On to Aix-en-Provence, and then ‘glittering, roaring Marseilles .. coloured even down into its puddles’, from where, on 11 October, the party sail to Genoa. They leave in hot sun, but pass a stormy night. Everyone is seasick. But the next morning, wrapped in a warm cloak – and quickly joined by Robert – Elizabeth takes her famously strong sea legs up alone on deck for her first look at Italy. It is love at first sight:
a thousand mountains & their rocks leapt up against the morning-sun, & [I] counted the little Italian towns one after another. […] The ship was near enough to shore for us to see the green blinds to the windows of the houses […] In one place, I counted six mountains (such mountains!) one behind another, colour behind colour, from black, or the most gorgeous purple, to that spectral white which the crowding of the olives gives. […] & sometimes fragments of cloud hung on the rocks, shining as if the sun himself had broken it. It was all glorious, & past speaking of.
The enchantment continues at Genoa, where the lovers sleep in the frescoed chamber of a dilapidated palazzo. ‘Beautiful Genoa—what a vision it is!—& our first sight of Italy beside.’ At last, after one more stormy night in the steamer, they arrive at Livorno on 14 October 1846.
‘And now this is Pisa—beautiful Pisa! […] All tranquil & grand.’ Here the travellers part: Anna and Gerardine are going on to Rome. After three nights in the Hotel Tre Donzelli, Robert and Elizabeth rent a furnished three-bedroom apartment in the sixteenth-century Collegio Di Ferdinando, one short block from the Duomo, the Baptistery and the Leaning Tower, and with a good view of all three. They’re the only tenants of this stuccoed Renaissance palazzo in ‘the very “most eligible situation in Pisa”’, which boasts a ‘grand marble entrance, marble steps & pillars’ restored by Giorgio Vasari, whose Lives introduced generations of Europeans like the Brownings to Italy’s Renaissance artists. Better still, it has hot water thrown in with the rent, which Elizabeth and Robert believe is cheap – though it turns out to be above the going rate.
But after all they’re a new couple, and there’s going to be as much play as seriousness as they embark on their first, quixotic tries at married life:
You would certainly smile to see how we set about housekeeping. R. brought home white sugar in his pocket—[…] & our general councils with Wilson .. “What is a pound? what is an ounce?” .. would amuse you if you could hear them.
Impracticality settles into joyous pattern as the lovers embrace new habits:
We have our dinners from the Trattoria at two oclock, & can dine our favorite way on thrushes & Chianti with a miraculous cheapness—& no trouble, no cook, no kitchen, .. […] which exactly suits us—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—So you see how primitive we are, & how I forget to praise the eggs at breakfast.
And why not? The six months they’ll live here are an extended honeymoon. Robert ‘rises on my admiration, and is better & dearer to my affections every day & hour. […] And we have been together a whole month now, & he professes to love me “infinitely more”, instead of the dreadful “less” which was to have been expected.’
We can picture the newlyweds pottering about their emerging routines like a pair of clockwork mice. ‘How large a part of the real world, I wonder, are those two small people?—taking meanwhile so little room in any railway carriage, & hardly needing a double bed at the inn’, as Dante Gabriel Rossetti will speculate affectionately, ten years from now. But there are three people – and a dog – on this adventure, and it’s Wilson who must interact with the world to make it all happen. From getting baggage delivered to providing ‘the coffee & milk & bread’ on which the household appears to run, she’s forced to be intrepid, learning languages with impressive rapidity: ‘Just when she had succeeded so well in French as to be able to ask for various things, [she has] to merge all the new knowledge in the Italian “which seems to her harder still”.’ Far from becoming homesick, the formerly shy northern lass is blossoming: ‘Wilson is an oracle—very useful too & very kind.’
Perhaps it helps that there’s a separation of powers. Elizabeth has no desire to be a domestic goddess. Her ideal home life is literary, ‘We are going to be busy—we are full of literary plans’, as she announces on day one, and she’s more than happy to hand over household responsibilities:
the ordering of the dinner is quite out of my hands. As for me, when I am so good as to let myself be carried upstairs, & so angelical as to sit still on the sofa, & so considerate moreover as not to put my foot into a puddle, why my duty is considered done to a perfection.
Meanwhile, despite or because of this spoiling, she is ‘renewed to the point of being able to throw off most of my invalid habits, & of walking quite like a woman’. Less than a month after arriving, ‘everyday I am out walking while the golden oranges look at me over the walls, .. & when I am tired R. & I sit down on a stone to watch the lizards’, she tells Julia Martin. To Miss Mitford she boasts that, ‘Mrs Jameson says, she “wont call me improved, but transformed rather.” […] .. my spirits rise: I live—I can adapt myself.’
She can indeed adapt herself. At the beginning of 1847 Wilson collapses with stomach pains that she’s been alternately ignoring and treating with quack medicines for weeks. Elizabeth sends for a doctor, puts the maid to bed for ten days, and nurses her back to health. Close up, the invalid whom Robert married is proving unexpectedly resilient. In fact, so little does she notice physical discomfort that when she falls pregnant in October she doesn’t even realise it. She suffers no morning sickness, and, even when miscarriage threatens, she remains partially in denial. But on 21 March 1847 her pregnancy becomes undeniable and she miscarries what the attending doctor identifies as a five months’ pregnancy.
The day-long labour can’t but be a huge shock. Yet Elizabeth doesn’t grieve; on the contrary. She is forty-one, and this unexpected pregnancy feels like another marvel of her new life. She reports it carefully to her unmarried sisters:
Towards evening however regular pains came on, every five minutes .. & these lasted for above four & twenty hours, much as in an ordinary confinement—Oh, not so very violent! I have had worse pain, I assure you—It did not continue long enough at once to exhaust one! and when my eyes were open to the truth, I was as little frightened or agitated as at this moment, & bore it all so well (I mean with so much bodily vigour) as to surprise Wilson .. & Dr Cook, too indeed—
She is, truth be told, rather proud of what she takes as a new achievement; even though she’s also angry with herself for not having realised what was going on. She believes she lost the child through taking morphine (probably correct) and keeping too warm (perhaps incorrect). Robert is less sanguine. He ‘was so dreadfully affected by my illness, as to be quite overset, overcome—only never too much so, to spend every moment he was allowed to spend, by my bedside .. rubbing me, talking to me, reading to me .. and all with such tenderness, such goodness!’ and afterwards, ‘In the first moment of his readmission into this room he threw himself down on the bed in a passion of tears, sobbing like a child.’
Elizabeth is touched and delighted by this too, even as she can’t help noticing ‘Wilson shaking her head behind the curtain.’ Visceral reality replaces the fine words of nearly two years of courtship, and the first great test of their marriage has brought the couple closer still. Chianti and milk rolls, sunshine and mediaeval city streets: the embodied life takes its place at the heart of their partnership.
[Seventh Frame]
‘It has been within the philosophical tradition, which for me includes social, political and religious thought, that I have found the resources for the exploration of this identity and lack of identity, this independence and dependence, this power and powerlessness’, wrote the brilliant British philosopher Gillian Rose, introducing her often self-reflexive essays on Judaism and Modernity in 1993.
Eliza
beth uses the poetic tradition in a similar way. Of course, Aurora Leigh isn’t a self-portrait as such. But its author’s lifelong relationship with poetry, from precocious obsession to the literary homage that is her final poem, starts and ends with a fierce credo of art for art’s sake that has nothing to do with an ivory tower but everything to do with poetry in the world. It is poetry as political action, as prayer, as a way of life; and what Aurora Leigh captures is this notion of a life as and for writing. Like Gillian Rose, Elizabeth asks and resolves her life’s questions through the tradition she practises. Like Rose, she does this not by stepping outside it to reflect, but in the very process of contributing to it.
Her poems may not be autobiographical or largely confessional, but because they are the record of becoming herself, they record her life. Stephen Spender encapsulates this two-way, mirroring relationship between the poet’s self and their work in his 1964 poem ‘One More New Botched Beginning’. It’s a memorial to lost friends, the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty and fellow poets Louis MacNeice and Bernard Spencer. That all three were writers, and famous ones at that, is also to the point of this strange, touching and rather wandering poem. Life stories get drafted and redrafted, interrupted and lost, just like poems, it says. Our own continual process of rehearsal is carried on after death by our friends, and – for famous writers – by a posterity of strangers.
Book Eight: How to be autonomous
Inward evermore
To outward,—so in life, and so in art
Which still is life.
The auspiciously named Via delle Belle Donne, near the Piazza di Santa Maria Novella in Florence, is a cool chasm into which the bright April sun only just makes it between the wide eaves of Renaissance town houses. But less than 200 metres away are the giant chess pieces of the Duomo, Baptistery and Giotto’s tower. It’s here, just a month after Elizabeth’s miscarriage, that she, Robert and Wilson settle into comfortable new lodgings. They’re in search of a better climate, closer to where the action is. Happiness, it seems, is infinitely perfectible:
I persuaded Robert to get a piano—and we have a good one, a grand […] including the hire of music, for about ten shillings a month. […] Our payment for the apartment includes everything […]—we have real cups instead of the famous mugs of Pisa, & a complement of spoons & knives & forks, nay, we have decanters & champagne glasses […] As Wilson says succinctly, “it is something like”.
Once again the couple order in their meals from a trattoria, and they acquire a ‘ “donna di faccenda” […] who comes for a few hours everyday to make the beds, clean the rooms, brush Robert’s clothes, wash up the cups & saucers &c &c.’ In 1847 Florence is crisscrossed by English households and the network of tradespeople attuned to their needs. It attracts English visitors too. A couple of days after their arrival, the Brownings find themselves hosting Anna Jameson and Gerardine, homeward bound and eager to toast 23 April, Shakespeare’s birthday, with ‘a bottle of wine from Arezzo’. The runaways seem to have set young Geddie a poor example: in Rome she’s fallen in love with ‘A bad artist,! an unrefined gentleman,!! a Roman catholic! (converted from Protestantism!) a poor man!! with a red beard!!!’ as Elizabeth notes with amusement. Nevertheless, the women stay a week, celebrating the ‘matrimonio miracoloso, with as much love at the end of nearly eight months as at the beginning’, of which Mrs Jameson is such a key witness for literary London.
And literary London signals its approval. In May, ‘Mr Forster of the Examiner’ sends greetings, while news arrives that John Abraham Heraud, editor of The Christian’s Monthly Magazine, is lecturing ‘on the poems of Robert & Elizabeth Barrett Browning “now joined together in the bonds of holy matrimony.”’ ‘Certainly if ever there was a union indicated by the finger of Heaven itself, and sanctioned & prescribed by the Eternal Laws […] it seemed to me […] to be this!’ purrs Robert’s literary mentor Thomas Carlyle. Fashionable callers at the Via delle Belle Donne range from American artists – writer George William Curtis, and sculptor Hiram Powers – to old neighbours from among the English gentry.
Elizabeth’s flattering ‘Hiram Powers’ “Greek Slave”’ will appear in her Poems (1850). The Brownings respond differently to Hope End acquaintances Compton John Hanford and his sister Fanny, getting them to witness the marriage property settlement that Robert has asked John Kenyon to have drawn up. And it doesn’t hurt one bit to have such well-connected visitors witness this legal agreement, by which Robert returns to Elizabeth all the wealth that otherwise passed automatically to him on their marriage, and in so doing proves he’s no bounty hunter. Elizabeth seems to come over all aflutter at this, telling Arabella:
It was half past ten oclock, & Robert said .. “Now, Ba, do you lie down on the sofa, and I will read this to you”—“Oh,” I exclaimed, throwing myself down in utter prostration of body & soul, .. “if you read a page of it to me, I shall be fast asleep! […] It’s your Deed, you will please to remember, yours & Mr Kenyon’s, & not mine by any manner of means. […]—Well & how do you think the discussion ended? He would’nt read it either—
Don’t believe a word of it. This is a scenario staged by a woman as determined as she is intelligent. Elizabeth wants to give Robert all she possesses, and also to put that impulse in writing. But at the same time she’s determined to make his renunciation as public as possible.
The sisters are corresponding regularly now, though Elizabeth still gets homesick: ‘I dream of you all often & cry in my sleep.’ Three of her brothers also write: George sends a package of magazines and a book he’s careful to inscribe ‘Mrs R Browning’. Henry, long the most resistant to their father’s sway, mails a letter; and so does Stormie, settled this spring back in Jamaica away from Papa. Treppy sends loving greetings. But in a way their father is right. Elizabeth’s departure has gone to the heart of the family’s sense of itself. Now the sisters openly criticise Papa to each other – ‘It really does at this distance, appear to me a quite monstrous state of things’ – and Elizabeth unapologetically includes Henrietta’s unofficial fiancé Captain Surtees in family greetings.
She leaves out Bummy, though. When their unmarried aunt shouldered the ‘wicked stepmother’ role after her sister’s death in 1828, she sometimes crossed swords with the strong-willed eldest Barrett daughter. Even in the Torquay years, according to Henrietta, ‘She has sometimes been disposed to scold me a little, & sometimes to look coldly upon Ba which has made her feel nervous & fidgetey.’ Perhaps caring work is simply not Bummy’s nature. But what she feels about her brother-in-law, whom she’s known since they were both teenagers, is an intriguing blank. Presumably she found him likeable enough when she became his confidant during the difficult departure from Hope End. Fifteen years later, this impression of intimacy is reinforced as she takes his side against the newlyweds. It’s entirely possible that she expects to gain absolutely nothing by this. Marrying a dead wife’s sister has been illegal since 1835; it was ‘voidable’ and attracted social opprobrium even before then. But feelings can’t be legislated for, perhaps. We shouldn’t forget that back in 1828 Bummy was only a couple of years older than Elizabeth is now; plenty young enough to feel the push and pull of flattery and desire.
Or perhaps her motives are purely principled. After all the family sense of what’s possible, even morally permissible, has been shaken. It will take Surtees and Henrietta another four years to follow Elizabeth’s precedent, but this is rapid progress by Barrett standards. Besides, three more unofficial liaisons are to follow. Sixth son Alfred, the unfortunately nicknamed Daisy, having celebrated Henrietta’s 1850 marriage with a seventy-two-stanza epic, will go on to marry against Papa’s wishes in 1855. Even after their father’s death the Barrett boys seem to associate romance with the clandestine. Stormie’s two daughters, born out of wedlock in Jamaica (Eva, the first, just before Papa dies), are educated on the island by a governess – whom Stormie briefly marries – and later in France. The girls, their mother and the governess all have mixed
heritage, and it’s noticeable that Stormie never brings them home to his Montgomeryshire estate. But then neither, in the previous generation, did everyone’s favourite, Uncle Sam: and it is his illegitimate daughter Elizabeth – Stormie’s and indeed Elizabeth’s first cousin – who will be the mother of Stormie’s children. Finally, after joining his brother in Jamaica, in 1864 Sette too will have a mixed-heritage daughter by his ‘housekeeper’. All these illegitimate Barrett children, whose pasts and futures uncomfortably straddle both sides of the Caribbean’s violent racial divide, face lives destabilised by their fathers’ clandestine behaviour. And so damage passes down through the Barrett family.
But these ripple effects are in the future. Summer 1847 sees Elizabeth increasingly out and about, exploring Florence’s tawny-stuccoed neighbourhoods and its art treasures. ‘It is so delightful to see her enjoyment, everything that is beautiful from sentiment or form or colour she seizes directly, but particularly in sentiment’, Fanny Hanford reports. Michelangelo’s tomb and Galileo’s villa are trumped by a tea party with a couple who actually knew some of Elizabeth’s literary heroes. The Hoppners befriended Byron and the Shelleys in Venice, when Mr Hoppner was vice consul there. Though Elizabeth is thrilled by the connection, she doesn’t quite seem to realise that these were no casual acquaintances, but the family who fostered Byron’s daughter Allegra and took in the distraught Shelleys when their daughter Clara died in 1818. Apparently:
On their arrival they ate nothing except water gruel & boiled cabbages & cherries, because it was a principle of Shelley’s not to touch animal food, & […] Mrs Hoppner did, as she said, ‘seduce’ him into taking roast beef & puddings .. ‘Dear Mr Shelley, you are so thin[‘]. (Fancy all this said with a pretty foreign accent.) ‘Now if you wd take my advice, you would have a very little slice of beef today—You are an Englishman & you ought to like beef—A very little slice of this beef, dear Mr Shelley’—And so, she said, by degrees, he took a little beef & immediately confessed that ‘he did feel a great deal better’.
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