For by late 1859 the hope that spiritualism held out to her, of transcending the mortal body, is itself dying. At the end of the summer she sends Sophie a letter questioning some of the supernatural experiences that seemed especially staged by the younger woman. What is it that prompts Elizabeth to do so? Has the devil in some detail finally changed her mind? Or is it just that, away from her friend’s charm and faced with the increasingly grim realities of trying to stay alive, she at last sees things clearly? Whatever her reasons, just as when she finally relinquished her belief in her father, she now rips off her own blinkers. But this time the reward of clarity is a gathering gloom. And as the Brownings settle in for their Roman winter and the turn of the decade – finding accommodation suddenly cheap due to the threat of impending war – their friendship with the Eckleys melts away to mere formality.
Everything is becoming difficult now. In mid-January 1860 Elizabeth ventures on a rare outing. She and Robert go to Castellani the jeweller’s, to see a fashionable exhibition of presentation swords for Napoleon III and Victor Emmanuel. One popular cause meets another: the Brownings are mobbed for autographs. Fun though this might have been in the past, now it leaves Elizabeth coughing, breathless and suffering an arrhythmic heartbeat for days. Still, she’s managed to send Chapman and Hall her Poems Before Congress, and proofs of the new book arrive this month. Her title, advertising the collection’s highly political content, comes from an abandoned congress on Italian sovereignty that had been due to take place at this very time. In February she composes a Preface in which she implies that Britain, preoccupied with free trade, has failed properly to support Italian unification:
Non-intervention in the affairs of neighbouring states is a high political virtue; but non-intervention does not mean, passing by on the other side when your neighbour falls among thieves.
Not surprisingly, when Congress appears in print in March it brings down a storm of hostile reviews, mostly accusing Elizabeth of being unpatriotic. In The Athenaeum, her old literary ally but political opponent H. F. Chorley even misreads ‘A Curse for a Nation’, as being directed at ‘perfidious Albion’ rather than American slavery (although he has a point, since the poem is fierce in its injunctions, but vague about what exactly it means by ‘Freedom’ and ‘writhing bond-slaves’). Reviews in Bell’s Weekly Messenger, The Examiner, The Critic, The Bookseller, The Atlas, the Daily News, The Press, The Spectator, The Saturday Review and the Manchester Guardian are among those that follow, and Blackwood’s verdict that ‘women should not interfere with politics’ is typical. Elizabeth’s profile ensures the very breadth of coverage that makes this criticism so insistent. She feels besieged, and moves the fight to Robert’s work, fuming to Sarianna about the ‘blindness, deafness, and stupidity of the English public to Robert’, who she says is appreciated in Britain by only ‘a small knot of pre-Rafaellite men’, though in America ‘he’s a power, a writer, a poet […] he lives in the hearts of the people’.
It’s a projection, but perhaps a healthy one, of the anger and abandonment she must feel. It can’t help that the staunchly intelligent and Italophile Anna Jameson, that good friend, dies this same month. Now the sense of political abandonment intensifies too. Tuscany has come under Victor Emmanuel’s rule after a plebiscite on 11 March, but French ‘liberation’ troops enter Savoy before the vote there has even been held. Elizabeth isn’t well enough to join the crowds in the streets who witness ‘King Victor Emmanuel Entering Florence, April 1860’ – though she writes about it in her poem of this title as if she were. Or as if she were reminded of that first, triumphant procession in 1847 below Casa Guidi’s windows: ‘And thousands of faces, in wild exultation, / Burn over the windows to feel him near—’ In May, Garibaldi gambles by invading Sicily with such small forces that he could have cost the country its slowly cohering political solution, ‘the soil beneath my feet / In valour’s act […] forfeited’, as Elizabeth writes in ‘Garibaldi’; though the gamble does pay off. Robert is working on persona poems again, but Italian political themes continue to dominate her own new work, which is still appearing regularly in Britain (Cornhill Magazine) and America (The Independent).
Elizabeth manages to engage eleven-year-old Pen’s emerging sensibilities in progressive realpolitik: she tells Henrietta that he cried when he read the political poems in Congress. But political stress is attritional. In June 1860 a fifth edition of Aurora Leigh appears without further revisions. On 7 July the Brownings are once again installed in Villa Alberti, Marciano, where by September William Michael Rossetti (brother of their old friend Dante Gabriel) and Vernon Lushington witness the threads drawn thin. In their presence Elizabeth quarrels with Walter Savage Landor over Napoleon III, and Robert shows ‘some slight symptom of approaching antagonism if Mrs Browning in talking came to the outskirts of the “spiritual” theme’. Apparently, ‘Browning could express himself with some harshness to his wife when this subject was mooted’.
By 7 November though, when Garibaldi and Victor Emmanuel enter Naples together in triumph, Mrs Browning has other worries. After the usual six-week autumn in Casa Guidi, the household travel south for what is to be their final Roman winter. Arriving on 23 November, they pick a vertiginous, skinny house above the Spanish Steps at 126 Via Felice. But while this is happening Elizabeth is somewhat removed, and in a state of cruel suspense. Back in Somerset, Henrietta is dying slowly and agonisingly of cancer. She’s been gravely ill since the summer, in the lovely old stone manor house of Stoke Court, Thurlbear, which Surtees has finally been able to afford. Arabella may be the place-marker who keeps the scattering family connected, but Henrietta is the sibling with whom, since Bro’s death, Elizabeth has had most in common – especially once they both married. The dreaded news arrives on 3 December: Henrietta had died the day Elizabeth and Robert arrived in Rome. It seems against the natural order of things that she should predecease the family invalid, and perhaps Elizabeth’s profound grief is intensified by survivor’s guilt. By dark coincidence, her poem of grief written after Bro’s death, ‘De Profundis’, appears in The Independent just three days later.
Yet as 1861 dawns, her poems, from ‘Little Mattie’ to ‘Nature’s Remorses’, increasingly adopt the fictional, often persona form that will dominate her hugely successful Last Poems when it appears in 1862. This style is a pre-echo of Robert’s Dramatis Personae, which will be published two years later; and it’s he who will prepare the posthumous volume, apparently following ‘a list drawn up’ in June 1861. Widower-poets face a difficult choice between ‘improving’ an uncompleted legacy or letting it go, perhaps overexposed, into the world. A century from now, for example, conspiracy stories will surround Ted Hughes’s attempts to do right by his late wife Sylvia Plath’s work, though his choices will clearly be good ones, as Plath’s posthumous reputation attests. No similar cloud of suspicion will hang over Robert’s head, even though the posthumous Elizabeth is much more in his own poetic image than she ever was alive. But suspicion without evidence is just gossip. Better perhaps to remember how long Elizabeth has been writing in persona: even 1826’s An Essay on Mind included ‘Riga’s Song’ among its ‘Other Poems’.
Now the living Elizabeth has a rare moment of cultural disconnect with ‘Lord Walter’s Wife’, which Thackeray turns down for Cornhill Magazine on grounds of immodesty. Usually so acutely tuned in to the zeitgeist, she has perhaps let herself get out of touch, as she busies herself preparing Italian literals of her own poetry for Francesco Dall’Ongaro to turn into Italian verse. Elizabeth’s heart is ‘heavy’ and Robert – ‘not inclined to write this winter’, as she tells Sarianna – is once again toying with visual art, this time modelling clay in William Story’s studio. Yet the couple remain a magnet for writers and artists. In April they talk with Joseph Severn, now British consul, about how he nursed the dying Keats forty years ago, right here at the Spanish Steps. In late May they go to the studio of Father Antonio D’Alessandri to be photographed. This is Elizabeth’s second sitting: las
t year he posed her with Pen. Now D’Alessandri records a face drawn by illness, and hair dyed jet-black like a disguise. This same month she also has a visit from Hans Christian Andersen. Her response is a homage, ‘The North and The South’, which she sends straight off to Thackeray for Cornhill.
It is 21 May 1861, and this is the last poem she will write. On 1 June, as if by a kind of instinct – though ostensibly because of the weather – the Brownings break the pattern of recent years and leave for Casa Guidi, arriving home on 5 June. The very next day, Cavour, that great statesman who was to unite Italy, dies. Elizabeth is shocked and grief-stricken; once again her ‘horrible vibrating body’ reacts. The death of her adored sister, and of what seems to be any hope of democracy and independence for her much-loved adopted country, bleed into each other. It feels as if nothing good can ever happen again.
Grief is a kind of yearning, and Elizabeth yearns from the apartment towards the sights and sounds of her beloved Florence, the elegant yet homely city astride the River Arno that she has made her home, but which she has become too ill to go out into. Now even Casa Guidi has its ghosts: of old freedoms when her health was improving and she went out and about with Robert, of happy days with Wilson, lit up by the blossoming romance with Ferdinando, of Pen’s infancy, of letters arriving from Henrietta, of those first civic parades. The unseasonably cool June means that even the apartment’s tall windows let in less brightness than usual. On 20 June, Elizabeth, trapped in nostalgia and grief, has them opened – and catches cold.
Two nights later, on 22 June, Robert has to call the doctor. Dr Wilson diagnoses congestion and a possible abscess in the right lung. Although feverish, with a racking cough and sore throat, Elizabeth is sure he’s wrong. She feels just the same as all the other times she’s been ill and besides, she can feel that it’s her left lung that’s troubling her, as always. Whether or not it is the same as usual, she spends the next five days coughing and, as a result, getting little sleep. She loses strength. Robert, too, passes these nights of coughing in a state of insomniac attention. It’s as if they’re keeping watch together to see whether the angel of death will pass over the house one more time.
Suddenly, on the evening of 28 June, there’s an injection of hopefulness. Isa Blagden calls with the news that the new prime minister, Baron Ricasoli, shares Cavour’s vision. Italy is going to be alright. It’s a close call, but the news for the country is miraculously good. The angel of death seems to have passed over the city roofs – over the entire peninsula – leaving it untouched. And it means, perhaps, that there’s no longer a battle for Elizabeth to brace herself against. Possibly she relaxes. At any rate, just after three in the morning of what is now 29 June, Robert notices that her feet have become very cold. He rouses Annunziata, and asks her to bring warm water and some jellied chicken, that soothing, sustaining food of invalids. He almost certainly administers some extra morphine, too. Elizabeth is confused as she half-wakes from a travel dream to exclaim ‘What a fine steamer – how comfortable!’
Annunziata bathes Elizabeth’s feet in the warm water, and feeds her some of the chicken. Robert sends the maid for more warm water and Elizabeth, with a trace of her old glitter, teases, ‘You are determined to make an exaggerated case of it’. But she lets him take her in his arms. They rest like that together. Sometime after 4am, Robert asks her if she knows him and she reassures him, ‘My Robert—My heavens, my beloved’. ‘Our lives are held by God’, she tells him. He lifts her and she kisses him repeatedly; when he moves his face away, she kisses her hands towards him, saying ‘Beautiful… beautiful…’ A few moments later, she has stopped breathing. It is, perhaps, an ideal death. Immensely moving and intensely intimate, it is also and essentially the death of a lover. Elizabeth, raised on the doctrine of family love and prepared to lose everything for romantic love, has ended her life with love’s avowal.
At least, that’s according to her lover himself. But perhaps he isn’t absolutely the most reliable narrator. Sometimes we believe that what should be true really was. Could this ideal deathbed be even slightly idealised? For Robert, the catastrophic loss of the person on whom his life is built runs the risk, like the loss of his mother in 1849, of destroying not just a way of life, but his own sense of self. He needs desperately to hold onto his foundation myth, the story of twin poetic souls finding each other and building their own idyllic home together.
Still, what he says about these last moments in his letters home rings true in many ways. At great moments, people do often become their most loving selves; since ‘what will survive of us is love’ is much more wholly true than Philip Larkin asserts in that famous poem. The tiny, frail Elizabeth of 1861, her face drawn and crumpled by long illness, certainly seems physically ready to slip quickly away from life.
And something else. This quiet unmooring is not the desperate struggle of a fatal asthma attack, nor the agonised drowning in infected fluid of a burst abscess. It most resembles a breath-shallowing, heart-stopping morphine overdose. Combine the high doses that result from Elizabeth’s lifetime dependency on the drug with the panicky human desire to relieve suffering and this is not inconceivable. And who’s to say that it would not even be a kind of pragmatic, if unconscious, compassion?
Love takes many forms; and of course Elizabeth had another love besides Robert. Twelve-year-old Pen still sports the long curls and fancy clothes that have been his mother’s whim. Three years ago Nathaniel Hawthorne found him ‘slender, fragile, and spirit-like […] as if he had little or nothing to do with human flesh and blood’. Since then, a rather solitary childhood, as the only offspring of parents whose migratory lifestyle means he acquires no close friends his own age, has given him an enjoyment of solitary amusements; sketching and riding his pony. Though sociable since birth, his reliance on his mother has been as great as any boy’s. Wilson, in effect his nanny, has been gone for a couple of years. Where is he during this trance-like deathbed scene? What does he see or overhear – what does he understand has happened?
In the morning light Isa Blagden returns to Casa Guidi and takes Pen off to Villa Brichieri, her home in nearby Bellosguardo, an exclusive, wooded hill district. The next day but one, 1 July 1861, Pen is brought back into town for his mother’s funeral. Elizabeth Barrett Browning is regarded as a heroine of Italian reunification, and all the shops near Casa Guidi have been closed in her honour. Indeed the whole city, hung with the black of official mourning for Cavour, seems to be grieving for her. This is not entirely an illusion. Next week a prominent government minister, Simone Luigi Peruzzi, will call at Casa Guidi to express the hopes of ‘all Italians’ that Robert and Pen will remain in Tuscany; within a couple of years ‘grateful Florence’ will erect a tablet on the house wall to memorialise Elizabeth ‘whose poems forged a gold ring / Between Italy and England’. And today her coffin, crowned with white blossoms and laurel wreaths, is carried on a special ceremonial route allowed only to public figures through the city to the Protestant Cemetery.
At the graveside Pen’s father reads from his mother’s poem ‘The Sleep’:
And, friends, dear friends,—when it shall be
That this low breath is gone from me,
And round my bier ye come to weep,
Let One, most loving of you all,
Say, ‘Not a tear must o’er her fall;
He giveth His belovèd, sleep.’
That night, he joins Pen at Isa Blagden’s luxurious villa.
Now changes happen in quick succession. In less than a week, by 5 July, the boy has been shorn of his long hair and princeling style. ‘Pen, the golden curls and fantastic dress, is gone just as Ba is gone’, Robert tells Sarianna, and ‘is a common boy all at once’. This is practical, making it possible to do without Annunziata living in (which would be scandalous now that theirs is an all-male household), but it also draws a line under the life that Elizabeth led. Even Casa Guidi is to be abandoned. Robert commissions a photographer to create a record of the household’s extraordinary w
ay of life, but, in the rooms darkened by the church wall immediately opposite, the daguerreotype process doesn’t take. So instead the painter George Mignaty is commissioned to enshrine the drawing room just as Elizabeth ‘disposed it and left it’, and on 1 August Robert and Pen leave Florence – as it turns out, for good.
He’s a boy who can never go home. His immediate future holds a month in Paris, then five weeks with his father, Aunt Sarianna and grandfather in Brittany. Perhaps one small comfort and continuity in this headlong transition is that he’s allowed to keep his little Giara mare, Stella. But all too soon Pen and his father – and Stella – are in London, and he is being enrolled with a tutor as the first stage of a years-long, ultimately unsuccessful struggle to cram him through an Oxford degree.
By next May, his father will be settled at 19 Warwick Crescent, where he’ll stay for the next quarter century as he manages the legacy of those sixteen miraculous years of marriage, and as his reputation grows and grows. Robert Browning will become an extraordinary poet and an avid traveller. Eventually, after seventeen years, he’ll even make return trips to Italy. Indeed he will die there, on 12 December 1889, while visiting his son in the splendid palazzo Ca’ Rezzonico on the Grand Canal in Venice.
For Pen will never outgrow his mother’s joyous legacy. Italy and art are his destiny. After an uncertain start on adulthood, he’ll study fine art in Paris and Antwerp and become an accomplished, if never distinguished, professional sculptor and painter. His marriage to American heiress Fannie Coddington will do as much to enable his life in Italy as his father’s active support will in establishing him as an artist. He will prove a devoted heir, assiduously collecting archival material and memorabilia of his parents’ lives. He’ll give a home for life to his aunt Sarianna (whom photographs reveal he closely resembles) and – albeit at separate addresses, since their marriage fails – to his childhood intimates, Wilson and Ferdinando. But he will die intestate in 1912, and at his death everything that this first, and most loving, witness of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s life has amassed will be auctioned off and dispersed.
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