ELISABETH BARRET BROWNING AND ROBERT BROWNING
- Introduction: paper’s topic
This paper is going to be focused on the relationship between Elisabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning, two well-known representatives of the English poetry during the Victorian Era whose love story has arrived to our days. We are going to make a trip from their childhoods to observe how these Victorian writers had some aspects in common in their lifestyles as, for instance, the extraordinary education they received at home, their early devotion to learning and writing or a life mostly developed at home due to different reasons as we will see (in Elisabeth’s case, due to her father’s tyranny as well as her sickly health; in Robert’s case, due to his indoor education and his dislike to public life becoming his house his shelter) but we will also point out the differences which exist between them: they belonged to different social classes, they were educated in different values and they didn’t succeed in the same way. However, after getting to know each other through correspondence, they decided to make a new start together in a foreign country in spite of some problems. They represent the triumph of love; a love which started with Robert’s admiration to Elisabeth’s verses and a love which made her leave her paternal prison forever. Apart from their biographical information, we will see their most important characteristics in what poetry is concerned, their relation with the historical time they were living in and their most important works.
In this work, I will try to show that, although they are considered as two basic figures of the Victorian poetry, they were partly affected by how their relationship became a public issue and, as a consequence, this was the most important detail by which they were remembered and still today. They were seen as the best existing lovers and their works were expected to show their most intimate feelings and secrets. In any case, each one represents a different and great contribution to English literature.
1. Life before their relationship: the importance of the education and their first literary attempts.
Elisabeth Barrett was born in 1806 in Durham, England. The fact that she was born in England is relevant if we take into consideration that her family had left the Old Continent many years ago. “The oldest of twelve children, Elizabeth was the first in her family born in England in over two hundred years. For centuries, the Barrett family, who were part Creole, had lived in Jamaica, where they owned sugar plantations and relied on slave labour. Elizabeth's father, Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett, chose to raise his family in England, while his fortune grew in Jamaica” (Poets.org). Thanks to the profitable business which was the slavery, she spent her youth with no worries in an idyllic place called Hope End, “a 500-acre estate near the Malvern Hills where she lived a privileged childhood, riding her pony around the grounds, visiting other families in the neighbourhood, and arranging family theatrical productions with her eleven brothers and sisters” (Victorian Web: Elisabeth Barrett Browning) while her family amassed a considerable fortune from the Jamaican sugar plantations.
Robert Browning, on the other hand, was born in Camberwell, a suburb of London, England, on May 7, 1812, the first son of Robert and Sarah Anna Browning (Wikipedia: Robert Browning). His middle origins didn’t affect to his education thanks to the figure of his father. “Mr. Browning had angered his own father and forgone a fortune: the poet's grandfather had sent his son to oversee a West Indies sugar plantation, but the young man had found the institution of slavery so abhorrent that he gave up his prospects and returned home, to become a clerk in the Bank of England.” (Victorian web: Robert Browning). There is a clear difference between both families, taking different attitudes in slavery’s matters: the exploitation of the sugar plantations in America was a very lucrative industry at that time but, as we can see here, not everybody preferred money to their own principles. While Elisabeth’s father amassed a fortune from the sugar plantations, “Robert's father amassed a library of around 6,000 books, many of them obscure and arcane. Thus, Robert was raised in a household of significant literary resources […]. As a family unit they lived simply, and his father encouraged his interest in literature and the Arts” (Wikipedia: Robert Browning). We can say that part of what Robert managed to be was thanks to his father’s support. “On this very modest salary he was able to marry, raise a family, and to acquire a library of 6,000 volumes. He was an exceedingly well-read man who could recreate the siege of Troy with the household chairs and tables for the benefit of his inquisitive son” (Victorian web: Robert Browning).
However, although they came from different backgrounds, they shared a tremendous “appetite” for learning. They didn’t attend to school lessons because they were educated at home, Elisabeth taught by special tutors and Robert trained under his father’s guidance and his great library. “Elizabeth was educated at home and attended lessons with her brother's tutor and was thus well-educated for a girl of that time” (Wikipedia: Elisabeth Barrett Browning). According to the Online-Literature webpage, she was a voracious reader and early on became a keen student under her tutors, studying languages including Greek, the Bible in Hebrew, and classical literature, philosophy, and history. “Elizabeth had read a number of Shakespearian plays, parts of Pope's Homeric translations, passages from Paradise Lost, and the histories of England, Greece, and Rome before the age of ten. She was self-taught in almost every respect. […] Her voracious appetite for knowledge compelled her to learn enough Hebrew to read the Old Testament from beginning to end. Her enjoyment of the works and subject matter of Paine, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Wollstonecraft was later expressed by her concern for human rights in her own letters and poems” (Victorian web: Elisabeth Barrett Browning). Both parents supported her early writing and many of her birthday odes to her parents and siblings still survive (Kirjasto.sci.fi). While her father was overly protective and actually forbade her to marry, he did encourage her to write, and in 1820 had fifty copies of her Homeric poem “The Battle of Marathon” printed, her father underwriting its cost (Online-literature web page).
Robert, simultaneously, was an extremely bright child and a voracious reader (he read through all fifty volumes of the Biographie Universelle) and learned Latin, Greek, French and Italian by the time he was fourteen (Victorian web: Robert Browning). In childhood, he was distinguished by love of poetry and natural history. “Much of Browning's education came from his well-read father. It is believed that he was already proficient at reading and writing by the age of five. […] From fourteen to sixteen he was educated at home, attended to by various tutors in music, drawing, dancing, and horsemanship. […] In 1825, a cousin gave Browning a collection of Shelley's poetry; Browning was so taken with the book that he asked for the rest of Shelley's works for his thirteenth birthday, and declared himself a vegetarian and an atheist in emulation of the poet. Despite this early passion, he apparently wrote no poems between the ages of thirteen and twenty. In 1828, Browning enrolled at the University of London, but he soon left, anxious to read and learn at his own pace. (Poets.org). “At home, his parents showed understanding of his decision to withdraw and supported him morally and financially” (Kirjasto.sci.fi). The random nature of his education later surfaced in his writing, leading to criticism of his poems' obscurities.
Consequently, both received good educations under the figure of their fathers supporting them in their writing hobby. However, we can say that Elisabeth’s life was totally influenced by an unexpected factor, the illness. “In her early teens, Barrett contracted a lung complaint, possibly tuberculosis, although the exact nature of her illness has been the subject of speculation. She was subsequently regarded as an invalid by her family” (Wikipedia: Elisabeth Barrett Browning). “Doctors began treating her with morphine and opium, which she would take until her death. While saddling a pony when she was fifteen, Elizabeth also suffered a spinal injury” (Poets.org). Her autocratic father’s concern increased with her fragile health but, despite her ailments, her education continued to flourish.
Both started writing proficiently since a very young age. Robert’s attempts to publish started at the age of twelve. He wrote a volume of Byronic verse entitled “Incondita” which his parents attempted, unsuccessfully, to have published; as a result, he destroyed it with a childish attitude (Poets.org). His first book of poetry, “Paracelsus” (1835 which dealt with the life of the famous Swiss alchemist, was comparatively well-received and began to meet and make friends with influential writers such as Dickens and Tennyson and artists of the day like the actor William Macready who encouraged Browning to write for the stage. While his plays were never very successful, this experience revealed Browning's great ability, the dramatic monologue (Poetryarchive.org). He discovered that his real talents lay in taking a single character and allowing him to discover himself to us by revealing more of himself in his speeches than he suspects - the characteristics of this dramatic method. The reviews of “Paracelsus” had been mostly encouraging, praised by such men of letters as Thomas Carlyle and William Wordsworth, but the difficulty and obscurity of his long poem “Sordello” (1840), set against the background of restless southern Europe of the 13th century, turned the critics against him, and for many years they continued to complain of obscurity even in his shorter, more accessible lyrics (Victorianweb.org). “It took twenty years for Browning's reputation to recover” (Poetryarchive.org). Between 1841 and 1846, Browning’s next publications in his “Bells and Pomegranates” series, including the verse drama for the stage “Strafford” (1837), and his narrative poem Pippa Passes (1841), were largely ignored (Online-literature.com). Although these works were for the most part unsuccessful, the techniques he developed through his dramatic monologues—especially his use of diction, rhythm, and symbol—are regarded as his most important contribution to poetry, influencing such major poets of the twentieth century as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Robert Frost (Poets.org). Other works were published and, although he was well-known at the time, he didn’t reach the success he deserved. If his “Sordello” had closed the doors to recognition, her relationship with Elisabeth would leave him in the shadow of her wife’s success. Nevertheless, as he said, “A minute's success pays the failure of years” (Quotationspage.com)
Elisabeth, on the other hand, achieved success little by little with her publications. Having had a more complicated life (being a chronic sick person, a woman in her time and living under his father’s rule), she could get power out from nowhere and she managed to be considered one of the greatest figures of the Victorianism. After “The Battle of Marathon”, Elisabeth’s second published poem “The Rose and Zephyr” appeared in the Literary Gazette, followed by “An Essay on Mind and Other Poems” in 1826, which drew the attention of a blind scholar of the Greek language, Hugh Stuart Boyd (Wikipedia: Elisabeth Barrett Browning). She was continuing her studies and was working on other poems and translations, published anonymously as was common for a woman at the time, but they went mostly unnoticed (Online-literature.com). But the slow abolition of slavery, a cause which she supported (as we can see in her work The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point (1849)), and the mismanagement of the plantations depleted the Barrett's income and, in 1832, Elizabeth's father sold his rural estate at a public auction. He moved his family to a coastal town and rented cottages for the next three years, before settling permanently in London. While living on the sea coast, Elizabeth published her translation of Prometheus Bound (1833), by the Greek dramatist Aeschylus (Poets.org).
Gaining notoriety for her work in the 1830's, Elizabeth continued to live in her father's house under his tyrannical rule. He began sending Elizabeth's younger siblings to Jamaica to help with the family's estates. Elizabeth bitterly opposed slavery and did not want her siblings sent away. (Poets.org). After the move to London, she continued to write, contributing to various periodicals "The Romaunt of Margaret", "The Romaunt of the Page", "The Poet's Vow", and other pieces, and corresponded with literary figures of the time, including Mary Russell Mitford (Wikipedia: Elisabeth Barrett Browning). During this time, she wrote “The Seraphim and Other Poems” published in 1838 (the first volume of Elizabeth's mature poetry to appear under her own name), expressing Christian sentiments in the form of classical Greek tragedy (Poets.org). It gained critical acclaim and she started correspondences with many literary figures of the day including Thomas Carlyle, Edgar Allan Poe, and William Wordsworth (Online-literature.com).
In this year, due to her weakening disposition, she was forced to spend a year at the sea of Torquay accompanied by her brother Edward, her favourite sibling, whom she referred to as "Bro." He drowned later that year while sailing at Torquay and Elizabeth returned home emotionally broken, becoming an invalid and a recluse. She spent the next five years in her bedroom at her father's home, seeing only one or two people other than her immediate family (Poets.org). “She developed almost morbid fear of meeting anyone, and devoted herself entirely to literature” (Kirjasto.sci.fi). Eventually, however, she regained strength, and meanwhile her fame was growing (Wikipedia: Elisabeth Barrett Browning) and, in 1844, she produced a collection entitled simply “Poems”. It gained a huge popularity and was praised among. Elizabeth Browning's name was even mentioned six years later in speculations about the successor of Wordsworth as the Poet Laureate (Classicalreader.com).
2. A love emerged from the poetry: their courtship and the life together until their deaths
This volume gained the attention of Robert Browning, whose work Elizabeth had praised in one of her poems, and he wrote her a letter:
“I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett,—and this is no off-hand complimentary letter that I shall write,” —January 10, 1845.
“I thank you, dear Mr. Browning, from the bottom of my heart.” — January 11, 1845
Elizabeth and Robert, who was six years her junior, exchanged 574 letters over the next twenty months (Poets.org). “A meeting was arranged for Browning to come and see her in May 1845, and so began one of the most famous courtships in literature. She could not believe that the vigorous and worldly Browning really loved her as much as he professed to, and her doubts are expressed in the Sonnets from the Portuguese which she wrote over the next two years. “Besides being hurt in love (due to her relationship with the Greek scholar H.S. Boyd), Elisabeth 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”(Victorianweb.com). But what is love without obstacles and hardships? As Frederic Kenyon writes, "Mr. Browning knew that he was asking to be allowed to take charge of an invalid's life—believed indeed that she was even worse than was really the case, and that she was hopelessly incapacitated from ever standing on her feet—-but was sure enough of his love to regard that as no obstacle" (Classicit.about.com). Love conquered all, however, and Browning imitated his hero Shelley by spiriting his beloved off to Italy in August 1846. Since they were proper Victorians, however, they got married a week beforehand (Victorianweb.org).
Their courtship and marriage, owing to her delicate health and the extraordinary objections made by Mr. Barrett to the marriage of any of his children, were carried out secretly (Wikipedia: Elisabeth Barrett Browning). “Her wealthy father had made it clear that none of his eleven children would be allowed to marry, on pain of banishment. The reasons for this were dark and unspoken, perhaps literally: some believe that Barrett's grandfather, one of the biggest landholders in the West Indies, had not only passed along his fortune made on rum and sugar but some mixed blood, and that Barrett's father felt so shamed by this, and so fearful of dark-skinned grandchildren, that he would do anything to prevent it” (Todayinliterature.com). Most of her family members eventually accepted the match, but her father disowned her, would not open her letters, and refused to see her. Elizabeth stood by her husband, and she credited him for saving her life. The removal from her morbid surroundings largely restored her health for the remaining fifteen years of her life (Classicit.about.com). They represented the triumph of love.
They decided to start from zero in a country who had been the shelter of many British poets, Italy, first in Pisa, and then, within a year, finding an apartment in Florence which they called Casa Guidi, now a museum to their memory (Wikipedia: Robert Browning). The union proved a happy one. “Elizabeth, whilst physically weak, was a tough intellectual with strong opinions, and Robert Browning, so long seen as his wife's husband, emerges as a complex and often troubled character. What is indisputable is the great love between them, which sustained Elizabeth's estrangement from her father, long periods of illness and “relative” poverty.” (Shop.bl.uk)
In her new circumstances, Elizabeth's strength greatly increased. (Wikipedia: Elisabeth Barrett Browning). “The Browning’s were a devoted, happy couple and Elizabeth’s physical strength and health improved greatly so that they could travel throughout Italy and Europe. Her pet Spaniel “Flush” was a constant companion and her nurse and confidante Elizabeth Wilson tended to her every need, as did her husband. They encouraged each other in daily activities as well as their writing, seemingly mindful of each other’s struggles to compose, offering critique or opinions. They had many visitors to their luxurious home with its elegant terraces, including English novelist and art critic John Ruskin and Anthony Trollope” (Online-literature.com).
During their romance, Elizabeth gave a little packet of sonnets to her husband, who could not keep them to himself. "I dared not," he said, "reserve to myself the finest sonnets written in any language since Shakespeare's". Elizabeth's Sonnets from the Portuguese, dedicated to her husband and written in secret during their courtship (1845 and 1846), were published in 1850. Critics generally consider the Sonnets—one of the most widely known collections of love lyrics in English—to be her best work. Admirers have compared her imagery to Shakespeare and her use of the Italian form to Petrarch (Poets.org). Kenyon writes, "With the single exception of Rossetti, no modern English poet has written of love with such genius, such beauty, and such sincerity, as the two who gave the most beautiful example of it in their own lives” (Classiclit.about.com). The peculiar use of “Portuguese” in her title seemed to be her husband's pet name for dark-haired Elizabeth but it could refer to the series of sonnets of the 16th-century Portuguese poet Luiz de Camões (Classicreader.com). Mrs. Browning was a woman of singular nobility and charm. Mary Russell Mitford described her as a young woman: "A slight, delicate figure, with a shower of dark curls falling on each side of a most expressive face; large, tender eyes, richly fringed by dark eyelashes, and a smile like a sunbeam." Anne Thackeray Ritchie described her as: "Very small and brown, with big, exotic eyes and an overgenerous mouth” (Wikipedia: Elisabeth Barrett Browning). These Sonnets helped increase her popularity and the high critical regard in which the Victorians held their favourite poetess (Victorianweb.com). The work includes poems such as the famous number XLIII, which begins with the well-known line, 'How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.' and which is one of the most beautiful existing love pieces:
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with a passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints, --- I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! --- and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
(Amherst.edu)
In 1849, at the age of 43, she gave birth to a son, Robert Wiedemann Barrett Browning, called "Pen". A year later, when William Wordsworth died, Browning was a candidate for next Poet Laureate, but Lord Alfred Tennyson was chosen. In 1857, the same year Browning’s father died, who had never forgiven her for marrying, a novel in verse, the controversial Aurora Leigh (1857) was published dealing with social injustice but its main subject was the subjugation of women to the dominating male. It also commented on the role of a woman as a woman and poet. On the whole, it celebrates in part female independence from domineering men. (Online-literature.com):
If I married him,
I would not dare to call my soul my own,
Which so he had bought and paid for: every thought
And every heart-beat down there in the bill,–
Not one found honestly deductible
From any use that pleased him!
—Bk. II, l. 785-790
That he, in his developed manhood, stood
A little sunburnt by the glare of life;
While I . . it seemed no sun had shone on me.
—Bk. IV, l. 1139-1141
(Online-literature.com)
Barrett's treatment of social injustice (the slave trade in America, the oppression of the Italians by the Austrians, the labour of children in the mines and the mills of England, and the restrictions placed upon women) is manifested in many of her poems. Two of her poems, Casa Guidi Windows and Poems Before Congress, dealt directly with the Italian fight for independence. This last poem was not well-received. In a letter dated 13 April, 1860 to friend and critic Mr. Chorley she writes “I never wrote to please any of you, not even to please my own husband.” She defends her work as from the heart, a duty to tell the truth for she further states: “Every genuine artist in the world (whatever his degree) goes to heaven for speaking the truth” (Online-literature.com). The first half of Casa Guidi Windows (1851) was filled with hope that the newly awakened liberal movements were moving toward unification and freedom in the Italian states. The second half of the poem, written after the movement of liberalism had been crushed in Italy, is dominated by her disillusionment. After a decade of truce, Italians once again began to struggle for their freedom, but were forced to agree to an armistice that would leave Venice under Austrian control. Barrett Browning's Poems Before Congress (1860) responded to these events by criticizing the English government for not providing aid. One of the poems in this collection, "A Curse For a Nation," which attacked slavery, had been previously published in an abolitionist journal in Boston (Victorianweb.com).
It is still unclear what sort of affliction Elizabeth Barrett Browning had, although medical and literary scholars have enjoyed speculating. Whatever it was, the opium which was repeatedly prescribed probably made it worse; and Browning almost certainly lengthened her life by taking her south and by his solicitous attention (Victorianweb.org). Elizabeth Browning died, romantically, in her husband's arms on June 29, 1861 in Florence. Robert survived her by twenty-eight years (Classicreader.com). Barrett's popularity waned after her death, and late-Victorian critics argued that although much of her writing would be forgotten, she would be remembered for "The Cry of the Children", "Isobel's Child", "Bertha in the Lane", and most of all the “Sonnets from the Portuguese”. No female poet was held in higher esteem among cultured readers in both the United States and England than Elizabeth Barrett Browning during the nineteenth century. Barrett's poetry had an immense impact on the works of Emily Dickinson who admired her as woman of achievement (Victorianweb.org).
Robert, during the life they shared together, was fascinated by and learned hugely from the art and atmosphere of Italy. He would, in later life, say that 'Italy was my university'. Browning's poetry was known to the cognoscenti from fairly early on in his life, but he remained relatively obscure as a poet till his middle age. In Florence, he worked on the poems that eventually comprised his two-volume Men and Women, for which he is now well known. Elisabeth’s love for him was demonstrated in the Sonnets from the Portuguese, and to her he dedicated this work which contains his best poetry. In 1855, however, when these were published, they made little impact because its author was then primarily known as Elizabeth Barrett's husband. It was only after his wife's death, in 1861, when he returned to England and became part of the London literary scene, that his reputation started to take off (Wikipedia: Robert Browning).
After the death of his beloved wife, he moved back to London to live with his son Robert “Pen” Barrett Browning (1849-1912). Embraced by London’s literary circle again, Browning’s Dramatis Personae (1864) was followed by The Ring and The Book. This book consists of a blank verse poem consisting of twelve volumes and 21,000 lines. In various voices, it narrates the 1698 trial of Count Guido Franceschini of Rome who murdered his wife Pompilia Comparini and her parents. (Online-literature.com). Browning made poetry compete with prose, and used idioms of ordinary speech in his text. A typical Browning poem tells of a key moment in the life of a prince, priest or painter of the Italian Renaissance. He often crammed his meaning into so few words that many readers could not grasp what he meant (Kirjasto.sci.fi). Extraordinarily long even by Browning's own standards, The Ring and the Book was the poet's most ambitious project and has been hailed as a tour de force of dramatic poetry. Published separately in four volumes from November 1868 through to February 1869, the poem was a huge success both commercially and critically, and finally brought Browning the renown he had sought and deserved for nearly thirty years of work. It was a best selling work during Browning’s lifetime. (Wikipedia: Robert Browning).
In the remaining years of his life, as well as traveling extensively and frequenting London literary society again, Browning managed to publish no less than fifteen new volumes. None of these later works gained the popularity of The Ring and the Book, and they are largely unread today. We can say that the late '60s were the peak of his career. However, Browning's later work has been undergoing a major critical re-evaluation in recent years, and much of it remains of interest for its poetic quality and psychological insight (Wikipedia: Robert Browning). His influence continued to grow, however, and finally lead to the founding of the Browning Society in 1881 by enthusiasts in England and America (Victorianweb.com).
Robert Browning died on December 12, 1889 in Venice at his son's house. His wishes were to be buried beside Elizabeth in the English Cemetery in Florence but various difficulties made the poet's requested burial impossible, and his body was returned to England to be interred in Westminster Abbey (Kirjasto.sci.fi). His grave now lies immediately adjacent to that of Alfred Tennyson. He and Tennyson were now mentioned together as the foremost poets of the age (Victorianweb.com).
Popularity came late to Robert Browning, but in
his last years he could walk the streets of London and see shop windows full of
posters and bookmarks and needlework cases inscribed with some of his cheeriest
lines: "God's in his heaven -- All's right with the world!" and
"O to be in England/Now that April's there" and "A man's reach
should exceed his grasp/ Or what's a heaven for?"
Browning gave every indication of enjoying the commerce of fame, and took every
opportunity to jeer at those critics and naysayers who, in his view, had
forestalled it. Most of his career had been spent in a double shadow -- that of
the Poet Laureate, Lord Tennyson, and that of his wife, Elizabeth Barrett
Browning (Todayinliterature.com).
As a curious detail, Robert Browning was the first person to ever have his voice heard after his death. On a recording made by Thomas Edison in 1889, Browning reads "How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix" (including apologizing when he forgets the words). It was first played in Venice in 1890 (Wikipedia: Robert Browning). This recording, made in 1889 and therefore the oldest in the Archive, preserves a unique occasion, a dinner party given by Browning's friend the artist Rudolf Lehmann. Colonel Gouraud had brought with him a phonograph and each of the guests was invited to speak into it. Initially reluctant, Browning eventually relents and can be heard reciting from his poem 'How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix'. Unfortunately, he forgets the words after a few lines, tries again and then gives up, but can be heard expressing his astonishment at this "wonderful invention" (Poetryarchive.com).
3. Their literary styles: “Sonnets from the Portuguese” and the dramatic monologue
Elisabeth Barrett Browning is generally considered one of the great English poets. Her works address a wide range of issues and ideas; she was learned and thoughtful, influencing many of her contemporaries, including her husband. Her own sufferings, combined with her moral and intellectual strength, made her the champion of the suffering and oppressed. Her gift was essentially lyrical, though much of her work was not so in form. Her weak points are the lack of compression, an occasional somewhat obtrusive mannerism, and experimentation both in metre and rhyme (Wikipedia: Elisabeth Barrett Browning).
Her achievement, indeed, was generally overestimated, in her own day and later, but it is now recognized that she is scarcely a really great artist. Her intense emotion, her fine Christian idealism, and her very wide reading give her real power; her womanly tenderness is admirable; and the breadth of her interests and sometimes the clearness of her judgment are notable; but her secluded life of ill-health rendered her often sentimental, high-strung, and even hysterical. She has in her the impulses and material of great poetry, but circumstances and her temperament combined to deny her the patient self-discipline necessary for the best results (Classiclit.about.com).
However, how did her love story affect to her fame? Elizabeth was a respected working poet for many years before her courtship and marriage to Robert Browning, yet it seems that her memory is most often reduced to the phrase, "How do I love thee"; therefore, in the minds of her time period and still some today, are her Sonnets. Her sonnets, Conant claims, are "without competition, the finest love poems in our language” (Victorianweb.org). The earliest reactions to the poems, in 1850, were not very favourable. The poems were met with reticence, not praise, and the sonnets' success would not come until later, when her biographical connection to the poems was known. For the Victorian reader, the sonnets were the epitome of appropriate poetry for women to write because they showed a woman in her best role — loving and expressing sentiments of love. “Many Victorian readers believed that the function of a woman was "not to write, not to act, not to be famous but to love”. If a woman were going to write, to write about love and loving would be the most appropriate choice and therefore the best received” (Victorianweb.org). Afterward, she was embarrassed to have the sonnets published. To further the theme of embarrassment, it is theorized that the title was selected to make the content seem less intimately personal, using the guise of a translation of another poet's work (Victorianweb.org).
Of all her works, the "Sonnets" have the most importance simply because they tell the tale of her own love story, which was her "life-riddle" that the poems finally solved. In a biographical piece appearing in The Cornhill Magazine in 1874, George Barnett Smith places Barrett Browning among the top three or four poets of England, claiming that:
“After Shakespeare, we should be inclined to maintain that she is the equal of any. For proof of this, let the reader turn to her "Sonnets from the Portuguese", which, under a disguised name, are her own sonnets . . . They are certainly equal to all of Wordsworth's and most of Milton's.” [485-56]
(Victorianweb.org)
The once overlooked "Sonnets" now represent Barrett Browning's best work because they are her own sonnets — that is, biographical. However, with the passing of time, Elisabeth's life became reduced more and more to them. As they became more and more popular, they were valued less and less as poems and more as relics of a fascinating love story. These poems fascinated readers because of the fairytale associated with them, not the text itself (Victorianweb.com).
In 1899, the Brownings' son Penini published the correspondence from Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett's courtship. As the letters became more popular, the original text that earned her praise, the "Sonnets” decreased in popularity. She became valued for her love, and the love letters better depicted that love better than did the sonnets (Victorianweb.org).
The compelling love story of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning attracts modern readers as much as it did Victorians. Everyone loves a true love story. However, biography and literature must be separated to get a true sense of her sonnets. The biography and letters were irresistible for the Victorians and still are today, but the pomes have been read in this way for about 150 years; it is time for a new reading (Victorianweb.org).
Robert Browning’s fame, on the contrary, rests mainly on his dramatic monologues, in which the words not only convey setting and action but also reveal the speaker’s character. Unlike a soliloquy, the meaning in a Browning dramatic monologue is not what the speaker directly reveals but what he inadvertently "gives away" about himself in the process of rationalizing past actions, or "special-pleading" his case to a silent auditor in the poem. Rather than thinking out loud, the character composes a self-defense which the reader, as "juror," is challenged to see through. Browning chooses some of the most debased, extreme and even criminally psychotic characters, no doubt for the challenge of building a sympathetic case for a character who doesn't deserve one and to cause the reader to squirm at the temptation to acquit a character who may be a homicidal psychopath. One of his more sensational monologues is "Porphyria’s Lover". The opening lines provide a sinister setting for the macabre events that follow. It is plain that the speaker is insane, as he strangles his lover with her own hair to try and preserve for ever the moment of perfect love she has shown him (Wikipedia: Robert Browning).
Yet it is by carefully reading the far more sophisticated and cultivated rhetoric of the aristocratic and civilized Duke of "My Last Duchess," perhaps the most frequently cited example of the poet's dramatic monologue form, that the attentive reader discovers the most horrific example of a mind totally mad despite its eloquence in expressing itself.
That's my last Duchess painted on the wall, Looking as if she were alive. I call That piece a wonder, now: Fra Pandolf's hands Worked busily a day, and there she stands. Will't please you sit and look at her? I said "Fra Pandolf" by design, for never read Strangers like you that pictured countenance, The depth and passion of its earnest glance, But to myself they turned (since none puts by The curtain I have drawn for you, but I) And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst, How such a glance came there; so, not the first Are you to turn and ask thus […].
The duchess, we learn, was murdered not because of infidelity, not because of a lack of gratitude for her position, and not, finally, because of the simple pleasures she took in common everyday occurrences. She's reduced to an objet d'art in the Duke's collection of paintings and statues because the Duke equates his instructing her to behave like a duchess with "stooping," an action of which his megalomaniacal pride is incapable. (Wikipedia: Robert Browning).
Ironically, Browning’s style, which seemed modern and experimental to Victorian readers, owes much to his love of the seventeenth century poems of John Donne with their abrupt openings, colloquial phrasing and irregular rhythms. But he remains too much the prophet-poet and descendant of Percy Shelley to settle for the conceits, puns, and verbal play of the Metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century (Wikipedia: Robert Browning).
The very qualities which sometimes led his poetry to be misjudged in his own time - his use of irony, his preference for oblique criticism rather than overt moralising, his extensive learning and his use of conversational rhythms - are the ones which secured his reputation in the twentieth century. His is one of the few Victorian poets who remained relevant to the modernists (Poetryarchive.org).
4. Conclusion:
Today the Brownings are often known or remembered primarily for the unique love story of two poets joining their voices and lives together. As a summary, we can say that the Brownings spent much of their time out of England and explored European models and matter in much of their poetry. Robert great innovation was the dramatic monologue, which he used to its full extent in his long novel in verse, The Ring and the Book. Elizabeth is perhaps best remembered for Sonnets from the Portuguese but her long poem Aurora Leigh is one of the classics of 19th century feminist literature.
The Victorian period literally describes the events in the age of Queen Victoria’s reign of 1837-1901. The term Victorian has connotations of repression and social conformity; however, in the realm of poetry these labels are somewhat misplaced. The Victorian age provided a significant development of poetic ideals such as the increased use of the Sonnet as a poetic form, which was to influence later modern poets (Poetseeres.org). Although it was in the Victorian era that the novel became the leading form of literature in English, Victorian poetry in a sense settled down from the upheavals of the Romantic era and much of the work of the time is seen as a bridge between this earlier era and the Modernist poetry of the next century (Wikipedia: English literature). On the whole, there are two main factors to point out in this period, factors that we can clearly see in the protagonists of this paper:
- Before the Victorian era, there were very few famous female poets. In the early nineteenth century writing was still seen as a predominently male preserve. However, despite views such as this, the Victorian period saw the emergence of many important female poets.
- More than anything else, what makes Victorians Victorian is their sense of social responsibility, a basic attitude that obviously differentiates them from their immediate predecessors, the Romantics.
- Bibliography:
- Elisabeth Barrett Browning; 28th Dec. 2007. Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia; Last modified 4th January 2008: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Barrett_Browning.
- Robert Browning; 28th Dec. 2007. Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia; Last modified 15th January 2008: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Browning
- Elisabeth Barrett Browning; 28th Dec. 2007. Poets.org: the Academy of American Poets; 1997-2008: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/152
- Elisabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning from Chapter XI, Period IX. The Victorian Period. About 1830 To 1901 ; 28th Dec. 2007. About.com: Classic literature; 2008; http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/rfletcher/bl-rfletcher-history-11-browning.htm
- Robert Browning – Biography by Glenn Everett, Associate Professor of English, University of Tennessee at Martin; 28yh Dec. 2007. The Victorian Web; last modified 7th May 2007; http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/rb/rbbio.html
- Robert Browning; Books and Writers; 28th Dec. 2007. Kirjasto.sci.fi; 2003: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/browning.htm
- Robert Browning; 28th Dec. 2007. Poets.org: the Academy of American Poets; 1997-2008: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/182
- Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett and After by Steve King; 28th Dec. 2007. Today in literature: Great books, good stories, every day: http://www.todayinliterature.com/stories.wk.asp?Event_Date=12/12/1889
- Robert Browning; 28th Dec. 2007. Online-literature: the Literature Network; 2000-2008: http://www.online-literature.com/robert-browning/
- Robert Browning; 28th Dec. 2007. The Poetry Archive; 2005: http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoet.do?poetIhttp://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoet.do?poetId=1545d=1545
- The Great Poets: Victorian Poets; 15th January 2008. Poet Seers.com; http://www.poetseers.org/the_great_poets/victorian_poets