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A Report on the Published and Unpublished Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Mary Russell Mitford 1836-1854

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Meredith B. Raymond
Meredith B. Raymond
Affiliation:
University of Massachusetts–Amherst
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Extract

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.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 1 , January 1973 , pp. 37 - 62
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1973

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References

NOTES

1. Kintner, Elvan, ed., The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1845–46, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1970).Google Scholar There are 573 letters in this edition, half of which, of course, are EBB's.

Ownership permission to quote from the unpublished letters in the Fitzwilliam Museum and the Wellesley College Library has been granted by Miss Phyllis Giles and Miss Eleanor Nichols, curators of the Browning materials at these respective institutions.

2. Miller, Betty, ed., Elizabeth Barrett to Miss Mitford: The Unpublished Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Barrett to Mary Russell Mitford (London: John Murray, 1954).Google ScholarMrsMiller, says, “Quantity, it became evident, threatened to outweigh quality” (pp. xvi–xvii).Google Scholar

3. Kenyon, Frederic G., ed., The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1897).Google Scholar Kenyon publishes only one letter (which he dates June 1838) before EBB's marriage. The MSS are now at Wellesley, but Kenyon's typescripts are preserved in the Manuscript Division of the British Museum under the “Additional MSS” category.

4. Taplin, Gardner B., The Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1957).Google Scholar

5. Professor Palmer's wife, Alice Freeman Palmer, was President of Wellesley College between 1882 and 1887. Hannah D. French, recently retired Research Librarian of Wellesley College, describes “The Browning Collection of the Wellesley College Library” in the Browning Newsletter, No. 6 (Spring, 1971), pp. 28–37.Google Scholar

6. Mr. George Sears of the editorial department of the G. and C. Merriam Company and I are both at a loss as to what is the correct term here. Folio has other connotations, so I follow his suggestion and use fold with this special definition. The folds may be considered as sections of the letter.

7. She begins to use the mourning paper in the spring of 1840, as in April the Barretts had received word of the death of her brother, Samuel, on 17 Feb. in Jamaica. “Bro” was drowned on 11 July 1840.

8. The portions of EBB's handwriting most generally acknowledged to be deciphered with greatest difficulty are those written after her brother's drowning. As is well known, she was literally laid low with grief and remorse and must have written in a nearly supine position. But it was not just the angle of posture, as the same irregular up-and-down line indicative of emotional stress is seen even in later years whenever she writes of Bro.

9. In addition to the work of Taplin, Miller, Kenyon, and Kintner already mentioned, Huxley, Leonard's Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Letters to her Sister, 1846–1859 (London: John Murray, 1929)Google Scholar, Shackford, Martha Hale's Letters from Elizabeth Barrett to B. R. Haydon (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1939)Google Scholar, McCarthy, Barbara P.'s Elizabeth Barrett to Mr. Boyd (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1955)Google Scholar, are most helpful editions, as is that of Landis, Paul and Freeman, Ronald E. entitled Letters of the Brownings to George Barrett (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1958).Google Scholar The two-volume Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Richard Hengist Horne, ed. Mayer, S. Townshend (London: Richard Bentley, 1877)Google Scholar is not helpful because of its unreliable dates. Just published at this writing is the correspondence between EBB and Haydon, Benjamin Robert, Invisible Friends, ed. Pope, Willard B. (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1972)Google Scholar, which provides some half dozen additions to those in Professor Shackford's book.

10. It is also helpful to keep track of the dates when the ships returned from the West Indies, for Elizabeth looked forward to learning what parts of the cargo would make suitable gifts for Miss Mitford. Therefore, a note of a gift of tamarinds, chocolate, or shaddocks can be an important clue for a date. Similarly, a record of Devon cream sent from Torquay to Three Mile Cross may prove a valuable item of information.

11. The most helpful biographies of Mary Russell Mitford are: Watson, Vera, Mary Russell Mitford (London: Evans, n.d. [1949])Google Scholar and Roberts, W. J., Mary Russell Mitford: The Tragedy of a Blue Stocking (London: Andrew Melrose, 1913).Google Scholar In addition to the aforementioned work by L'Estrange, A. G. K., he has also edited The Life of Mary Russell Mitford: Told by Herself in Letters to Her Friends, 2 vols. (New York: Harper, 1870).Google Scholar The other major source of her published letters is Chorley, Henry, ed., Letters of Mary Russell Mitford, 2nd Ser., 2 vols. (London: Richard Bentley, 1872).Google Scholar

12. The exact source of this quotation is not indicated.

13. EBB contributed to three successive editions of Findens' Tableaux: 1838, 1839, and 1840. These were published in October of the preceding year in each case. (See Taplin, , pp. 63–64, 77.Google Scholar) They were dedicated to Lady Dacre, Lady Egerton, and Lady Sidmouth, respectively.

14. Miller, Betty (p. 174)Google Scholar has an error of a day when she gives the date as 1 Sept. 1842.

15. See Miller, , pp. xiii–xv.Google Scholar Dorothy Hewlett suggests another angle: “Miss Mitford wrote to a correspondent that it was ‘as if I had heard that Dr Chambers had given her over when I got the letter announcing her marriage, and found she about to cross to France. I never had an idea of her reaching Pisa alive’” (p. 196).

16. The letter is found in Hood, Thurman L., ed., Letters of Robert Browning Collected by Thomas J. Wise (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1933), p. 22Google Scholar:

March 9., '49.

Dear Miss Mitford,

Ba desires me to tell you that she gave birth, at 2-¼ this morning, to a fine, strong boy, like Harry Gill with the voice of three,–a fact we learned when he was about half born–Ba bore the 21 hours,–a long 21 hours' pain, without one cry or tear, as I know, who held her hand whenever they would let me. Now all is over; the babe seems happy in his cradle, and Ba is, I suppose, the very thing you call happy–this is God's reward for her entire perfectness to me and everybody but herself. You know something,–perhaps a great deal of her–but I know, if not all, quite as much as my knowledge can hold. So, be joyful with her, and so kind to me as to allow me to consider myself, dear Miss Mitford,

Yours very faithfully ever,

Robert Browning.

17. For the passage mentioned and source of these quotations, see Mitford, Mary Russell, Recollections of a Literary Life or Books, Places, and People (New York: Harper, 1852), pp. 171–72.Google Scholar

18. See Kenyon, , II, 49, 57Google Scholar, for the letters to Miss Mitford and John Kenyon.

19. Once, in a letter dated 6 Dec. 1842 (unpublished, Wellesley), in a portion Mrs. Miller has excised, Elizabeth, speaking of Mrs. Dupuy's financial reverses and also cognizant of MRM's impecunious state, said: “Altho' poverty is an evil, it is a minor evil as compared with any bereavement of the affections,” and went on (see Miller, , p. 151Google Scholar) to compare her own family's reversals at Hope End as “thrice happy and blessed” in view of what followed (the death of her two brothers). Yet Elizabeth displays a remarkable grasp of the pros and cons of investing as they discuss ways of handling the subscription.

20. For example, the dates on EBB's letters in November and December 1842 during this crisis run as follows: for November–2, 4, 5, 8, 14 (two letters), 18, 19, 21, 23, 26, 27, 28; for December–3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 (two letters), 9, 11, 13, 14, 17, etc.; and a similar count for October.

21. The copy in the B.M. is approximately five by three inches–not so diminutive as is suggested by Elizabeth in her letter of 4 Oct. 1842 (unpublished, Wellesley), who says, “But really, considering that the book's so far too small to be read, the verses may be well enough to remain invisible.” In addition to poetic selections to which Elizabeth contributed her “Introductory Stanzas,” the book contained information of the almanac type as well as pictures of Mont Blanc!

22. EBB eventually saw Horne after his marriage when he visited the Brownings in Paris in the fall of 1851. Taplin tells us she did not see Chorley, “until the summer of 1852, when she and Browning dined one evening at his London home” (p. 131).Google Scholar

23. Although the subject of Miss Martineau's mesmeric cure is discussed and although EBB does suggest that MRM might get some help by this means, these letters do not give us much material on EBB's attraction to spiritualism and table-tipping.

24. Let his biographer (where is he?) look to these letters.

25. See Woolf, Virginia, Flush, A Biography (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1933)Google Scholar, who says concerning the “stealings” of Flush: “As a matter of fact, Flush was stolen three times; but the unities seem to require that the three stealings shall be compressed into one” (p. 175). Dr. Lola L. Szladits, Curator of the Berg Collection, has analyzed the particular appeal which Flush had for MrsWoolf, . See her article, “‘The Life, Character and Opinions of Flush the Spaniel,’” in Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 74 (1970), 211–18.Google Scholar

26. See Taplin, , pp. 79–81Google Scholar, on this morbidity.

27. My scholarly research has not determined the date as a certain one nor has it determined the date of Flush's birth. But work is in progress on these non-vital statistics.

28. Flush also delivered letters, as well as journals, to the invalid's room at Wimpole Street. See letter of 24 Mar. 1842 in Miller (p. 111). This letter (3000 words) contains, it should be noted, an important discussion of unity and morality in art in the excised portions.