Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Abstract

Elizabeth Barrett Browning Beverly Taylor (bio) The latest volume of The Brownings' Correspondence (Wedgestone, 2022) is once again the greatest boon of the year to Browning scholarship. The delay of volume 28, covering correspondence from both Brownings in the period spanning May 1860–February 1861, caused by a change in printers, kept students of the poets' works perpetually wanting more. Now it is here, and this volume does not disappoint. Superbly edited by Philip Kelley, Edward Hagen, and Linda M. Lewis, it provides authoritative texts, crucial and expert annotations, and in three very useful appendices, biographical sketches of correspondents not previously identified in the series (in this volume, William Cornwallis Cartwright, the Brownings' neighbor in Rome), quotations of relevant passages from supporting documents, and contemporary reviews of the Brownings' works published during the period covered (in this instance, EBB's Poems before Congress and Aurora Leigh). This volume ends with a unique contribution, representing forty-three images from EBB's "own" personal carte-de-visite album, which she purposefully collected after RB gave her the album in October 1860. RB's 1878 notation on the front flyleaf of the album assures viewers that all the photos were chosen and arranged by EBB herself. These include many participants in the complex events of the Risorgimento, most of them Italian patriots, military and political leaders, and supporters of the movement (including Napoleon III, Camile de Cavour, and Garibaldi)—what she called "the public men mixed up with the Italian question" (p. 202), though she also included Pio Nono (Pope Pius IX), whom she viewed as an impediment to unification. She wrote that these photographs were "the most deeply interesting of possible sights," insofar as "souls are seen in faces" (p. 202). A couple of the photographs seem to document personal friendships rather than roles in [End Page 348] the Risorgimento (such as Walter Savage Landor, who had come under RB's guardianship, and Seymour Kirkup, an English artist and art historian residing in Florence), and a couple of the images from cartes-de-visite have been lost (those of the opera composers Verdi and Rossini). EBB's focus on the Italian movement toward unification and independence as a nation-state occupies many of the letters in this volume, most of them concerned with attitudes toward Louis Napoleon, now the French Emperor Napoleon III: Was he a hero who risked much by daring to champion Italy militarily against Austrian forces? Or was he an untrustworthy ally, who merely feigned sincere support in order to grab Italian territory to aggrandize France? In numerous letters, EBB reports that she has been vilified for supporting Napoleon III: at one point, she remarks that in England, where her "A Curse for a Nation" was hotly deplored, "they pay me a good deal . . . with mud and eggshells" (p. 195). A couple of unusually long letters to EBB reveal critical friends attempting to argue with her belief that Napoleon III merited praise and trust. On 3 September 1860, her old acquaintance Robert Bulwer Lytton (Owen Meredith) wrote that while Louis Napoleon's ends were not necessarily "selfish," his means were "unscrupulous" (p. 129). Later the same month, Frederick Tennyson (Alfred's brother, who became a friend of the Brownings in Florence) wrote EBB a less reasoned and persuasive letter to argue that Louis Napoleon's name represented 666, the mark of the beast (a creation of the devil), in three ancient languages: Hebrew, Greek, and Latin (p. 168). Despite her resistance to complaints that she betrayed her Englishness by supporting Italy so passionately, and happy to be popular in America, she nevertheless remarked, "anti-English as I am said to be, I prefer an English audience very much" (p. 217). The other major focus of EBB's correspondence in this year is her grief over the suffering of her sister Henrietta with uterine cancer. Longing to help nurse her beloved sister, she both praises her other sister, Arabella, for caring for Henrietta and also expresses distress that Arabella is on-site to care for the patient while EBB is separated by great distance. Even as she acknowledges that Arabella and RB are correct in judging that the cold of...