire, between
the market town of Ledbury and the Malvern Hills. In this peaceful setting, with its
farmers' cottages, gardens, woodlands, ponds, carriage roads, and mansion
"adapted for the accommodation of a nobleman or family of the first distinction,"
Elizabeth-known by the nickname "Ba"-at first lived the kind of life that might be
expected for the daughter of a wealthy country squire. She rode her pony in the
lanes around the Barrett estate, went with her brothers and sisters for walks and
picnics in the countryside, visited other county families to drink tea, accepted visits
in return, and participated with her brothers and sisters in homemade theatrical
productions. But, unlike her two sisters and eight brothers, she immersed herself
in the world of books as often as she could get away from the social rituals of her
family. "Books and dreams were what I lived in and domestic life only seemed to
buzz gently around, like bees about the grass," she said many years later. Having
begun to compose verses at the age of four, two years later she received from her
father for "some lines on virtue penned with great care" a ten-shilling note
enclosed in a letter addressed to "the Poet-Laureate of Hope End."
4. •
Before Barrett was ten years old, she had read the histories of England, Greece, and Rome;
several of Shakespeare's plays, including Othello and The Tempest; portions of Pope's
Homeric translations; and passages from Paradise Lost. At eleven, she says in an
autobiographical sketch written when she was fourteen, she "felt the most ardent desire to
understand the learned languages." Except for some instruction in Greek and Latin from a
tutor who lived with the Barrett family for two or three years to help her brother Edward
("Bro") prepare for entrance to Charterhouse, Barrett was, as Robert Browning later
asserted, "self-taught in almost every respect." Within the next few years she went through
the works of the principal Greek and Latin authors, the Greek Christian fathers, several plays
by Racine and Molière, and a portion of Dante's Inferno-all in the original languages. Also
around this time she learned enough Hebrew to read the Old Testament from beginning to
end. Her enthusiasm for the works of Tom Paine, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Mary
Wollstonecraft presaged the concern for human rights that she was later to express in her
poems and letters. At the age of eleven or twelve she composed a verse "epic" in four books
of rhyming couplets, The Battle of Marathon, which was privately printed at Mr. Barrett's
expense in 1820. She later spoke of this product of her childhood as " Pope's Homer done
over again, or rather undone." Most of the fifty copies that were printed probably went to
the Barretts' home and remained there. It is now the rarest of her works, with only a handful
of copies known to exist.
5. •
At the age of twenty Barrett offered to the
public, with no indication of authorship, a
slender volume entitled An Essay on Mind,
with Other Poems (1826). Long afterwards
in a letter to an American critic she called
the book "a girl's exercise, nothing more nor
less!—not at all known to the public."The
poem for which the volume was named was
a pretentious and frigid effort to survey in
some eighty-eight pages the history of
science, philosophy, and poetry, from
ancient Greece to the present. The other
fourteen poems were occasional pieces or
verses of a personal nature which did not
yet display the author's authentic voice. Of
the two journals which noticed the volume,
one objected to its obscurity of language
and its "barren themes," and the other
advised the poet to come down from the
heights to look more closely at nature.
6. • Shortly after the publication of this volume Barrett entered into one of the
most important friendships of her life. Hugh Stuart Boyd, a totally blind,
middle-aged dilettante scholar with private means, had published at his
own expense several volumes of translations from the Greek patristic
writings. Since the author of the "Essay on Mind" lived not far from him,
he was eager to become acquainted with a poet of such extraordinary
erudition. From his home in Malvern Wells he sent her copies of his works
and invited her to pay him a visit. Starved as she was for intellectual
companionship, she eagerly began to correspond with him and before
long was making frequent visits to Ruby Cottage, where he lived with his
wife and daughter. It was entirely owing to Boyd's influence that Barrett's
enthusiasm for Greek studies was rekindled. During this period she read
an astonishing amount of classical Greek literature-Homer, Pindar, the
tragedians, Aristophanes, and passages from Plato, Aristotle, Isocrates,
and Xenophon-as well as the Greek Christian Fathers Boyd had translated.
7. In 1832 the peaceful, secure lives of the Barretts in their Herefordshire retreat came to a
distressing close. For a number of years the Jamaican plantations of the Barrett family had
been mismanaged and Mr. Barrett had suffered serious financial losses. With the prospect of
a greatly reduced income he could no longer afford to maintain the Hope End estate and
suffered the embarrassment of its having to be sold at a public auction to satisfy creditors.
The eleven children and their father (Mrs. Barrett had died in 1828) went to live temporarily
in Sidmouth, on the southern coast of Devonshire. The reason for the choice of this town in
the south of England may have been Mr. Barrett's concern for Elizabeth's health. At the age
of fifteen she had injured her spine when she was attempting to saddle her pony. Seven
years later the breaking of a blood vessel in the chest left her with a weakened constitution
and a chronic cough. During the period of the Barretts' stay in Sidmouth, Boyd lived for a
year and a half within a few minutes' walk from their home. To the detriment of her own
poetic career she went to him daily and helped him to see through the press a bizarre
volume on his favorite subject, Greek Christian Fathers. By the time she left Sidmouth
Browning's feelings toward Boyd had changed: she now saw him as limited, naive, and even
pathetic. The one volume that she produced while at Sidmouth was Prometheus Bound,
Translated from the Greek of Aeschylus; and Miscellaneous Poems, published anonymously
in 1833. Twelve years later in a letter to Boyd she called the translation "that frigid, rigid
exercise," and after her marriage she made amends by writing a vastly improved version. The
"miscellaneous poems" are all immature in content and expression and give little promise of
their author's future distinction.
8. •
After living for three years in several rented houses in the coastal town, the Barretts moved in
1835 to London, which was to remain their permanent place of residence. At first Elizabeth
missed the fresh sea breezes and the sound of the waves, and disliked her new setting
because of the ever-present soot and fog and the long, narrow streets lined with attached
stone or brick houses which all looked alike. But before long she was content to be living in a
great metropolis, the center of the nation's literary and artistic activities. Barrett made her
name known in literary circles with The Seraphim and Other Poems (1838). Except for the
privately printed Battle of Marathonthis was the first work with her name on the title page.
She said that the volume, despite some shortcomings, was "the first utterance of my own
individuality." The many reviews that appeared both in England and America almost all hailed
her as a young poet of extraordinary ability and still greater promise. The long poetic drama
of seventy-eight pages for which the volume was named presents the conversation of two
angels in the heavens retelling portions of the Old and New Testaments, and commenting on
the Crucifixion then taking place. Although most of the critics considered the poem too
mystical and too high-flown to be successful, they generally praised the shorter poems, most
of which now seem sentimental and trite. A poem that soon became a great favorite with
both professional critics and the general public was "Isobel's Child," with its depiction of the
death of a three-month-old baby who has been lying all night in the mother's arms. The wellknown critic John Wilson ("Christopher North") declared that there was beauty in all the
poems and that some were "altogether beautiful."
9. •
When she returned to the family home at 50 Wimpole Street after the three terrible years at
Torquay, she felt that she had left her youth behind and that the future held little more than
permanent invalidism and confinement to her bedroom. For the following five years she
remained mostly in her room, which she decorated with busts of Homer and Chaucer and
later with engravings of Browning (whom she had not yet met), Tennyson, Carlyle,Harriet
Martineau. and Wordsworth. Yet despite her frail health she was more fortunate in her
circumstances than most women writers of her time. Thanks to inheritances from her
grandmother and her uncle, she was the only one of the brothers and sisters who was
independently wealthy. As the eldest daughter in a family without a mother, she normally
would have been expected to spend much of her time supervising the domestic servants, but
her weakness prevented her from leaving her room. Thus the members of her family came to
visit with her and to bring her everything she desired. Relieved of all household burdens and
financial cares, she was free to devote herself to reading English and French fiction and
memoirs and to writing letters, essays, and poetry. Since the prospect of meeting strangers
made her nervous, only two visitors besides her family had the privilege of seeing her in her
room: John Kenyon, a minor poet and friend of many English poets, and the well-known
writer Mary Russell Mitford. During her last year or two at Wimpole Street she also received
the Reverend George B. Hunter, whom she had come to know during her years at Sidmouth,
and the art critic Anna Jameson.
10. •
Protected from the outside world and surrounded by a loving family, Barrett
resumed her literary career, which had been partially interrupted during her
serious illness at Torquay. In addition to producing a continuous flow of poems for
publication in both English and American journals, she wrote a series of articles on
the Greek Christian poets and another series on the English poets, the latter
originally begun as a critique of a recently published anthology of English verse.
Also, in collaboration with the playwright Richard Hengist Horne, she made many
anonymous contributions to a book of critical essays on eminent literary figures
edited by him and entitled A New Spirit of the Age (1844). Within three years after
her return to Wimpole Street she had many new poems in manuscript and others
already published in journals, and she believed that the time was ripe for their
appearance in book form—the first since The Seraphim and Other Poems of 1838.
The critical reception of her Poems, published in two volumes in 1844, was such
that the author was no longer merely a promising young poet but had suddenly
become an international celebrity. On both sides of the Atlantic the leading
journals came out with substantial reviews, and almost all found much to praise;
Elizabeth Barrett was now acclaimed as one of England's great living poets. The
poem which found least favor with the critics was "A Drama of Exile." For 119
pages the drama recounts the conversations and events of the first day's exile
from Eden, as various spirits alternately rebuke and console the fallen pair. In the
judgment of most reviewers the drama was lacking in coherence, the language
was obscure, and the characters were unreal.
11. •
None of the shorter poems caught the public fancy more than "Lady Geraldine's
Courtship: A Romance of the Age." A young poet with slender financial resources
falls in love with the daughter of an earl; but since her life is filled with luxuries, he
has little hope that his love will be returned. Despite the social barriers, however,
the romantic conclusion has the girl responding to her suitor's ardor. Another
poem much admired by sentimental readers was "Bertha in the Lane." The
heroine, though apparently in good health, dies suddenly after learning that her
lover has jilted her in favor of her younger sister. The most influential poem in the
volumes, and one of the best-known of all her works, was "The Cry of the
Children," which had first appeared in Blackwood's a year earlier. Having read the
reports from the parliamentary commissioners of the terrible conditions of
children's employment in mines, trades, and manufactures, she tells of the
hopeless lives of the boys and girls who are the victims of capitalist exploitation.
Even though Barrett was a bookish, sheltered, uppermiddle-class unmarried
woman far removed from the scenes she was describing, she gives evidence here
of her passionate concern for human rights. The critics reviewing Poems praised
her for her intellectual power, originality, and boldness of thought; but most
agreed that her weakness lay in her frequent vagueness of concept and obscurity
of expression.
12. • The two volumes found their way into the home of Robert Browning.
Upon seeing a handsome tribute paid to him by name in "Lady Geraldine's
Courtship," Browning in January 1845 wrote a letter which began, "I love
your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett." When Browning wrote
that first of the many letters that were to be exchanged between the two
poets, Barrett had already won an admiring public and was maintaining an
extensive correspondence with writers and artists in England and the
United States. Browning, on the other hand, was bitterly discouraged
because his poetical career was not prospering and his productions on the
London stage had proved to be hopeless failures. Six years younger than
Barrett, he had abundant energy and good health, dressed as a young man
of fashion, and enjoyed going to dinners and receptions where he
conversed with many of the leading figures of the literary world. For
almost all of his life he had been living at home with his parents and his
sister—all three of whom adored him—and was financially dependent
upon his father, since none of his volumes of verse had repaid the
expenses of publication.
13. •
The courtship progressed despite the objections of Mr. Barrett, who wished his children to
remain totally dependent on him. During the period of the exchange of letters and of
Browning's visits to her room, she was composing the poems later to be named "Sonnets
from the Portuguese." Most of the world's great love poetry has been produced by men;
what is new about the sonnets is that the coming of love into the writer's life is described
from the point of view of the woman. Among the finest love poems ever written by a
woman, they are her most enduring poetic achievement. A chronic invalid, worn down by a
succession of griefs, robbed of the bright-hued cheeks and resilience of youth, living without
hope that a new life might someday be hers outside of her virtual prison, she expresses in
the sonnets her sense of wonder that her life has been so transfigured. Filled with gratitude
for her suitor's offer of love, she at first tells him that they must remain no more than friends
because of the disparities in health and age. Marriage, she says, would place a severe burden
upon him, for the care of an invalid wife six years older than he would necessarily take him
away from the varied social life he has been enjoying. Will love that has come so quickly not
fade just as quickly? Is her lover's suit based merely on pity? If she will promise to give up her
home and the day-to-day associations with father, brothers, sisters, and friends, will he in
turn be everything to her so that she will never miss the life she leaves behind? From the
earnest look of her lover's eyes she finds the answers to these and other questions, so that
her doubts and hesitations are dispelled. With the full assurance of the depth of his feelings
for her, she responds to his love in the most inspired sonnet of the cycle, "How do I love
thee? Let me count the ways."
14. •
The clandestine marriage ceremony took place on 12 September 1846 at St. Marylebone
Parish Church, which was not far from the Barretts' house. Almost immediately the couple
left for Italy, where they hoped the warmer climate might help Elizabeth to regain some of
her strength. After one winter they moved to Florence, which was to remain their home until
Elizabeth's death. Despite the responsibilities of marriage and motherhood—their only child,
Robert Wiedemann Barrett Browning, called "Pen," was born in 1849-Mrs. Browning had no
intention of discontinuing her literary career. Her first task was to revise her volumes of 1838
and 1844 for publication in a new edition. For the three years following her marriage Mrs.
Browning had kept the forty-four sonnets in a notebook; she did not show them to her
husband until the summer of 1849. He was so impressed with their beauty that he insisted
on their appearing in her forthcoming new edition of Poems (1850). In order to make it
appear that the poems had no biographical significance, the Brownings selected the
ambiguous title "Sonnets from the Portuguese," as if they were translations. "Catarina to
Camoens," the poem immediately preceding the sonnets in the second volume of Poems tells
of the love of Catarina for the Portuguese poet Camoens. Since first reading "Catarina to
Camoens" in Elizabeth's Poems of 1844, Browning had associated Elizabeth with the
Portuguese Catarina. Most of the reviews of the Poemsof 1850 paid little attention to the
sonnets, but a writer in Fraser's magazine immediately appreciated their distinctive quality:
"From the Portuguese they may be: but their life and earnestness must prove Mrs. Browning
either to be the most perfect of all known translators, or to have quickened with her own
spirit the framework of another's thought, and then modestly declined the honour which
was really her own."The sonnets gradually gained critical acceptance and have become the
most beloved of all Mrs. Browning's works.
15. •
Mrs. Browning had developed a passionate interest in Italian politics; during her
first year in Italy she had written "A Meditation in Tuscany" and sent it to
Blackwood's. The editor had declined it and returned the manuscript to her, and it
became the first part of Casa Guidi Windows (1851). The poem deals with political
events as seen by the poet from the windows of Casa Guidi, the great stone palace
in Florence where the Brownings had an apartment. In 1846 the newly elected
Pope Pius IX had granted amnesty to prisoners who had fought for Italian liberty,
initiated a program looking forward to a more democratic form of government for
the Papal State, and carried out a number of other reforms so that it looked as
though he were heading toward the leadership of a league for a free Italy.
Progressive measures had also been instituted in Tuscany by Grand Duke Leopold
II, who arranged for a representative form of government and allowed the people
to have a free press and to form their own civic guard. The first half of Casa Guidi
Windows had been written when Mrs. Browning was filled with enthusiasm and
was hopeful that the newly awakened liberal movements were moving toward the
unification and freedom of the Italian states.
16. •
In the second half of the poem she voices her disillusionment and her bitter
disappointment that liberalism had been crushed almost everywhere in Italy. Pope
Pius had fled in disguise from the Vatican in the face of agitation for a republican
government and had taken refuge at Gaeta under the protection of the king of
Naples. Leopold, whom Mrs. Browning had at first admired, had proved to be a
coward; and, rather than agree to the formation of a constituent assembly of the
Italian states in Rome, he had left his Florentine palace and joined the exiled pope
in Gaeta. Several months later the Austrian troops had occupied Florence, and
Leopold had returned under their protection. In her poem Mrs. Browning
expresses her disappointment with the pope, the grand duke, the English
government for its failure to intervene on the side of the Italian patriots, and the
Florentines themselves because they had been unwilling to make the necessary
sacrifices. By the middle of 1849 the liberal impulses had been crushed; except for
Piedmont all the Italian states were under the domination of Austria and the
papacy. For the next ten years there were no more uprisings or wars, and in the
absence of stirring political events Mrs. Browning began the composition of a
completely different kind of poem from anything she had written up to then.
17. •
As early as 1845 she had written to Browning that it was her intention to
write a sort of novel-poem "running into the midst of our conventions, &
rushing into drawing-rooms & the like 'where angels fear to tread'; & so,
meeting face to face & without mask the Humanity of the age, & speaking
the truth as I conceive of it, out plainly." For several years events in her
own life and in the world about her distracted her from her purpose, so
that the first mention of her new work appears in a letter written in 1853
to her friend Anna Jameson. Her poem would fill a volume when it was
finished, she said; it was the romance she had been "hankering after so
long, written in blank verse, in the autobiographical form." Named after
the heroine of the poem, Aurora Leigh was published in 1857. In the
dedication to her lifelong friend and benefactor John Kenyon she wrote
that it was "the most mature of my works, and the one into which my
highest convictions upon Life and Art have entered." In a narrative of
some 11,000 lines the heroine tells of her birth in Italy, her early years in
rural England, her successful literary career in London and later in
Florence, and at the end her marriage to her one true love.
18. • Orphaned at an early age and brought up by an aunt in the western
county of Shropshire, the youthful Aurora finds herself in a cultural desert,
with no one to share her enthusiasm for literature. Aurora's description of
the kind of education imposed upon her by her conventional aunt
illustrates the restricted, anti-intellectual attitudes of the English middle
classes toward the upbringing of their daughters. Aurora memorizes the
Collects of the Anglican Church, takes lessons in music and dancing, is
given some superficial instruction in French, German, history, and
geography, and is taught sewing and embroidery. Not only were young
women discouraged from learning Greek and Latin and from reading
"controversial" books, but they were denied a university education. Aurora
has to seek her education at home, whereas her cousin Romney Leigh is
sent to a university. Rebelling against her aunt's narrow regimen, Aurora
finds her true life in the world of books. Discovering her father's private
library hidden away in the attic, she reads widely in Greek and Latin
literature and English poetry and begins to compose verses of her own.
19. • At the age of twenty she rejects a proposal of marriage from Romney
Leigh, who asks her to be his wife for the sole reason that he needs her to
help him in his philanthropic activities. Women, he tells her, are lacking in
the higher imaginative qualities that would enable them to be great
writers or artists. Aurora moves away from the rural community which has
so stifled her and makes her home in London, where she will be
independent and strive for literary success. By dint of steady application
she wins within six or seven years a place for herself in the London literary
world. To help support herself she writes articles for encyclopedias and
journals, but she finds her chief satisfaction in the publication of her
volumes of poetry. The heroine of this novel-poem serves as Mrs.
Browning's mouthpiece when she declares that the most fitting subjects
for poetry are to be found in contemporary settings and that a poet should
not reject his own times to seek inspiration from earlier civilizations.
Aurora, though still in her middle twenties, has already produced books of
poetry which are reaching a wide and admiring public.
20. • In contrast to Aurora, who has lived a serene and rather sheltered
life, the main figure of the subplot is a pathetic victim of the abuses
of society. Marian Erle is the only child of an ignorant and abusive
migrant farm worker and a wife cowed into submission by his
drunken rages. The girl runs away from her parents in fear of their
violence, is rescued from destitution by Romney Leigh, and even
receives from him an offer of marriage. As a radical socialist he thus
proposes to put into practice his utopian ideal of the destruction of
the barriers that separate the rich from the poor and the educated
from the ignorant. The marriage, however, does not take place, for
Marian is treacherously spirited away from England by a woman
who believes herself to be in love with Romney. Marian is taken to a
house of ill fame in Paris, where she is drugged and sexually
assaulted. As a result of this act of violence she becomes pregnant
and after much ill-treatment gives birth to a son.
21. • After nine years in London Aurora suddenly gives up her apartment and
establishes a new home for herself in a villa in Florence. On the way she
stops in Paris, where she encounters Marian and hears her story; she takes
Marian and the baby to Florence with her. A few months after her arrival
Aurora is asked once again by Romney to be his wife. This time, however,
he is blind and much humbled by his misfortunes. Leigh Hall, which he had
converted into a utopian community, had been set on fire and destroyed
by the very people whom he had been aiding. At the time of the fire he
had been struck on the forehead and blinded by a falling beam. Romney
now sadly admits that doctrinaire socialism is a failure, for the people will
rebel against any restrictions and reforms imposed upon them. Aurora
says that she too has been wrong in her proud independence and her
belief that her life could be complete without the companionship of a
loved one. They pledge themselves to each other and look forward to a
life of shared responsibilities. In the meanwhile Marian has told them that
she will never marry and that when her child no longer needs her care she
will devote herself to helping the "outcast orphans of the world."
22. •
In this long narrative poem Mrs. Browning has dealt with some of the major social problems
of her age. In Victorian England an educated woman with unusual talents had almost no
opportunity to make use of her skills in a world that was dominated by men. Nevertheless, as
the poem shows in the example of its heroine, it was possible for a woman with great energy
and sense of purpose to live by herself in London and become renowned on the strength of
her own unaided efforts. Professional success alone, however, is not sufficient, for nothing
can give more meaning to a woman's life than enduring love in marriage. Another theme is
Mrs. Browning's distrust of the theories of contemporary French socialists, such as Charles
Fourier, who advocated the division of society into communistic units. She believed that in
the kind of state envisioned by the radical socialists there would be no place for artists and
poets. Nothing stirred up more controversy than her frank treatment of the plight of "the
fallen woman"—a subject that was considered by the Victorian public to be outside the
purview of the serious novelist or poet. In mid-nineteenth-century England standards of
sexual conduct were so rigid that any woman who bore a child out of wedlock, even if she
had been a victim of male aggression, was shunned by "respectable" people and condemned
to a life of penance and mortification. Eighteenth-century readers had allowed their novelists
more freedom to depict sexual irregularities, but the great Victorian novelists dealt obliquely,
or not at all, with such subjects. One of Mrs. Browning's most fundamental convictions was
that sexual activity outside of marriage was immoral, but she believed that society should be
more compassionate in its treatment of women who had been victims of seduction or sexual
attacks. It is not surprising that the story of Marian Erle shocked a number of women readers,
some of whom were reported to have said that the reading of Aurora Leigh had endangered
their morals.
23. • Most of the Brownings' literary friends were delighted with the poem and
accorded it the highest praise; Swinburne, Leigh Hunt, Walter Savage
Landor, Ruskin, and the Rossetti brothers all spoke of it with unrestrained
enthusiasm. From a commercial point of view it proved to be by far the
most successful of Mrs. Browning's works; by 1885, twenty-eight years
after its first publication, it had gone through nineteen editions. Despite
its great popularity with other poets and with the general public, it found
little favor with professional reviewers. Most were in agreement that the
poem was too long and lacking in coherence, that the characterization was
weak, that the plot was melodramatic and implausible, that the imagery
was often inappropriate and discordant, and that some of the material
was so vulgar that it offended good taste. One reviewer declared that the
coarseness of its language made Mrs. Browning's book "almost a closed
volume for her own sex." The notices in the most influential journals,
however, granted that despite its shortcomings the poem gave evidence of
its author's vigorous intellect, her earnestness, and her wide and humane
sympathies.
24. •
Two years after the publication of Aurora Leigh Mrs. Browning again became absorbed in
current political events as the Italians, after a decade of truce, began once more their
struggle for independence and unity. In June 1859 Italian troops under the leadership of King
Victor Emmanuel of Piedmont, joined by Napoleon III, who had come to northern Italy with
substantial French forces, won two battles against the Austrians in Lombardy. Then early in
July Napoleon surprised and bitterly disappointed the Italians by agreeing at Villafranca to an
armistice which would leave Venice under the domination of Austria. In response to these
events Mrs. Browning's Poems before Congress was published in the spring of 1860; but by
the time the volume appeared the title was misleading, for the congress of the leading
powers that was to have been held in January had been indefinitely postponed. Seven of the
eight poems deal with Italian politics, while the other, "A Curse for a Nation," is an antislavery
poem that had earlier been published in an abolitionist journal in Boston. Although Mrs.
Browning felt betrayed when she first heard of the truce initiated by the emperor whom she
had long admired, she expressed her continuing faith in him in two of the poems, "A Tale of
Villafranca" and "Napoleon III in Italy." In her view the emperor was not at fault, for his noble
aims had been frustrated by selfish and small-minded statesmen. In "Italy and the World"
Mrs. Browning prophesies that the states of central Italy in revolt against Austria will join
Piedmont and Lombardy to form a united and independent kingdom, but the triumphant
conclusion of the Italian cause will owe nothing to the English government, which she berates
for its failure to provide military aid. The notices in the leading English journals were
uniformly unfavorable toward the volume, which they found offensive because of its strident
tone and anti-British bias.
25. • In the spring of 1860 Mrs. Browning continued to write poems on
the Italian situation, which to her great delight appeared to be
moving toward a victorious outcome. Central and northern Italy had
become a united kingdom under the leadership of Victor Emmanuel
of Piedmont and his prime minister, Count Cavour. The theme of
"King Victor Emmanuel Entering Florence, April, 1860" is the great
joy of the people of Tuscany and their expressions of gratitude
toward the king for the part he has played in helping them to their
freedom. The tone of "Summing up in Italy," however, is bitter; here
Mrs. Browning utters her fears that although the great powers of
Europe will ratify the creation of the new kingdom of Italy, they will
discredit its chief architects. Besides her political poems, at this
time she wrote "A Musical Instrument," which has become one of
her best-known poems. Based on the myth of Pan and Syrinx, the
verses exemplify the doctrine that the true poet is destined to
suffer much hardship and pain in the practice of his art.
26. •
Despite her extreme frailty Mrs. Browning followed with feverish excitement the
rapidly unfolding events of the winter of 1860-1861. The peoples of Sicily, Naples,
and the States of the Church had voted for annexation with Victor Emmanuel's
new kingdom. With most of the Italian states united, a national parliament met at
Turin early in 1861. Mrs. Browning felt that her faith in the Italian leaders had been
justified. "There are great men here, and there will be a great nation presently,"
she declared. She had been in poor health for several years, suffering from
weakness of the lungs and heart, and her obsession with Italian politics further
weakened her nervous system. The final blow, which prostrated her emotionally
and physically, was the unexpected and premature death on 6 June 1861 of Count
Cavour, the great patriot who had been chiefly responsible for bringing the
disparate states into a unified and independent kingdom. "I can scarcely command
voice or hand to name Cavour," Elizabeth wrote; "if tears or blood could have
saved him to us, he should have had mine." For the next two weeks she remained
in seclusion, never going out and seeing almost no one at home. Then on 20 June
she was stricken with a severe cold, cough, and sore throat, and was confined to
her bed; she died in Browning's arms early in the morning of 29 June. Within a
month Browning left Florence with his son to make his permanent home in
London.
27. •
The many journals which reported Mrs. Browning's untimely death all spoke of her
as the greatest woman poet in English literature. The highly respected Edinburgh
Review expressed the prevailing view when it said that she had no equal in the
literary history of any country: "Such a combination of the finest genius and the
choicest results of cultivation and wide-ranging studies has never been seen
before in any woman." In America the most extravagant of the obituary notices
appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger, which called her "the Shakespeare
among her sex" and placed her among the four or five greatest authors of all time.
A year after her death Browning collected and arranged for publication her Last
Poems, which included a number of translations from Greek and Latin poetry,
personal lyrics, and poems on Italian politics. In the same year the fifth edition of
her Poems was published. Both works were warmly received by the leading literary
journals on both sides of the Atlantic as they reviewed her poetic career from its
beginning and concluded that her gifts had been of the highest order. A writer in
the Christian Examiner of Boston said that Tennyson's In Memoriam(1850) and
Mrs. Browning' Aurora Leigh were the two greatest poems of the age and that the
"Sonnets from the Portuguese" were the finest love poems in English:
"Shakespeare's sonnets, beautiful as they are, cannot be compared with them, and
Petrarch's seem commonplace beside them."
28. •
In the decades following Mrs. Browning's death her poetry began to lose much of the appeal
it had held for readers during her lifetime. The consensus of late-Victorian critics was that
much of her writing would be forgotten in another generation but that she would be
remembered for "The Cry of the Children," a few of the romantic ballads such as "Isobel's
Child" and "Bertha in the Lane," and most of all for the "Sonnets from the Portuguese."
During all this period and for the first three decades of the present century, Aurora Leigh
largely dropped out of sight. In 1930, however, Virginia Woolf in an article in the Times
Literary Supplement deplored the fact that Mrs. Browning's poetry was no longer being read
and especially that Aurora Leigh had been forgotten. She urged her readers to take a fresh
look at the poem, which she admired for its "speed and energy, forthrightness and complete
self-confidence." "Elizabeth Barrett," Mrs. Woolf wrote, "was inspired by a flash of true
genius when she rushed into the drawing-room and said that here, where we live and work,
is the true place for the poet." In Mrs. Woolf's view, the heroine of the poem," "with her
passionate interest in social questions, her conflict as artist and woman, her longing for
knowledge and freedom, is the true daughter of her age."
Notwithstanding Mrs. Woolf's enthusiasm for Aurora Leigh, the poem continued to be
ignored by the general public and by scholars until the recent advent of feminist criticism.
None of Mrs. Browning's poems has received more attention from feminist critics than
Aurora Leigh , since its theme is one that especially concerns them: the difficulties that a
woman must overcome if she is to achieve independence in a world mainly controlled by
men. In her Literary Women Ellen Moers writes that Aurora Leigh is the great epic poem of
the age; it is "the epic poem of the literary woman herself." It now looks as though Mrs.
Browning's literary reputation will remain secure with future critics who view her work from
a feminist perspective. One may also prophesy that for the general public the "Sonnets from
the Portuguese," despite some Victorian quaintness of imagery, will continue to hold their
place among the most-admired love poems of world literature.
