Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Writing in Isolation

 

The expression of frustration could have been sent from any tier in travel-restricted Britain: “Where do you go in July? For me, I cant answer. I am longing to go to London, & hoping to the last. That is all. For the present, ... certainly the window has been opened twice – an inch – but my physician shakes his head or changes the conversation (which is worse) whenever London is mentioned. But if it becomes possible, I shall go – will go! Putting it off to another summer is like a never.”

 In fact, it was mailed from Torquay in June 1840, by someone who had already spent two years in virtual lockdown there. Its recipient was Richard Hengist Horne, a literary man about town. Horne has since fallen into obscurity, but the letter writer would go on to become world famous as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, author of many pioneering works, including one of the best-known poems ever written, “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways”.

 For now, though, she was an emerging talent struggling to keep any sense of herself as a writer alive. The success of her The Seraphim and Other Poems two years earlier had been eclipsed by the onset of severe illness that prompted her medical evacuation from the polluted capital. As a result she was feeling isolated, and left behind. As she confided to another friend: “What claim had I in my solitude & sadness & helpless hopeless sickness upon a literary man overwhelmed with occupation & surrounded by friends & fitnesses of all sorts in London?”

 In fact, she wasn’t alone in her isolation. Bad health was good business for 19th-century Torquay. Wealthy invalids flocked to the south Devon town for its sunshine and sea air. Local landlords and tradesmen profited from the absence of any effective cure for illnesses as various as gout, tuberculosis and plain old asthma. So did doctors, whose quack remedies included cupping, bleeding and herbal decoctions. The 34-year-old was among many incomers settling round its picturesque harbour. Here she shared a family “bubble” with an aunt, sister and favourite brother, all “quenching the energies of their lives” in this frustratingly limited existence; her wider social and professional life would remain entirely virtual for years. In 1845 she would still be writing to Robert Browning, “As for me, I have done most of my talking by the post of late years – as people shut up in dungeons, take up with scrawling mottos on the walls.”

 Elizabeth had lived with chronic illness, self-isolating on and off, for much of her adult life. The emergency that precipitated her flight to Torquay was coughing up blood. Unlike John Keats, however, she seems to have had not tuberculosis, but bronchitis and asthma that, without modern clinical treatments, eventually merged into pneumonia, to kill her at 55. For this brilliant woman, who was writing poems at six and French dramas at 10, and whose first book was published at 14, “the straitness of my prison” was becoming intolerable.

 As a robust, outdoorsy child she had planned (in no particular order) to become the greatest female poet ever, to help liberate Greece from Ottoman rule, and to become Lord Byron’s girlfriend. But when she was 15, she and her sisters caught an undiagnosed illness, quickly followed by measles, which in Elizabeth turned to months of headaches and whole-body muscular spasms. Today, her diagnosis would probably be viral illness and post-viral syndrome. Unfortunately, medicine of the time used the spine as a metonym for any systemic illness – and treated it accordingly. The teenager was confined to a spinal sling for nine months. She emerged scarcely able to walk, and her health never fully recovered.

 In 2018, when I started writing the first biography of Barrett Browning in three decades, a mysterious respiratory illness that clinicians were helpless to understand or alleviate appeared remote, colourfully old-fashioned. And she seemed a most unlikely role model. I’d absorbed the cultural cliche of the neurasthenic poetess in The Barretts of Wimpole Street, Rudolf Besier’s Broadway hit that spawned three films and seven TV dramas. Now I found myself wading through theoretical and fictional speculation about psychosomatic symptoms, a feminist retreat to the couch, or all-round privileged weediness. Just like the pandemic conspiracy theories that were beginning to crop up on my social media, these speculations seemed obsessed with avoiding the brutal truth of human vulnerability: denying the fact of illness which, though today clinically manageable in the west, still kills millions in the absence of, for example, antibiotics or steroid inhalers.

 By 2020, as I continued to track her lifelong search for the clean, warm air that would let her breathe, Barrett Browning’s struggle for life took on an ugly new meaning. It became increasingly hard to spend days thinking about someone racked with coughing, fighting for breath and profoundly frustrated in all she wanted to do, when every time I stood up from my work table it was to hear more of the same. Her oscillation between frustration and fear became comprehensible, immediate and at times almost overwhelming. To write biography is after all to take on your subject on her own terms – and, like all writing, that means putting your self in the frame, whether you mean to or not.

 Yet the same material was also offering me a fascinating insight into how to cope with what was going on in my own world. Elizabeth was one of the first cultural influencers to understand how a virtual existence offers escape from daily life, “The escape from pangs of heart & bodily weakness ... when you throw off yourself … what you feel to be yourself … into another atmosphere & into other relations, where your life may spread its wings out new,” as she explained it to Browning. She escaped via paper rather than a screen, of course; but her grasp of self-invention through a kind of “second life” reminded me of all the friendships we were suddenly reconfiguring on Zoom. I also realised how closely her practice prefigured today’s digital communicators: not just the teenagers and geeks, bloggers and TikTok stars, but citizen journalists, activists and those policed by authoritarian regimes too.

 For in creating this virtual presence Barrett Browning went further than just building a form of personal freedom. In 1844 she published Poems, the book that consolidated her reputation and would lead to her nomination for poet laureate (though it took Britain another century and a half to actually appoint a woman). It also ushered in her modernising style, with its conversational language, story-telling drive – and ethical imperatives. Together with Alfred Tennyson and, later, Browning, she was signalling the end of Romanticism and the start of a distinctively Victorian way of writing for a new, mass audience. Changing the course of literary history, from this point on she would achieve international celebrity, and influence writers as varied as Emily Dickinson, John Ruskin, Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling and Virginia Woolf.

 Key to her new way of writing was its use of influence. Barrett Browning might be confined to her room but, like Charles Dickens, she deployed her fame, and rapidly widening readership, to advocate against key injustices of her day. Her still-shocking “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point” was published in an abolitionist fundraiser in 1848; she also wrote fundraiser poetry for the Ragged Schools movement giving poor kids an education, and had published an impassioned condemnation of child labour, “The Cry of the Children”, in the mass-circulation Blackwood’s Magazine. In “The Runaway Slave” and in Aurora Leigh she condemned rape and forced prostitution – rather than their victims. Finally, “Casa Guidi Windows” and other late poems forced the Italian anti-imperial struggle on the attention of British readers, and it’s for this that she would receive a hero’s funeral in Florence

Elizabeth’s life story isn’t just a useful guide to working around isolation, though. There was, eventually, an end to lockdown. Poems (1844) had also inspired the young Robert Browning to contact her. When the pair eventually married, it was to Italy that they ran away together. The next 15 years, though latterly marred by the recurrence of Elizabeth’s ill-health, were a period of glorious nomadism. Working from abroad and searching about to create their ideal lifestyle, first in Pisa and then in Florence – with stays in Rome, Paris, London and Le Havre – the Brownings lived the life of perpetual adventure that today’s digital nomads have rediscovered.

 From the first moment, “it was all glorious, & past speaking of”. A southern climate, fresh air and fresh food allowed Elizabeth to get really well for the first time in her adult life. The couple stayed in a medieval collegio, in spa towns and Tuscan villas, eventually settling on the first floor apartment in a palazzo near Florence’s Boboli Gardens that Elizabeth would name Casa Guidi. They adopted Italian habits including the evening passeggiata, while tapping into the expat community’s local knowledge. Food was a particular revelation: “We dine our favorite way on thrushes & Chianti with a miraculous cheapness – It is a continental fashion, which we never cease commending. Then at six we have coffee & rolls of milk – made of milk, I mean: & at nine, our supper (call it supper, if you please) of roast chesnuts & grapes – ”

 British visitors have embraced the Med since the days of the grand tour. What differentiated the Brownings was that they continued to send work back to publishers in London and the US; and to keep up with fellow writers and artists through mail and visits. Elizabeth proved as determined to sustain her writing life as she had been to carve it out. In the model she created in Florence – of a home from home, in which to work from home – I think she found the perfect response to her lockdown life. Necessary as that had been, it taught her actively to embrace the freedom to travel when it came: something I recognise in the travel plans friends are sharing now for “when this is all over”.

 Besides, the shadow cast by those years of isolation was surely what made her pay such passionate attention when she found herself in Italy, and campaign so hard for the country’s future: rather as we debate organising society differently from now on. When our lockdown ends, I’ve realised, we could do worse than throw ourselves into campaigning for change, whether for social justice or the planet we find ourselves on. Just like that remarkable pioneer Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

 What we can learn from Elizabeth Barrett Browning's years in lockdown. By Fiona Sampson. The Guardian February 15, 2021.

 

Fiona Sampson, author of a new biography, Two-Way Mirror: The Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning,discusses the life and work of the Victorian poet. Although perhaps best known for her runaway romance with fellow poet Robert Browning, Elizabeth also battled chronic illness and family troubles to create influential activist writing and ground-breaking poetry.

 Elizabeth Barrett Browning: poet, activist, trailblazer, runaway. History Extra , BBC ,  February 17, 2021.

‘Ah, did you once see Shelley plain?’ asks the speaker in Robert Browning’s poem ‘Memorabilia’ — a line which recognises how easy it is to misread a writer once they’ve passed into a hazy afterlife of fame, neglect or simple misunderstanding. Yet few of Browning’s contemporaries are as hard to see plain as his own wife: the poet who was known to her family as Ba, signed herself EBB, and published a number of popular works under her married name of Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
 
During her lifetime she was one of the most admired poets of the age; a framed portrait of her hung in the bedroom of Emily Dickinson, and when Wordsworth died in 1850 there was serious talk of her becoming the first female poet laureate. Since her death in 1861, however, her reputation has sunk like a bad soufflé.
 
For many readers, knowledge of her poetry is now restricted to a single line reproduced every year on thousands of Valentine’s Day cards — ‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways’ — while her lifelong struggles with illness and laudanum addiction have been replaced in the popular imagination by sugary romances such as Rudolf Besier’s 1930 play The Barretts of Wimpole Street and its 1964 musical adaptation Robert and Elizabeth.
 
Even the Google Doodle that celebrated her birthday in 2014 turned her into a girlish figure who appeared to be oddly fascinated by a wilting flower. Tiny in real life (Annie Thackeray described her as ‘very very small, not more than four feet eight inches I should think’), in death she has been treated more like a wax doll: a pretty simulacrum of a human being without any inner life at all.
 
There were some early warning signs in Virginia Woolf’s 1933 novel Flush, a playful version of Elizabeth Barrett’s life as seen from the perspective of her pet spaniel. In one scene Flush barks and trembles at his own reflection in a mirror: ‘Was not the little brown dog opposite himself?’ asks Woolf. ‘But what is “oneself”? Is it the thing people see? Or is it the thing one is?’ The central aim of Fiona Sampson’s new biography is to strip away the illusions we have about this unfashionable poet and get far closer to seeing her as she was. It is a bold attempt to understand EBB before her reputation started to ebb.
 
She was born in 1806, and her early life was in many ways a pastoral idyll. Growing up in a large country house in Herefordshire that was (to her considerable embarrassment as an adult) paid for by her family’s involvement in the slave trade, as a child she was encouraged to write poetry that made up in confidence for what it lacked in skill. (An ode on her sister Henrietta includes the lines: ‘But now you have a horrid cold, /And in an ugly night cap you are rolled.’) She was also a tomboy who boasted that she ‘could run rapidly & leap high’and ‘climb pretty well up trees’.
 
Then it all started to go wrong. By the time she was in her twenties, a long list of symptoms that included intense physical pain, crippling fatigue and bronchial infections that caused her to cough up what Sampson refers to as ‘slugs of yellow, grey, green mucus’, meant that she spent most days confined to her bedroom and a ‘little slip of sitting room’ on the third floor of 50 Wimpole Street, the family’s new London home. Here she was protected from the outside world by a fiercely loving and gloomily religious father, who refused to countenance the possibility that she might ever want to leave him for another man. It was like living in a nunnery of one.
 
Her main form of escape came through the poetry she continued to write, including heart-tugging appeals such as ‘The Cry of the Children’ (1842), which helped to publicise Lord Shaftesbury’s reform of the child labour laws, and a bestselling two-volume collection of Poems (1844). For someone whose life was usually enclosed by four walls, poems were like an extra set of windows she could open onto the world.
 
They were also far less willing to submit to the sort of limitations she had to settle for in her own life. A poem such as her semi-autobiographical epic Aurora Leigh (1856) is written in a form of blank verse that keeps fraying at the edges and sometimes gleefully bursts apart at the seams. Repeatedly the speaker’s voice reveals itself to be much more disruptive than it might at first appear: not that of an angel in the house, but rather of a woman who wants to show us how hard it is to move around while wearing a crinoline without bumping into the furniture.
 
The turning point of Elizabeth Barrett’s life was her first meeting with the man who would become her husband. Even before they saw each other it was clear how much they had in common. Robert Browning’s earliest communication with her in 1844 was a fan letter that he signed off: ‘I do, as I say, love these books with all my heart —and I love you too.’ And as their relationship blossomed over the next few months both of them enjoyed tangling together writing and real life.
 
Not only did they meet frequently in person — Robert would end up making 91 visits to Wimpole Street in total — they also wrote to each other almost daily, lovingly playing around with each other’s choice of language in a series of intimate allusions and private jokes. In effect they were practising for the time when their hands would be joined together more permanently in marriage. Each time one of Elizabeth’s letters left her bed-sitting room to make its way across London it was like a literary exercise in elopement.
 
After a secret marriage and rapid departure from Wimpole Street in 1846, their final destination was Italy, where they moved into a seven-roomed apartment in the Palazzo Guidi in Florence. Sampson is especially good on the happy routines of their life, as they spent their days eating ice cream, entertaining visitors, and writing, writing, writing.
 
Following this honeymoon period and the birth of a son, whom they jokingly nicknamed Pen, they seem to have drifted apart in terms of their daily activities. After disagreeing over matters such as spiritualism (Elizabeth was intrigued and hopeful, whereas Robert dismissed it as an absurd hoax), Sampson reports that within a few years they were ‘leading almost parallel lives’. Yet they remained as close as ever on paper. There is something painfully moving in Robert’s report of his wife’s last illness, as he lifted her up towards him and she kissed him repeatedly, even kissing the air after he had laid her back on the bed, and murmuring ‘Beautiful... beautiful’ as she held out her hands to him one last time. When she died he was broken by grief. ‘How she looks now,’ he wrote from her deathbed, ‘how perfectly beautiful.’
 
Sampson points out that in some ways these final moments were just the most literal version of a struggle that Elizabeth had always experienced as a female poet, forever ‘fighting for breath, determined to stay alive and to speak’, and this biography is a generous attempt to restore her reputation. The individual who emerges is not the sad-eyed invalid we are familiar with, but an ambitious woman who enjoyed teasing men. One letter to Robert during their courtship breaks off with an ellipsis that is also a saucy come-on, telling him that she longs ‘for some experience of life & man, for some…’) She could also be surprisingly catty. ‘I never could apprehend that a person with such breadth of chest & with so little tendency to becoming thin, was of a consumptive habit,’ she once observed of a friend’s daughter.
 
Occasionally Sampson’s attempts to turn her into a more contemporary figure strike a false note, with references to ‘virtue-signalling’ and ‘snowflakes’ that are themselves likely to sound outdated before too long. But, overall, this is a fine contribution to a growing number of biographies that try to pick off the barnacles of rumour and legend that have attached themselves to the lives of writers, and instead reveal them as they really were — or at least how they appear to us now.
 
Rescuing Elizabeth Barrett Browning from her wax-doll image. By Robert Douglas Fairhurst. The Spectator, January 30, 2021. 

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, although a famous poet in her lifetime, has struggled to hold her rightful place in the literary canon. Poet Fiona Sampson’s new biography, Two-Way Mirror, the first of Barrett Browning in 30 years, seeks to rectify that anomaly by looking at the personal life and poetic influence of this remarkable woman. 
 
Growing up in Herefordshire, Ba, as she was affectionately known at home, was a tomboy who relished country living. However, as well as her overbearing family, Elizabeth faced another bodily oppression: grave but undiagnosed illness. Sampson speaks of the poet’s cloistering illness in the context of our own period of isolation. “She is a fascinating model of how to live a locked-down life,” Sampson tells me. “She railed against it frequently. She described it as a prison.” Indeed, Elizabeth’s social life largely depended on letters, “the equivalent of screen time now. I wouldn’t say that she profited from being shut away.” 
 
Despite her physical problems, “she had a very clear mind-body distinction, which now we are not supposed to do; we are meant to be all anti-Cartesian,” says Sampson. Elizabeth resented her body—“my stupid vibrating body,” as she called it—yet her mind roamed free. She was prolific in her confinement, publishing poetry on Italian reunification and the abolition movement that “was having a huge leverage on public opinion in Britain… doing extraordinary things that changed European culture, the culture of a whole continent,” as Sampson puts it.  
 
Biographers spend what Sampson describes as “conceptual, quality time” with their subjects. “It was a book which was quite hard to finish because she does die of a respiratory illness… you can almost feel it yourself. That suffocation, that struggling for breath: writing about it during the pandemic has been an extraordinary test.” 
 
Alongside the themes of illness and isolation, another moment of Elizabeth’s life struck a chord. Her brother, known as Bro, comes to visit her in Torquay and drowns in an inexplicable boating accident. Elizabeth felt responsible for his death. Sampson points out that “years later she wrote to Robert [Browning, her husband] that she couldn’t get over the guilt and grief. She only writes about it once, about how she asked Bro to stay, that she knew he was bored and ‘quenching the energies of his life’ as she put it, and that she knew even her father needed him back in London for the family business and yet she got her way. To die in a boating accident even suggests dying of boredom in a way, through taking unnecessary risks. It was a wholly unnecessary death.”
 
Two-Way Mirror raises an intriguing question: do we become different people in different places? Elizabeth seems to adopt different characteristics as she moves from rural Hope End, to urban smoggy London, and then to Cornwall for her health—and finally to mainland Europe when she married Browning. 
 
Gloucester and Torquay are associated with frustrating, debilitating ill health while London offers creative inspiration and renewed energy. “I do feel that there is a spring in her mental step immediately when she gets back to Wimpole Street from Torquay, where she lapsed into depression, especially after Bro dies. She escapes that provincialism of a small, gossipy place.” Going abroad rejuvenated her spirits. After her marriage to Browning in 1846, the couple went to France and then Italy. “She had a happy decade,” as Sampson puts it, “where she turned out to have so much more health and strength than she thought.” 
 
Sampson thinks there is a precursor here to digital nomadism, as the Brownings travel and write, sending their work back to London to be published. “There is a funny bifurcation, going from locked-down life to being a digital nomad. It’s encouraging actually, I think it’s something we should all pin our hopes to.” A strong sense comes out of Elizabeth’s letters from abroad that life is there for enjoying at long last. 
 
“It is only when she gets to Europe and she is no longer a daughter in a household but head of her own that she can apply intellectual will to the problems of the world. She is doing this against the odds, as a woman and a woman living with chronic illness.” 

Indeed, when she was young Elizabeth expressed optimism about the status of women, though she changed her mind when she came up against solid barriers. Although she could be published, even under her own name—unlike Charlotte Brontë, who opted for a male pseudonym to secure a publisher—criticism of Elizabeth’s work retained a patronising air from the literary establishment. “She’s practically [described as] a poetess, which is a diminutive, isn’t it,” says Sampson. “I do think these things haven’t gone away. I think she speaks enormously to women’s experience now particularly within literature and academia, publishing and journalism. Her experience is not, alas, obsolete.” 
 
Elizabeth presents a mix between conformity to her era’s expectations as well as a pioneering defiance of their boundaries. “She pushed as hard as she could, as much as she could, mostly by writing, against those boundaries and I think she shifted those boundaries for public opinion,” says Sampson. The biographer sees a link between her battle with illness and her apparent conformity within her family prior to her elopement: “she had fought so hard to stay alive, she was happy to do the extra work, the planning, keeping a respectful life, to seem to conform in order to keep the space on the page, in order to radically not conform.” 
 
Sampson sees her biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, as well as her earlier one of Mary Shelley, as a way of maintaining space for female writers of the past and their present-day successors. “To try and rope them together to climb the mountain, to keep checking the links in the chain in women’s writing—not because I think it is a separate tradition, which can be dismissed as a minor tradition, but because it is part of the Great Tradition.”
 
The life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sampson concludes, “is a story about willpower. A story about absolute determination to be a writer: wilful, brave self-invention.” 
 
Writing isolation—why Elizabeth Barrett Browning is the poet for our time. By Alice Wright. Prospect,  February 9, 2021

 

 Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Profile on Poetry Foundation