Victorian Poetry

In an anomalous year, I begin reviewing the scholarship of August 2019–August 2020 with an anomaly, for this first work will soon be published in 2020. Philip Kelley, the principal editor of The Brownings’ Correspondence, with infinite generosity sent me the final proof for volume 27 (Winfield, KS: Wedgestone Press, [End Page 321] forthcoming, 2020), the most recent volume of some forty projected for the full edition. Like the dozen most immediately preceding volumes, volume 27 is edited by Kelley, Edward Hagan, and Linda M. Lewis. It includes 163 letters dating from October 1859 through May 1860, a period when events of the Second Italian War of Independence consumed the Brownings. Because any new volume of the Correspondence constitutes the highwater mark in a year’s publications on EBB, I offer the following forecast of this volume’s contents to reassure Browning scholars that a little wait will be handsomely repaid.

Knowing as we do that EBB dies just over a year after writing the last letters gathered here, volume 27 begins ominously by referring repeatedly to EBB’s serious bout of illness in the summer of 1859. She acknowledges to friends that she had purposefully deceived her sisters by concealing the extent of her illness; she nearly died, and she confesses that she had felt as if she had an “iron bar crushing the chest & forbidding the breath” (p. 16). Her letters written in the spring of 1860 register her growing strength by becoming more numerous and longer. Early letters in this volume track the Brownings’ eagerness for good weather to allow them to travel to Rome for a warmer winter, and they recount Robert’ s efforts, assisted by their friends the Storys—already in Rome—to find affordable accommodations where few steps and ample sunlight and warmth would support EBB’s continued convalescence. Both of the Brownings marvel at the emptiness of Rome, which émigrés and tourists now avoid because of the general state of unrest generated by combat in Italy. When the medical imperative driving her quest for a warmer climate prevails, EBB insists to her worried sisters in England that Rome is perfectly safe from military violence. She jokingly reports Pen’s summation that the family had to choose between “cold air in her chest” and “a cannonball in her stomach” (p. 52). The lungs prevailed. But she insists she feels perfectly safe in Italy (“I am afraid of nothing in Italy but the north wind,” p. 56), and by March 1860 she drolly reports that she is “beginning to flourish..., as far as so dry a stick can” (p. 224).

This “dry stick” can still register fiery passion about English readers’ neglect of Robert’s poetry: “The blindness deafness & stupidity of the English public to Robert are amazing” (p. 268). In contrast, she declares, “in America, he’s a power, a writer, a poet—he is read—he lives in the hearts of the people.” Something of a social lion in England, he is a literary lion in America, where people host “‘Browning evenings’” and “‘Browning readings’” (p. 269). To measure the general English apathy toward literary accomplishment, she observes that though “English people will come & stare at me sometimes,” they fail to appreciate Robert, and the dentists, physicians, artists, and friends who treat her with free services and courtesies are generally not English (p. 269). [End Page 322]

EBB obliquely refers numerous times to her disdain for Sophia Eckley. To her confidante Isa Blagden she ironically observes that because she has a history of attracting “women of straw, women of false lives & hearts,” she intends “to have no more female friends” (pp. 124–125). On the topic of women’s conventional nature, she opines that women rarely care about political issues, “exterior subjects” (p. 113). Underscoring women’s conventional detachment from serious issues (as well as the pope’s failure to institute serious reforms), she jests about the pope’s issuing an edict forbidding the wearing of crinolines in St. Peter’s and other Catholic churches (p. 53). On friendships, she writes sadly of Anna Jameson’s death, and she refers frequently to arrangements that Robert...