“Casa Guidi,” as Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning affectionately called their apartment in the fifteenth-century Palazzo Guidi, was their home for nearly all of their married life, from 9 May 1848 until Elizabeth's death on 29 June 1861. They took the apartment furnished for three months in the summer of 1847 and found life there so pleasant that when in the following year it became available, they established themselves in Casa Guidi on a permanent basis and furnished the apartment themselves. Their only child, Pen, was born in Casa Guidi. Elizabeth wrote Casa Guidi Windows and Aurora Leigh there and Robert, many of the poems in Men and Women. It was to Casa Guidi that Robert brought home “the square old yellow Book” which, metamorphosed by him, became The Ring and the Book. These were years of great happiness for the poets, and it is appropriate that Casa Guidi should be preserved as their memorial.

Would Elizabeth Barrett Browning have approved of the project to preserve Casa Guidi as a memorial to her and her husband? There are statements in her letters and in her poetry, and notably in the very poem to which she gave Casa Guidi's name, which suggest at first sight that she would not have supported any such idea.

Florence and Swallowfield. The very names symbolize the high and the low visibility now associated with Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Mary Russell Mitford. Other contrasts could be drawn. The stifling sick-room and the garden of geraniums, the “poetess” and wife of Robert Browning and the “authoress” of Our Village who was the only child of Dr. Mitford, country gentleman. Or, to mention a point on which Miss Mitford showed some sensitivity, a life of financial freedom versus one of financial uncertainty. What was the attraction which insured the constant and copious interchange of letters, a record which can only be labelled remarkable in a century of remarkable letter-writers? The answer is a multiple one, as whoever reads Elizabeth's side of this correspondence will discover. But such a reader will also discover a whole host of subjects and figures which will give him fresh insights into the public and private lives of the correspondents, their families, and their literary circles. The excerpt which follows indicates the ease with which Elizabeth Barrett shared her thoughts with Miss Mitford whether on topics creative or critical, domestic or political, and whether uttered in sickness or in relatively good health.

William Wetmore Story (Fig. 1), lawyer, poet, and sculptor, was born in Salem, Mass., in 1819. As one of America's most prominent nineteenth-century expatriate sculptors, he lived and worked in Rome, and he died in Vallombrosa in Tuscany in 1895. Story's friendship with Robert Browning was a crucial factor in his development as an artist; and during the 1850's, under the influence of the then still relatively unknown Browning, Story altered his approach to both poetry and sculpture.

Which is the proper text for an authoritative modern edition of Robert Browning's poems?

An analysis of Browning editions published during the past twenty-five years reveals that there has been a variety of answers to this question. The basis of many inexpensive reprints has been the sixteen-volume 1888-89 collection revised by Browning just before his death. More recently, at least two important editions–the Oxford Standard Authors volume, edited by Ian Jack, and the Ohio University Press variorum edition, edited by Roma A. King, Jr.–have adopted as their text the 1889 “reprint” of Browning's poems (though in the latter case the text is emended), which was issued after his death but incorporated many authorial revisions and corrections. A few editions have also reprinted earlier versions of the poems.

The question of Shelley's influence on the young Robert Browning is hardly a disputed one, but the question of how far it continues into the life and work of the later Browning is quite a different matter. While the early influence is readily acknowledged, the later hardly receives the amount of attention it deserves. The consensus among critics has long been that in his youth Browning had a great enthusiasm for Shelley, an enthusiasm clearly apparent in Pauline and Paracelsus, but abruptly extinguished in Sordello. Generally speaking, it would seem that Browning's ardent enthusiasm for Shelley the poet ends with Sordello in 1840, just as his respect for Shelley the man ends in 1856, with the discovery that he had abandoned his first wife. Any evidence for a lapse of his disaffection in later life seems effectively countered by Browning's own testimony in a letter written in 1885 to F. J. Furnivall, refusing the presidency of the newly formed Shelley Society: “For myself, I painfully contrast my notions of Shelley the man and Shelley, well, even the poet, with what they were sixty years ago, when I only had his works, for a certainty, and took his character on trust.” With these highlights of the relationship, most Browning critics and biographers terminate the discussion.