MORE
INFORMATION ABOUT BROWNING´S MARRIAGE
1, After the drowning death
of her brother in the early 1840s, Browning became a virtual recluse. She did
not want to meet anyone who did not belong to her close circle of friends, and she
conducted most of her friendships through letters. However, in 1845, Browning
received a telegram from the poet Robert Browning. The telegram read "I
love your verses with all my hear, dear Miss Barrett.
I do, as I say, love these books with all my heart - and I love you too."
The two met several months later and fell in love. They wrote to each other
daily and the letters from their courtship are a wonderful record of its
progress. During this period, Browning composed her famous Sonnets from the
Portuguese, which were published in 1850.
Elizabeth and Robert kept their love a secret because Browning's father was vehemently opposed to the
relationship. The couple eloped on September 12, 1846 and for the next week, Browning continued to live at home so the secret would
not be revealed. When Browning's father died ten
years later, she had never been forgiven.
Shortly after their marriage, Elizabeth and Robert
departed for Pisa, Italy and ultimately settled in Florence. In Italy, Browning
regained her health and in 1849, gave birth to the couple's only child, Robert Wiedemann Barrett. The Brownings
lived in Florence for the next 15 years, with occasional visits to London.
2. Meanwhile the friendship with
Browning had become the chief thing in Elizabeth Barrett's life. The
correspondence, once begun, had not flagged. In the early summer they met. The
allusion to his poetry in "Lady Geraldine's Courtship" had doubtless
put an edge to his already keen wish to know her. He became her frequent visitor
and kept her room fragrant with flowers. He never lagged, whether in friendship
or in love. We have the strange privilege, since the publication of the letters
between the two, of following the whole course of this noble love story from
beginning to end, and day by day. Browning was six years younger than the woman
he so passionately admired, and he at first believed her to be confined by some
hopeless physical injury to her sofa. But of his own wish and resolution he
never doubted. Her hesitation, in her regard for his liberty and strength, to
burden him with an ailing wife, she has recorded in the Sonnets afterwards
published under a slight disguise as Sonnets from the Portuguese. She refused
him once "with all her will, but much against her heart", and yielded
at last for his sake rather than her own. Her father's will was that his
children should not marry, and, kind and affectionate father though he was, the
prohibition took a violent form and struck terror into the hearts of the three
dutiful and sensitive girls. Robert Browning's
addresses were, therefore, kept secret, for fear of scenes of anger which the
most fragile of the three could not face. Browning was reluctant to practice
the deception; Elizabeth alone knew how impossible it was to avoid it. When she
was persuaded to marry, it was she who insisted, in mental and physical terror,
upon a secret wedding. Throughout the summer of 1846 her health improved, and
on the 12th of September the two poets were married in St. Marylebone parish
church. Browning visited it on his subsequent journeys to England to give
thanks for what had taken place at its altar. Elizabeth's two sisters had been
permitted to know of the engagement, but not of the wedding, so that their
father's anger might not fall on them too heavily. For a week Mrs. Browning
remained in her father's house. On the 19th of September she left it, taking
her maid and her little dog, joined her husband, and crossed to the Continent.
She never entered that home again, nor did her father ever forgive her. Her
letters, written with tears to entreat his pardon, were never answered. They
were all subsequently returned to her unopened. Among them was one she had
written, in the prospect of danger, before the birth of her child. With her
sisters her relations were, as before, most affectionate. Her brothers, one at
least of whom disapproved of her action, held for a time aloof. All others were
taken entirely by surprise. Mrs. Jameson, who had been one of the few intimate
visitors to Miss Barrett's room, had offered to take her to Italy that year,
but met her instead on her way there with a newly-married husband. The poet's
journey was full of delight. Where she could not walk, up long staircases or
across the waters of the stream at Vaucluse, Browning
carried her. In October they reached Pisa, and there they wintered, Mrs.
Jameson keeping them company for a time lest ignorance of practical things
should bring them, in their poverty, to trouble. She soon found that they were
both admirable economists; not that they gave time and thought to husbandry,
but that they knew how to enjoy life without luxuries. So they remained to the
end, frugal and content with little.
For climate and cheapness they
settled in Italy, choosing Florence in the spring of 1847, and remaining there,
with the interruptions of a change to places in Italy such as Siena and Rome,
and to Paris and England, until Mrs. Browning's
death. It was at Pisa that Robert Browning first saw the Sonnets from the
Portuguese, poems which his wife had written in secret and had no thought of
publishing. He, however, resolved to give them to the world. "I dared
not", he said, "reserve to myself the finest
sonnets written in any language since Shakespeare's." The judgment, which
the existence of Wordsworth's sonnets renders obviously absurd, may be
pardoned. The sonnets were sent to Miss Mitford and published at Reading, as
Sonnets by E.B.B., in 1847. In 1850 they were included, under their final
title, in a new issue of poems.
3. The love story of Robert Browning and
Elisabeth Barret often reminds of the courtship and
marriage of their contemporaries, Richard and Clara Schumann. In both romances
a possessive father tries to prevent his daughter's match; in each case a sense
of spiritual kinship, shared artistic purpose, and deep passion prevail over
the obstacles, and, interestingly, in both stories it is the woman who is the
more famous artist at the start of the relationship.
Robert
Browning enjoyed a privileged only-child existence, complete with excellent
tutors, travel, and the leisure to pursue his literary inclinations. His early
critical reception was eclipsed by that of Tennyson's. While his publication of
PARACELSUS in 1835 did win him recognition, his next published work, SORDELLO
(1840), met with such vituperation as to require almost two decades to repair his standing. It was during this period of
emotional fragility that he read Elizabeth Barrett's 1844 poems.
Elizabeth Barrett had received a classical
education and displayed a literary gift from girlhood. Her first collection of
poetry was so highly regarded that she was considered to succeed Wordsworth as
Poet Laureate. Made an invalid as much by a back injury she suffered as a youth
as by the controlling presence of her jealous father, EBB was a reclusive,
bedridden spinster-poetess when Robert Browning initiated a correspondence with
her in 1845. Their love letters, some of the most eloquent in the language, led
to a meeting from which sprang up between them, despite the objections of her
father and Elizabeth's own feelings of inadequacy for wifedom, an intense
passion that led to their secret engagement and subsequent elopement to Italy
in September 1846.
There, for fifteen years of happy married life,
they lived primarily in Florence, where their home, the Casa Guidi, became a spiritual mecca
for the expatriate English-American community. Together they raised their son,
Robert Wiedemann, whom they nicknamed Penini, embraced the cause of Italian unity, and continued
to write. Elizabeth published SONNETS FROM THE PORTUGUESE (1850), CASA GUIDI
WINDOWS (1851) and AURORA LEIGH(1857), as well as a collection of poems that
were published posthumously; Robert found a new mature voice in CHRISTMAS EVE
AND EASTER DAY (1850) and MEN AND WOMEN (1855).
When Elizabeth died in her husband's arms in 1861,
Robert Browning decided to return with his son to England where his poetry
found increasing favor as he experimented with new forms.