As literary gossip this is astonishingly incomplete. Yet for Elizabeth it establishes continuity, across the intervening quarter century, between her own and the Romantic poets’ lives. After all, she and Robert have also fled to Italy in search of freedom to live as they choose. And her belief that their relationship is profoundly more authentic than mere convention – ‘we could not lead the abominable lives of “married people” all round—you know we could not’ – is innocently, but undeniably, Shelleyan.
The couple’s own literary life is continuing. They’re both at work, Elizabeth composing Poems (1850) and Robert polishing Poems 1849, and Elizabeth’s poems appear regularly in Blackwood’s. In July they upsize to a comfortable, seven-roomed apartment on the piano nobile of Palazzo Guidi, ‘which belonged to the Guidi who intermarried with Dante’s Ugolino family of Pisa’. It will become their permanent home, and inspire one of Elizabeth’s most important poems, but they don’t know that yet. For now, they’ve simply taken a three-month lease on furnished rooms recently vacated by ‘a Russian prince’. The Palazzo is ‘In THE situation of Florence’ on Piazza San Felice, a hundred yards from the Pitti Palace; admission to the green maze of the Boboli Gardens beyond is included in the rent:
The eight windows which are very large […] open on a sort of balcony-terrace […] which is built out from the house, giving it an antique & picturesque appearance to the exterior—And you may suppose what a pleasure it is to have such a place to walk up & down in, when we are not inclined to go into the streets. Opposite is the grey wall of a church, San Felice, and we walk on the balcony listening to the organ & choir—
They fall into a happy routine. ‘At about eight in the evening we walk in the comparative cool .. stand on the bridge of Santa Trinita, & go eat an ice at Dony’s .. then return to supper, & dont sit up three m[inutes] afterwards’. Elizabeth develops a delight in clothes, ‘the green plaid which is Robert’s favorite & which I just begin to wear every day […] the silk shot, [the] blue barége, [the] prettiest of possible slippers, which Henrietta has made for me!’ Wilson, freed from the heavy duties of travel – and by the ‘donna di faccenda’ Annunziata, who has followed them across town – is once again a proper lady’s maid, busy sewing Elizabeth:
little front-caps […] very prettily of net in the old fashion, but with a worsted edge, as slight as possible to be embroidered at all—[…] & very pretty, at the expense of a few pennies—[…] Robert likes them so, that I scarcely wear anything else, & have them in various colours, blue, green, lilac, purple, with my hair done in the old Grecian plait behind, which Wilson sighs in the doing of.
Only Flush is not quite his usual self. Like his mistress, he finds the heat hard to sleep through. Like Wilson, he suffers from stomach upsets and constipation. These troubles pass; but it’s plain he needs worming: ‘He is in great spirits & as full of caprices as ever .. only thin. Why shd he be thin, I wonder.’
Now the little household takes its front-row seats for the drama of Italian Republicanism. They’ve arrived on the peninsula at almost the tipping point of the Risorgimento, the cultural and political ‘resurgence’ that will eventually culminate in the creation of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861. The three decades since the 1815 Congress of Vienna reimposed Habsburg Austria’s control of the fractured territory – especially through its rule of the northern Italian states – have seen guerrilla action and sporadic insurrections, and the foundation of the secretive Carboneria in the south and of La Giovine Italia north of the border in Marseille. On 12 September, their first wedding anniversary, Elizabeth and Robert watch and wave as ‘for above three hours an infinite procession’ of citizens and ‘forty thousand […] inhabitants of the different Tuscan states, deputations and companies of various kinds [pass] under our windows with all their various flags & symbols, into the Piazza Pitti where the Duke & his family stood in tears at the window to receive the thanks of his people’. By granting the right to form a civic guard, Austrian Grand Duke Leopold II seems to have taken a first step towards offering Tuscan independence from the Habsburg empire.
The excitement is contagious:
The windows dropping down their glittering draperies, seemed to grow larger with the multitude of pretty heads, & of hands which threw out flowers & waved white handkerchiefs—There was not an inch of wall, not alive, if the eye might judge—Clouds of flowers & laurel leaves came fluttering down on the advancing procession—and the clapping of hands, & the frenetic shouting, and the music which came in gushes […] and the exulting faces, and the kisses given for very exultation.
Even Flush gets carried away, and goes missing while being walked. Robert, who has a nasty cold, spends the anniversary evening searching for him; only for the little dog to return next day none the worse for wear. But the couple don’t forget their own celebration in all the excitement. As an anniversary thank-you they give Wilson a turquoise brooch, bought the night before on the Ponte Vecchio; in return, she makes Yorkshire Knead Cakes for tea.
Next February, when Leopold grants Tuscany its own constitution, Elizabeth and Robert will have a still closer view of his triumphant arrival at the Pitti Palace ‘in the midst of a “milky way” of waxen torchlights—you wd have thought that all the stars out of Heaven had fallen into the piazza’. By then they will have left Palazzo Guidi, where the rent doubles in high season. Here it’s not winter that’s cheap but summer, with its risk of cholera and typhoid, its almost unmanageable heat. After much agonising, on 19 October they move just up Via Maggio, to rooms so cold and uncomfortable that they almost immediately move again to a ‘little baby-house’ actually on the Piazza de’ Pitti. And here, from the double windows of their cramped new drawing room, they share a grandstand view of history with numerous visitors: ‘In came Wilson to announce Count & Countess Cottrell, Mr Tulk, Mr & Mrs Ley: Mrs Ley’s nurse & two children, & Dr Allnutt [sic], .. all come to crowd into our little drawingroom to see the “festa” in the piazza.’
Sometimes this is just all a bit too much. February 1848 sees both Brownings preoccupied. Robert worries about paying two rents, which has made leaving Palazzo Guidi a false economy. Elizabeth is busy writing a long, political poem and is also pregnant again, full of hopeful anticipation despite continuing to have periods: ‘I have had my usual health, as regularly as possible […] I have both laughed & cried, in one or another crisis of this fatal uncertainty.’ Although she knows that ‘the habit of miscarriages is hard to break’, she can’t resist dropping a hint about morning sickness to Henrietta: ‘Very well I am […] The exception is a sickness in the morning, which is’nt the pleasantest thing in the world, on first getting up.’
But the habit of miscarriages is indeed hard to break. A fortnight after she’s mailed the letter Elizabeth loses the baby. Possibly the bleeding she’d experienced was a sign that the pregnancy was already lost or unviable. Yet, again, she seems not quite bereft. Possibly she still can’t imagine a new kind of love to rival her grand amour. As she wrote to Miss Mitford while she was still pregnant, ‘Of course, it is natural to be rather anxious—one is not more nor less than a woman. Still, it strikes me often, that I have no right to ask for more […] Robert has the dear goodness to say that he never cd love his child as he loves his wife […] Perhaps, God should keep his gifts of children, for such women as have missed something of the ideal of love.’
And there’s always poetry to absorb her energy and emotion. ‘A Meditation in Tuscany’, the long political poem she’s been working on and now sends to Blackwood’s, includes impressions recycled from her letters:
And all the thousand windows which had cast
A ripple of silks in blue and scarlet down
(As if the houses overflowed at last),
Seemed growing larger with fair heads and eyes
[…]
At which the stones seemed breaking into thanks
And rattling up the sky, such sounds in proof
Arose; the very house-walls seemed to bend;
&n
bsp; The very windows, up from door to roof,
Flashed out a rapture of bright heads […]
This is politics as crowd scene: even the writing is crowded. In its transferred epithets, their fluidity mimicking the fast-changing revolutionary scene, we see the idea of ‘Italy’ – abstract, historical – brought to life by the people, ‘IL POPOLO—/ The word means dukedom, empire, majesty’. For Elizabeth, the ideal of a free Italy is inseparable from the vibrant physicality of daily Florentine life.
Revolutionary enthusiasm is all mixed up with personal experience. These initial eighteen months in Italy are her first sustained chance to enjoy bodily autonomy and the vivid sensuality of an outdoor life since she was a fourteen-year-old tomboy; even her pregnancies a sign that she’s ‘not more or less than a woman’ than the ‘black-eyed’ mothers with their children in the streets. Warm climate, Italian food, novel surroundings and the sexiness of new marriage have all contributed to a bodily resurrection. Elizabeth’s gift for passionate imaginative identification has always been attractive: as Uncle Sam remarked decades ago, she has a gift for love. Now her ardent, optimistic ‘A Meditation’ reverberates with the poet’s own Risorgimento as it portrays emptied tombs and compares the ruined architecture of Italy’s historical reputation with a resurrected national future.
Blackwood’s eventually turns down this ‘grand’ poem on the insular British grounds that these are foreign affairs, incomprehensible without extensive footnotes. But Elizabeth’s own attitude is changing anyway as she and Robert become increasingly anxious about the influence of French revolutionary politics on the Italian quest for independence. It’s all very well that the leaders of the French Second Republic, declared on 26 February, include their fellow poet Alphonse de Lamartine. But the Brownings are liberals, not socialists. For them, France’s 1848 Revolution is frightening. It realises some of the socialist philosopher Charles Fourier and anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s utopian ideas about cooperative organisations along with Louis Blanc’s droit au travail (the right to work); and ‘Really we are not communists’, Elizabeth finds herself reassuring Kenyon. ‘Nothing can be more hateful to me than this communist idea of quenching individualities in the mass.’
Revolution as self-determination does appeal, and Elizabeth understands individuation not least because she herself has laboured to achieve it. ‘Life develops from within’, as she’ll put it in Aurora Leigh, seven years from now. She knows at first hand how easily individual human flowering can be blocked, ‘As if the hope of the world did not always consist in the eliciting of the individual man.. But like most people who don’t have to earn their living, she doesn’t understand economic bondage. Unless what Elizabeth calls ‘matters of material life’ are arranged differently, whoever rules Italy the labouring poor will remain desperate, the small traders worse off than bankers and bishops. Sure enough, in The Communist Manifesto, which is published in London this very month, February 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels aim their critique not at grand dukes but at exploitative business owners like her own family.
Elizabeth rather resembles the second-generation Romantics, in whose steps she so admiringly treads, in being moved by the idea of ‘liberty’ but failing to see that her own privilege is complicit in denying it to the many. It remains ineluctably the case that her escape from Wimpole Street was made possible by slavery money. And in the twenty-first century, ‘A Meditation in Tuscany’, which eventually appears in 1851 as Part One of Casa Guidi Windows, feels lacking in intellectual underpinning. Yet at the midpoint of the nineteenth century it is radical; forcing a British readership otherwise protected from these proto-revolutionary scenes into imaginative complicity with ordinary Italians. Elizabeth turns the reader into a fellow revolutionary participant by evoking her own enthusiasm in all its vulnerability rather than hiding behind the conceit of an omniscient narrator; she puts her own self in the frame as advocate. As The Globe and Traveller will write, on the poem’s eventual appearance, ‘when the exponent of Italian feelings is the most gifted of England’s poetic daughters […] the claim on her own country’s hearing becomes paramount’.
Meanwhile the Browning household is undergoing its own revolutions. Lateral thinking saves the day when Robert realises that renting unfurnished is much cheaper than a furnished let. Political crises keep property prices low: he manages to resecure the apartment at Palazzo Guidi for just twenty-five guineas per annum, and the household returns there on 9 May 1848. As Elizabeth tells Arabel, ‘Next summer we shall [sub-]let our apartment for at least eight pounds a month […] & return here in the winter to a rent-free residence.’ With canny furniture-shopping they can create a smart asset and fund their travel:
The carpet is down in the drawingroom & looks very well. The walls are green, the chairs crimson, with white & gold frames, & the carpet mixes up all colours. The ceiling has a good deal of gilding in Italian fashion, .. and the little sittingroom at the end of the suite, a very pretty room, has a cloud full of angels looking down on you […]. Of course you are to understand that our furniture is not new—but it is in good taste & characteristic.
But this is also Elizabeth’s first opportunity to nest-build:
we wanted linen & plate, & then our rooms being immense, yearned for more & more filling—& then again, we grew ambitious, & instead of four legs to every chair we looked to gilding & spring seats, .. & so, we have passed sixty pounds & still want curtains.
Six months on, the pleasure – and expenditure – are unabated:
The bedrooms & Wilson’s room […] are to have the curtains altogether of white muslin, checked in rather a large pattern—two to each window, very full. And the bed in my room is hung with the same […] there’s a new carpet laid down in my bedroom—I wanted a drugget, but the carpet was as cheap, & very thick & rich looking it is. […] we had bought for that room a beautiful chest of drawers […] Robert bought the other day a companion-chest, infinitely more beautiful—in fact far too good for any bedroom—ebony & ivory inlaid, with the curiosest gilt handles […] & he gave two pounds for it.
Furnishings can be resold, but they represent a considerable investment of money and imagination, especially given the ‘panic’ of war nearby – about the dangers of which Elizabeth seems strangely relaxed. But then her emotional reactions have always been somewhat disassociated. Around her, much of Europe is being shaken by the fear and promise of revolution, and there have been democratic uprisings in Vienna and Berlin as well as in Paris. In March, King Charles Albert of Piedmont-Sardinia had declared his intention to unite divided Italy under the Pope. He built on a local revolt against Habsburg rule in Lombardy-Venetia by attacking the Austrians’ military headquarters in the Quadrilatero, a set of four city fortresses centred on Verona and Mantua and just 125 miles from Florence. Joined by papal, Tuscan and Sicilian forces, for a while his campaign went well: two fortresses fell. But in May the Pope, Pius IX, became nervous about challenging the mighty Austrian Empire (which is also Catholic) and withdrew his support, as did Ferdinand II of the Two Sicilies. Austrian Field Marshal Count Radetzky will finally defeat the Italian forces in August, after a three-month siege of Venice, and become Viceroy of Lombardy-Venetia for almost a decade.
These are bloody battles, not just street demonstrations, and it’s hard to avoid the feeling that Elizabeth’s determination to build a new life willy-nilly in such a time and place is not just wilful, but irrational. For there’s another fly in the ointment: Robert isn’t writing. For him, marriage has exchanged an extended adolescence, at his writing desk day and night, for adult, practical – even if not financial – household responsibilities. Also, neither Browning is under any illusion that he’s currently the more distinguished partner and, while it’s exciting to be adored by the author of poems you love with all your heart, it’s altogether different to make a life as the lesser writer. Robert is, in effect, playing The Partner, that conflicted role to which, traditionally, artistic and literary partnerships relegate the wom
en.
But however unorthodox the couple’s domestic roles, bodies are still bodies. In June 1848, just after their return to Palazzo Guidi, Elizabeth falls pregnant again. Once again she feels so well that she carries on as usual. In mid-July, she and Robert escape the city on ‘un bel giro’ alone together, first to the coast at Fano and then, when that proves altogether dreary, south down the Adriatic coast to Ancona. Here they stay for a week, and Robert at last writes a poem. But even this signals that all is not well. The depressive narrator of ‘The Guardian Angel: A picture at Fano’ is accompanied, like Robert himself, by a lover. Despite this he identifies with Guercino the ‘Little Squinter’, painter of a sentimental seventeenth-century altarpiece in the town, and prays for the angelic guardianship it portrays. Eight stanzas conclude by breaking the ‘fourth wall’ of fictional conceit to appeal to someone from real life, the long-lashed, baby-faced Alfred Domett, who was Robert’s pal about (literary) town before emigrating to New Zealand in 1842:
Where are you, dear old friend?
How rolls the Wairoa at your world’s far end?
This is Ancona, yonder is the sea.
So what’s going on here? In later years Domett will publish a verse epic, Ranolf and Amohia, celebrating Maori culture, but his real skill is in public office. He has the restless, slightly misfit energy that does well in new enterprises, and will become New Zealand’s fourth premier in 1862–63. When he retires to England, more than two decades from now, the old friends will reunite after an emotional message from Robert: ‘I never could bear to answer the letter you sent me years ago, though I carried it always about with me.’ Feelings which turn out to have been deep-seated. When Domett left England Robert declared:
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