The Relationship of Elizabeth
Barrett Browning and Robert Browning
Although
her poetry, letters, and diaries reveal a profound ambivalence about love,
Elizabeth Barrett Browning seems, despite some difficulties, to have enjoyed a very
happy relationship with her husband, Robert Browning. According to Kathleen
Blake, Robert Browning was practically "a one-man refutation of virtually
all of her anxieties." The following account of their relationship is
drawn from Blake's book, Love and the Woman Question in Victorian Literature. —
Laurelyn Douglas '91 (English 264, 1991)
Robert
Browning was emphatically unlike the doctors humorously described by E.B.B.,
who carried the inkstand out of her room as part of the cure because if poetry
involves malady for men, "for women it was incompatible with any common
show of health under any circumstances".
Their
relationship began in his admiring her poetry. His audacious first letter moves
from loving her books to loving her. E.B.B. was alarmed by his
"extravagance", and worried that he might substitute lioness-worship
for real feeling, with something of Aurora Leigh's distaste for merely literary
adulation.
Much
of E.B.B.'s hesitation came from knowing that love can bring injury as well as
boon. She had suffered such injury. With great pain did she finally recognise
that her father's strangely heartless affection would have buried her her
sickroom, for how else could she interpret his squelching of her plan to travel
south for health in 1846, when doctors practically ordered the journey to Italy
as a last hope? E.B.B. had had previous experience of one-sided affection, as
we see in her diary of 1831-3, which concerns her relationship with the Greek
scholar H.S. Boyd. For a year her entries calculate the bitter difference
between his regard and her own, and she wonders if she can ever hope for
reciprocation. In fact she finds her womanly capacity for feeling a liability
and wishes she could feel less — "I am not of a cold nature, & cannot
bear to be treated coldly. When cold water is thrown upon a hot iron, the iron
hisses. I wish that water wd. make that iron as cold as self."
Besides
being hurt in love, E.B.B. also felt she had done hurt, and this too made her
cautious. She felt that she had actually caused her brother's death by wanting
him to be with her, and done violence to a tight-knit family. She fearfully
questioned what sort of a gift her heart would make to Browning since she was
not young (thirty-eight), six years an invalid, broken-spirited in guilt and
sorrow. So for a long time Robert Browning had to accede to her formula, urged
in the Sonnets, that he loved her for nothing at all, just because he loved
her. But once he had overcome her mistrust, he began to campaign for his right
to include her poetic gift among his reasons for being smitten: "How can I
put your poetry away from you?" She must keep up writing her writing for
"Ba herself to be quite Ba". He worried that she might scant her own
work in order to help him and write him letters, for her knew how
self-sacrificing affection could make her. She answered that she felt better
and stronger for his interest and did not grow so idle as he thought. She was
composing the Sonnets during their letter-writing courtship, and she also outlined
her rough idea for Aurora Leigh. Browning comments that he would like to
undertake something as ambitious himself, and "you can do it, I know and
am sure."
Though
E.B.B. did not do a great deal of work for a year or so after her marriage — as
she says, before she could go forward she had to learn how to stand up steadily
after so great a revolution — the intermission was brief and the follow-through
impressive. Before her death in 1861: Poems of 1850, Casa Guida Windows (1851),
Aurora Leigh, Poems before Congress (1860), and her last Poems. Bearing a son
put no stop to her enterprise. She writes in 1850, "As for poetry, I hope
to do better things in it yet, though I have a child to Śstand in my sunshine,'
as you suppose he must; but he only makes the sunbeams brighter with his curls,
little darling". A charming picture emerges of the Brownings' mutual aid,
to the pouring out of the coffee. She benefited from their unconstraint, their
regimen of hard work, their interchange of encouragement.
Browning
was a helpful critic from the beginning, for instance, from his earliest letter
commenting on her translation of Prometheus Bound. But E.B.B. was not easily
influenced and often stood up for her originality even when people thought it
amounted to eccentricity, as they more than once did. On her controversial
Poems Before Congress she says, "I never wrote to please any of you, not
even to please my own husband". She did not emulate Browning directly
because she thought she shouldn't and because she thought she couldn't anyway.
As Susan Zimmerman has shown, the Sonnets differ from the traditional sonnet
sequence in praising the beloved — Browning — as a singer far beyond the
speaker in power — he is a "gracious singer of high poems", while she
is a worn-out viol (IV; XXXII).
In
breaking the traditional identity between lover and poet, E.B.B. forecasts the
split between woman-in-love and artist developed in Aurora Leigh. At the same
time, her awe of Browning as a specifically masculine poet discouraged her in a
way that also guaranteed integrity because it put imitation out of the
question: "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! and admirable for being beyond."
Browning's
benefit to her work went beyond encouragement, criticism and provision of a
model to study but not to copy. E.B.B. had felt the limits of her own
experience as limits to her poetry. She had known a filial and invalid
exaggeration of feminine enclosure. Browning gave her Italy, gave her travel,
gave her experience. Her letters in marriage run over with the high spirits of
a wanderer and observer
Besides
expanding her material, Browning also restored her to her own aesthetic.
E.B.B.'s ars poetica stressed self-expression, made it a first principle to
"looke in thine heart, and write" according to her Essays on the
English and the Greek Christian Poets. Yet in the reduced state in which
Browning found her, she experienced separation between her inmost feelings and
her poetry — her own being had become so nearly defunct that she could not
produce poetry except from a factitious personality.