The couple finally arrive in London on 23 July, and take a rental at 26 Devonshire Street, less than five minutes on foot from 50 Wimpole Street. It’s so very close, yet not quite home. ‘It is a position on a thickset hedge—I cant make a movement to right or left without pain’, as Elizabeth puts it. The two months here will be a time of emotional struggle for both her and Robert, who goes almost immediately to New Cross to see his family. ‘Thank God it is not to be looked forward to anymore. He is himself again’, Elizabeth records.
The decision made with such difficulty proves a good one. Soon, exciting plans are being laid. Henrietta brings her husband and first child up by train from Taunton to spend the beginning of August in Bentinck Street, equally close to Wimpole Street and Arabella. Of the brothers, ‘Henry has been very kind in coming not infrequently,—he has a kind, good heart. Occy, too, I have seen three or four times—Alfred & Sette, once’. Meanwhile, ‘dear George […] was very good & kind & feeling to me at last—it has made me really happier’. Only Papa remains obdurate, refusing to see even his first grandchild, writing ‘a very violent and unsparing letter’ in response to Robert’s overture. Indeed he returns Elizabeth’s letters ‘all with their unbroken seals testifying to the sealed up heart which refused to be opened by me’. ‘It is so very disastrous & hopeless’, his daughter grieves.
But by contrast, artistic and literary London embraces the couple. They see old friends like Mary Russell Mitford and John Kenyon. Through the American artist Thomas Buchanan Read they befriend Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Moreover:
Mr Arnauld [sic] the chancery barrister, has begged us to go and live
Still, now it’s Elizabeth’s turn to falter. ‘There’s kindness in England after all. Yet I grew cold to the heart as I set foot on the ground of it, & wished myself away.’ As well as griefs that remain too immediate – she can’t bear to visit Julia Martin in Herefordshire, which reminds her of Bro – she’s falling ill. It’s still summer, but London is a polluted city, set in a basin nearly at sea level where dust and industrial dirt hang in the air and in the lungs. ‘The quality of the air does not agree with me .. that’s evident. For nearly five years I have had no such cough nor difficulty of breathing, & […] I get so much paler every day.’ And so, ‘We pass this winter in Paris, in the hope of my being able to bear the climate—for indeed Italy is too far. And if the winter does not disagree with me too much we mean to take a house & settle in Paris, so as to be close.’
Low-lying, northern European Paris has a climate not much better than London’s, and even this compromise will prove unworkable. Nevertheless, it seems the couple’s best hope of a life among friends and loved ones. They cut short their London stay and leave for France on 25 September, travelling this time with Thomas Carlyle. After a rough crossing and a night in Dieppe, they’re back at the Hôtel aux Armes, where they rest for a fortnight before moving into a second-floor apartment, ‘flooded with sunshine’, at 138 Avenue des Champs-Élysées: ample reward for Robert’s ‘miseries in house-hunting’. The ‘pretty cheerful, carpeted rooms’ comprise ‘a drawing room, a dressing & writing room for Robert, a small dining room, two comfortable bedrooms & a third bedroom up stairs for the femme de service,—kitchen &c—for two hundred francs a month’. The address is gloriously fashionable too, and they’ll remain here till they return to London next July. In fact, they like it so much that, in spring 1853, Robert’s father and sister will move in.
One shortcoming seems obvious: there’s no writing room for Elizabeth. But within two days of moving in, Robert, who’s preparing an edition for Moxon of what will unfortunately prove to be forged letters by Shelley:
has taken to his new room with green curtains, & sits there half in sun & half in shade, ‘doing’ his Shelley to his heart’s content. ‘Monday,’ he said, ‘was the happiest day he had had since he left England; and we never have lived in a house, he likes so well as this.’! So ‘Casa Guidi’ is slighted you see—dear Casa Guidi.
It’s a moment of what seems like masculine ascendancy. In the same week ‘Baby’, now two and a half, invents his family nickname: ‘He has now taken to call himself Peninni—by an extraordinary revolution of syllables: he means Wiedeman […] Peninni can do this, Peninni can do that, Peninni wants this & that, all day long’. This autumn, the small boy obsessed with soldiers graduates to trousers: ‘Such ridiculous tiny trowsers up to his knees!—and long, white knit gaiters. It’s a beautiful costume, & he is much admired’, his mother boasts. She still loves dressing him up in ‘a white felt hat, white satin ribbons & feathers .. really the prettiest hat I ever saw, & he looks lovely in it—with a trimming of blue satin ribbon inside at each cheek!’ But, odd though this sounds in the twenty-first century, she’s doing nothing unusual. Even in sleepy Taunton, Henrietta contemplates a black felt hat for her first son Altham, while Parisians go altogether further: ‘Do you know, in Paris, they even put the boys into curlpapers? boys ten years old, Wilson has seen curled up regularly in the morning, .. a process which I could not approve of.’
It’s nothing to do with gender: only with privilege and ostentation. For appearances matter. Soon after moving in, Elizabeth has to sack the cook-housekeeper, caught three times with her lover coming out of her room, because ‘the facts were known in the house, & we could not keep a woman of a disreputable character’. Her replacement is Desirée, ‘a little brisk laughing creature, who tumbles about everything .. “has no method,” Wilson says, but who cooks extremely well & is as good natured as possible’.
But scandal turns up nonetheless. Desirée is installed in mid-October, just in time for the arrival of Robert’s father and sister on a three-week visit, during which Robert senior divulges that back in New Cross he’s got involved with a widow called Minny von Müller. Under the misapprehension that she’s bothering his father, Robert writes the lady a stern letter. Unfortunately, the old man hasn’t been entirely honest. Scandalously, on 1 July the following year huge damages of £800 – about twenty-five times an agricultural labourer’s annual salary – will be awarded against him for both breach of promise and defamation of Mrs von Müller’s character: on evidence which includes over fifty love letters plus a (false) accusation of bigamy, and Robert’s own shot across her bows. Three weeks after the court ruling, Robert’s father and sister will flee the country. The case is shocking enough to make the papers and Robert, who escorts them to Paris, will feel it ‘to the heart of his heart’.
But these personal embarrassments are to come. Meanwhile, the old year ends with darkness and drama. On 2 December 1851 Charles-Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte leads a coup in the streets of Paris. Elizabeth is sanguine in letters home: she’s used to European revolutions going on around her. But she has battles of her own. This month she’s once again seriously ill with bronchitis, perhaps even pneumonia; and in January, as she sits coughing in the Champs-Élysées apartment, she is deeply hurt to discover that Mary Russell Mitford has betrayed her confidence by writing about the death of Bro in a memoir, Recollections of a Literary Life.
Robert, on the other hand, is thriving in Paris. His New Year’s resolution for 1852, to write a poem a day, will result eventually in Men and Women, the book with which he takes his great step forward. He’s being encouraged in his work by a new friend, the critic Joseph Milsand, who, back in August, published a highly complimentary essay dedicated to his work, ‘English Poetry after Byron II’, in La Revue des deux mondes. On 15
January Milsand’s follow-up three-hander, covering Elizabeth alongside John Reade and Henry Taylor, is positive enough; but certainly no rave. Still, by the spring, Milsand is spending every Tuesday evening at the Brownings’.
Their cultural milieu is tilting towards Robert; this tilt increases as Elizabeth’s illness allows him to resume the conventionally male literary life. While she’s confined at home by pulmonary disease he goes out alone, though with her blessing, for intellectual chat and writerly gossip. But she is determined to meet George Sand, the brilliant Frenchwoman who is her near contemporary. Almost as soon as they had arrived in Paris, she had persuaded Robert to ask Carlyle for a letter of introduction to Sand from Italian activist Giuseppe Mazzini. Robert, who himself meets Sand several times, seems offhand virtually to the point of obstructiveness. It’s almost as if the diminutive ‘Ba’ has replaced the major talent who is ‘Elizabeth Barrett Browning’ in his mind. Or perhaps he’s simply not quite as Bohemian as he thinks: Sand has a scandalous reputation as a sexual free spirit. And as a woman writer and thinker too; when all three do eventually meet, on 15 February 1852, Elizabeth encounters once more that other way of being a female intellectual:
she seemed to be in fact the man in that company, & the profound respect with which she was listened to, a good deal impressed me […] scorn of pleasing, she evidently had—there never could have been a colour of coquetry in that woman. […] I liked her .. I did not love her .. but I felt the burning soul through all that quietness, & was not disappointed.
Life seems a little easier come the summer. From 6 July till 12 October 1852 the Brownings are back in London, renting at 58 Welbeck Street, again roughly a hundred yards from 50 Wimpole Street. Again they see Henrietta and Surtees Cook, who again come to stay nearby; again they also meet old friends and new. Through Jane Carlyle, they meet Mazzini in person; the wealthy, hop-farming Paines of Farnham introduce clergyman-novelist Charles Kingsley; through Coventry Patmore they meet John and Effie Ruskin, lunch with the couple and view Ruskin’s collection of Turners; and at the christening of Hallam Tennyson, Robert meets F. T. Palgrave, later the famous anthologist. After escorting his disgraced father into French exile, Robert is back in town with Sarianna to help dispose of Robert senior’s home; Elizabeth’s intelligent, self-effacing sister-in-law spends the rest of the summer with the couple.
Their only other disruption comes in August, when Wilson asks for a pay rise from £16 to £20. The Brownings, short of money, refuse; Wilson responds that she needs to find better-paying employers. But in fact she and the Brownings are by now friends and housemates as much as employers and employee. By the time she goes north on 3 September to spend three weeks with her family, she has already agreed to stay on. The relief is huge. The household relies on her: while she was away on the equivalent trip last year, Elizabeth found herself in a ‘dreadful state of slavery, with Wiedeman hanging to the skirts of my garment whatever way I turned’.
On 16 October the household is back in Paris. From the Hôtel de la Ville l’Évêque they watch Louis-Napoléon’s triumphalist return from the tour that set in motion his process of becoming emperor. A week later they set off south. This is abrupt, but Elizabeth has been coughing since September, and John Kenyon has given them the money for a swift return to Florence. They travel overland via Lyon, Turin and Genoa, where Elizabeth is so weak that they rest up for ten days. ‘I was no longer flesh of Robert’s flesh, only bone of his bone. Fever and cough every night had completely wasted me away’, Elizabeth tells Mrs Jameson later. They arrive home on 10 or 11 November:
To my deep joy .. I cant tell you how pleased I felt. Dear Florence, I do love it certainly, though Robert (demoralized man that he is by the too enchanting Paris) maintains that it’s dead & dull […] I feel myself back in my nest again, and cant enjoy it too much.
Within a couple of days, even her cough is better: ‘We have no fires on this fourteenth of November, nor think of fires .. and I have half forgotten my cough .. it’s all but gone .. and the chest is as free as a bird.’
This time, though, individual bodily autonomy will not be confused with civic liberty: ‘Neither I nor Baby can be said to flourish less for the revolutions and counter-revolutions, the putting up & pulling down of liberty trees, & the invasions of Austrian & French armies.’ Back in Paris, on 2 December Louis-Napoléon is crowned Emperor Napoleon III. But here in socially and economically depressed Florence, life is altogether quieter. Pen’s old balia visits, ‘kissing [Pen] again & again […] She almost knocked out all my front teeth with her energetic kisses—’. Though Alessandro has found another job, his children come over. ‘Madame Biondi […] and Mr Stuart .. and the Cottrells & heaps of other people’ come through the door. The frightening decline in Elizabeth’s health has been halted, and it’s the start of ‘a very happy winter, with nothing from without to vex us much’. By the spring, revising Poems for its third (1853) edition, and with Robert deep in Men and Women, Elizabeth has also started work on that project she’s had so long in mind: the new, narrative poem that will become Aurora Leigh.
[Eighth Frame]
Could you look me in the eye? In the biblical tradition from which that compassionate philosopher Emmanuel Levinas comes, the encounter with the other person isn’t a response to the entire face. It’s only the eyes that are ‘the light of the soul’, where personhood sees and is seen. And surely this is why people who are going to be executed are blindfolded or hooded: not really to protect them from seeing their fate, but to protect the executioner from seeing them and being seen by them. To protect the executioner from seeing himself fail his primary duty – that of recognising, and preserving, the other person.
In photographs taken by the highly accomplished Fratelli D’Alessandri in the last two years of her life, we see Elizabeth trying to look her photographer in the eye. Posing with and without Pen, her chin is ever so slightly down and she glances ever so slightly upward. It’s the pose that Lady Diana Spencer made famous: as a shy young royal fiancée, Diana looked dazzled by the world’s gaze.
Elizabeth too has been a shy young woman. Now she simply seems worn out. Success and illness have both worn down her defences. She looks towards Father Antonio D’Alessandri – towards this figure whose face, as she tries to find it, is hidden under a blackout hood – as if the camera’s inspection is something she must bear. (She’s trying to stay still too, of course.) On 27 May 1861, four weeks before her death, she looks at the camera that will deliver its final verdict, and her eyes seem to express an undefended acceptance. She looks at the lens with sincerity and expectation.
Book Nine: How to lose a body
It is the hour for souls.
Now things begin to speed up. In September 1853, Elizabeth and Robert spend their seventh wedding anniversary in Bagni di Lucca, ‘this green, cool, bright, quiet, noisy place’, as Robert calls it, where they’ve once again rented a house for the summer. Seven-year relationships are notoriously ‘itchy’, as inner and outer stories shift, a shared history beginning to obscure the initial connection, but the couple seem happy enough: ‘Well—here’s the wedding-day. Robert told me this morning that he should love me still more the next seven years—but I shall be satisfied with the old love.’
Staying this time right in town on Piazza Tolomei, they’re more worried about other people, ‘Likely indeed to infest us, but we have made it public […] that we mean to be private’. But at just £11 for over thirteen weeks, and with more rooms than they can use, Casa Tolomei is too good to miss. ‘Our little Penini [Elizabeth is still varying the spelling] is in paradise with the garden & the mountains, & the donkeys.’ Robert is busy with poems in his own ‘cheerful little blue room with two windows’. And Elizabeth is at work on Aurora Leigh.
She knows she needs privacy to write: ‘An artist must, I fancy, either find or make a solitude to work in .. if it is to be good work at all.’ Yet strangely, as in Paris and despite all those spare rooms, she again has no study of her own and, t
hough she can always leave Penini with Wilson, there’s a lingering sense of her fitting work around family life in ways Robert does not.
Still, things work out well enough. Florence was far more distracting:
there was something painful in breaking the thread & letting our pleasant friends roll off like lost beads. Mr Tennyson […] used to come to us every few days & take coffee & smoke […] & commune about books, men & spirits till past midnight. […] He was with us the last night. So was Count Cottrell […] So was the American minister from the court of Turin, Mr Kinney and his wife.
Besides, distractions do furnish a life. In Bagni di Lucca the Brownings are deepening their friendship with a younger couple, the American writer-sculptor William Wetmore Story and his wife Emelyn: ‘She & I go backward & forward on donkeyback to tea drinking & gossipping at one another’s houses, & our husbands hold the reins.’
One interest they all share is spiritualism, something that dominates this summer’s correspondence. Séances aren’t just entertaining or philosophically interesting ‘happenings’. As possible proof of life after death their stakes couldn’t be higher. But the Brownings are bashful, uncertain. In their world Christian belief is socially fundamental; being Nonconformists, they know well that even the wrong kind of Christianity is problematic. Since Wimpole Street days Elizabeth has counted several Swedenborgians among her acquaintances, and she’ll remain attracted to the sect’s idea of the perfectible self passing through a series of purely spiritual reincarnations after death. However, she must perform some mental juggling to manage both her faith and the untheological possibility that the dead can speak to us: she’s careful not to expose four-year-old Pen to something she recognises may be mere superstition.
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