Letters of RB and EBB, Part II

By -
Time for another chapter of the letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett!  Ooh, this was interesting.  In our story so far, Robert has started a correspondence with Elizabeth, and he's clearly interested in her.  After they meet in person, Robert sends a Confession of True Feelings letter, and Elizabeth reacts poorly.  She has never thought of herself as eligible for romance, and she doesn't know what to do, nor does she want to encourage Robert to waste his life on her (as she sees it).  I have now read the next 5 months of letters, from May to October...

RB's first letter to EBB

The two are still writing, but Elizabeth is clearly trying to discourage Robert from romance.  She just wants to talk about Poetry and Life.  Robert keeps dropping anguished hints about his feelings, and she replies with a stubborn reluctance to hear it.
...I see by the law of my own star, my own particular star, the star I was born under, the star Wormwood, on the opposite side of the heavens from the constellations of 'the Lyre and the Crown.'  (EBB, July 1845)

...I am yours ever, and not till summer ends and my nails fall out, and my breath breaks bubbles,--ought you to write thus having restricted me as you once did, and do still?  You tie me like a Shrove-Tuesday fowl to a stake then pick the thickest cudgel out of your lot, and at my head it goes--  (RB, July 1845)
From her point of view, it's completely hopeless; what would they do?  She is a chronic invalid (I thought she was a TB patient, but no!  Her illness was a lung problem, though, and she did not expect to live long), and she has a strange and despotic father who won't even let his healthy children marry. Reading her descriptions of him, I think he must have had some psychological problem.  He seems to have been completely tyrannical; nothing would please him, and nobody was allowed to do anything.  Elizabeth wants to go on a trip to a better climate for her health, but she is blocked from going anywhere at all, for any reason.  So it's not that she isn't attracted to Robert (which she won't admit aloud for a minute), but that circumstances prevent their union.

At last, however, Robert's insistence that he knows what he's doing and that she's the only woman in the whole world for him, and anyway he never planned to get married so it doesn't matter that they can't--seems to have some effect.  Elizabeth admits her feelings in words that make it a bit difficult for modern eyes to see (I found this bit rather confusing), and suddenly Robert is ecstatic.

However, they are still trapped.  Elizabeth warns Robert that his habitual weekly visit is fine, but if he starts showing up more often, the family (her father) will notice and that will be the end of his ability to see her at all.  Any action that hints at a special friendship will lead to disaster.



 Letters of RB and EBB, Part I

Comments

  1. NancyJuly 8, 2013 at 6:12 PM

    I read a book called Dared and Done about the Barrett-Brownings, and the author makes a strong case for Edward Moulton-Barrett's "issue" being one of racial purity. The family had estates in Jamaica, and evidently there may have been (Oh the horror!) some suspicion that the ancestors were not all racially "pure." Her take is that Mr. Moulton-Barrett could not stomach the idea of his children continuing this "tainted" line. By all accounts, Elizabeth's looks were "exotic" - she was dark enough that Robert called her his "Portuguese" - so maybe that was Moulton-Barrett's problem. Whatever. He sounds like a nut-case, doesn't he?

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousJuly 9, 2013 at 5:35 PM

    I was going to say exactly what Mumsy just said. OH WELL she beat me to it. I was going to beat her to it, but when I tried to post the comment originally I kept getting kicked off.

    I love it when they finally reach a point where they totally love each other -- when Elizabeth quits being so reserved and just admits she loves him already. Bless em.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of...
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the s...
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he ...
Read more