Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Rebecca Stott, Simon Avery

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780582404700
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317877035
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

This volume will provide students with an introduction to the poetry and life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, one of the most popular poets of her day in Britain and America and who has become one of the great icons of Victorianism for the modern age. The authors present a biographical survey, study of her poetry, its critical reception and an assessment of her influence on later poets.

This book also examines the complex 'myths' which are associated with Elizabeth Barrett Browning and offers re-readings of her life and work, particularly in dispelling the myth of the ailing invalid poet-recluse and instead showing her to be one of the great intellectuals of her day, immersed in European history and politics from a very early age. The book situates Browning within broader historical,political and cultural contexts than have yet been examined enabling a better understanding of her poetry and paints the portrait of a fine and innovative poet, an intellectual and an astute political thinker.

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CONSTRUCTING THE POET LAUREATE OF HOPE END: ELIZABETH BARRETT’S EARLY LIFE

SIMON AVERY

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WRITING HISTORIES

In 1853, Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote to her friend Isa Blagden that she had ‘the greatest horror’ of becoming the subject of biographical speculation, of being ‘caught, stuck through with a pin, and beautifully preserved, with other butterflies and beetles’ (quoted in Hayter, 1962: 110–1). Since her death, however, Barrett Browning has been ‘stuck through with a pin’ and ‘preserved’ by biographers on many occasions and continues to be so. Indeed, over the past fifteen years alone her life has been scripted and rescripted in a number of strikingly different ways. The most detailed study to date remains Margaret Forster’s Elizabeth Barrett Browning, published by Chatto and Windus in 1988, which drew upon newly published letters and other biographical materials in order to challenge and deconstruct many of the standard images which had accrued around Barrett Browning through the processes of mythologisation. Forster presents a far more active and intellectual woman than the myths had previously allowed for, and yet throughout the study there is little detailed consideration of Barrett Browning’s actual writings or her development as a poet. Consequently, Barrett Browning’s life is separated from her art in a manner similar to, although not to the same degree as, Elizabeth Gaskell’s mid-nineteenth-century biography of Charlotte Brontë.

In the 1990s, however, two new biographical studies were published which give more attention to the poetry than does Forster’s work. Barbara Dennis’s Elizabeth Barrett Browning: The Hope End Years (Seren, 1996) focuses predominantly on Barrett’s early life at the family home in Herefordshire as part of a series of books which commemorate writers and artists of that region. Although Dennis sometimes tends to conflate Barrett too easily with her major protagonist Aurora Leigh, her study is insightful in its exploration of Barrett’s youth and how Barrett’s experiences during this period influenced her writings. Dennis also reveals much about Barrett’s early literary influences by drawing upon the evidence of the poet’s extensive reading which is documented in her unpublished notebook of 1822–24. In contrast, Julia Markus’ Dared and Done (Bloomsbury, 1995) takes a wider focus in examining the Brownings’ courtship and married life, again drawing upon new research in order to suggest that at times the relationship between the two poets might not have been as ideal as it is usually considered to be. Markus gives close attention to the poetry of both the Brownings, thereby demonstrating how their professional as well as personal lives intersected, and also offers some intriguing, if sometimes tentative, arguments concerning Barrett Browning’s family background (see the discussion of slavery below).

We can clearly relate the different emphases and agendas in these biographies to the theoretical considerations of history which have emerged in the 1980s and 1990s from the work of New Historicist critics such as Jerome McGann and Marjorie Levinson (see Levinson et al., 1989). As New Historicism has demonstrated, history – and here we can include biography or ‘life-history’ – never exists objectively, complete and uncontested, but is rather mediated through particular perspectives and choices. That is, individual historians consciously select specific pieces of evidence while discarding others in order to construct a version of history which is, overtly or not, a biased narrative. Therefore history comes to be made up of competing versions which reconstruct the same events or period from different perspectives, and as a consequence it is crucial that readers of histories are aware of the particular agendas, biases and assumptions of the historian who has selected and arranged that narrative.

It is intriguing to realise, then, that the twenty-year-old Elizabeth Barrett had already highlighted precisely these points over 160 years before New Historicist critics formally theorised them, for in her long philosophical poem An Essay on Mind (1826) she advised:

… in th’ historian’s bosom look,

And weigh his feelings ere you trust his book;

His private friendships, private wrongs, descry,

Where tend his passions, where his interests lie—

And while his proper faults your mind engage,

Discern the ruling foibles of his age.

(11.314–19)

In the spirit of this quotation, therefore, I will begin by declaring my own ‘passions’ and where my own ‘interests lie’. In writing this short version of Elizabeth Barrett’s early life, I am particularly concerned with constructing a narrative which explores the poet’s resistance to received ideas of socially acceptable feminine behaviour as they were embodied in what Michel Foucault terms ‘dominant ideologies’. Drawing extensively on the volumes of The Brownings’ Correspondence which continue to be published by Wedgestone Press, as well as other biographical source materials, I foreground Barrett’s developing proto-feminist and political thinking, and interpret it in ways which I believe will be useful for our analyses of her writings in subsequent chapters of this study. What should emerge from this exploration, therefore, is a construction of Elizabeth Barrett as a challenging and original thinker who contested received ideas and socially endorsed gender expectations from an early stage in her life.

FAMILY AND GENDER POLITICS AT HOPE END

As Margaret Forster and Barbara Dennis have emphasised, it is important to acknowledge that Elizabeth Barrett was brought up not in the urban environments with which she is so often associated – Wimpole Street in London or Casa Guidi in Florence – but in rural Herefordshire amidst the Malvern Hills which she described in her diary as a ‘sublime sight’ and ‘such a sea of land’ (D 6). Born in 1806, the same year as John Stuart Mill, another figure who would become associated with liberal ideas, Elizabeth was the eldest of the twelve children of Edward Barrett Moulton-Barrett and Mary Graham-Clarke (one child, Mary, died aged four in 1814), and in 1809 she moved with her parents to what would become the family home for the next twenty-three years, Hope End near Ledbury in Herefordshire, a house which cost her father the inordinate sum of £27,000. With its name meaning ‘closed valley’ in archaic English (Forster, 1988: 9), the original house of Hope End was pulled down by Barrett’s father soon after the family’s arrival there and subsequently rebuilt as an imposing mansion in the Regency Indian-Gothic style, a fashion most famously seen in Brighton Pavilion. Set within 375 acres of parkland with a deer park, icehouse and grotto, the house itself possessed twenty bedrooms, vaulted ceilings, stained-glass windows, domes and minarets, giving it an air of opulence which Barrett’s mother said was reminiscent of the Arabian Nights Tales (Forster, 1988: 11). Significantly, the poet who would expend much of her creative energy drawing attention to the plight of the deprived in society, herself grew up in extremely privileged surroundings.

Hope End therefore offered a seemingly idyllic home for the Barrett children and certainly at this stage in Elizabeth Barrett’s life, her relations with her family were supportive and secure. As I claimed in the introduction, the persistent myths surrounding Barrett would have us believe that her father was always the grotesque parody of Victorian patriarchal authoritarianism which Bessier depicted in The Barretts of Wimpole Street. As Forster and Dennis have shown, however, this account is somewhat misconceived, for during the Hope End period Edward Barrett was deeply loved and respected by his children. Indeed, Barrett’s early poems written to celebrate the birthdays of family members constantly address her father with ‘the simple language of the heart’ and-‘th’enduring strains of filial love’ (BC 1:125) and construct him as a benevolent protector from ‘that world, where vices roam’ (BC 1:19). Furthermore, as Mermin points out, Barrett clearly considered her father to be a fundamental catalyst in her literary development (Mermin, 1989: 15–16), viewing him as the man who ‘sowed the very bottom of my mind’ (BC 1:11) and who helped to formalise her future vocation. As Barrett herself wrote in 1820:

In my sixth year [Kelley & Hudson suggest Barrett meant her ninth year] for some lines on virtue which I had pen[n]ed with great care I received from Papa a ten shilling note enclosed in a letter which was addrest to the Poet Laureat [sic] of Hope End; I mention this because I received much more pleasure from the word Poet than from the ten shilling note [ … ] ‘Poet laureat of Hope End’ was too great a tittle [sic] to lose—

(JSC 1:350)

Certainly, Edward Barrett’s support for his daughter’s literary endeavours is evident in his paying for the printing of her first major poem, The Battle of Marathon, which was dedicated by the poet ‘To him, to whom “I owe the most”, and whose admonitions have guided my youthful muse, even from her earliest infancy’ (CW 1:1). This and the numerous other expressions of love between father and children in the correspondence suggest that the assumptions concerning Edward’s tyrannical behaviour need modifying and readjusting somewhat when considering these early years.

Rather, during her youth it was Barrett’s relationship with her mother which was more problematic. Again, there is no denying the great love Barrett had for Mary, who is revered in the early poems as ‘So supremely distinguished in the anals [sic] of our little lives’ (BC 1:58) and whose untimely death in 1828 is recorded in Barrett’s correspondence in terms of utter anguish: ‘I never can forget what I have lost. Her voice is still sounding in my ears—her image is in my heart’ (BC 2:176). And yet there is also no denying that Mary represented a model of middle-class womanhood against which Barrett increasingly defined herself, for despite her evident intelligence, her mother spent much of her life almost continually pregnant and taking care of the family – pressures which eventually compounded to break her health. Indeed, in a letter to Robert in 1846, Barrett made a rare direct reference to her mother which highlights the psychological damage engendered by her restricted life. She was, Barrett wrote,

of a nature harrowed up into furrows by the pressure of circumstances [….] A sweet, gentle nature, which the thunder a little turned from its sweetness—as when it turns milk—One of those women who can never resist,—but, in submitting & bowing on themselves, make a mark, a plait, within,.. a sign of suffering. Too womanly she was—it was her only fault—

(BC 13:305–6)

Beneath the rhetoric of love and loss here is a barely veiled critique of a system which beats wives and mothers into submission (see the discussion of marriage in Chapter Six). Mary is compared to a ploughed field, an image which signals her main function as bearer of new life, but a field which has been ‘harrowed’ by a harrowing frame, suggesting processes of dominance and violation. (This contrasts sharply with Barrett’s earlier use of the image of her father as furrower, ‘sowing the very bottom of my mind’ with creativity.) And in the second image pattern, Mary is again depicted as vulnerable, subject to a signifier of sublime power, thunder, which results in ‘a sign of suffering’ within. Nevertheless, there is also a significant slippage here in the allocation of blame for Mary’s fate, for at the close of the quotation Barrett suggests that her mother complicitly surrendered to the condition of being ‘[t]oo womanly’ and thereby upheld the system which would eventually annihilate her. From an early age, Barrett herself determined never to give in to such complicity.

Barrett’s initial resistance to conventional modes of feminine behaviour is clearly articulated in two extant autobiographical prose pieces written around the time of puberty: ‘My Own Character’, which was started in 1818 when Barrett was twelve but then quickly aborted, and the more expansive and exploratory ‘Glimpses into My Own Life and Literary Character’, written in stages over 1820–1 (both reprinted in BC 1). In these documents Barrett repeatedly emphasises her passionate, hot-tempered and impatient nature, her ‘violent disposition’ and her extraordinary will-to-power as she asserts her authority over her siblings and ‘spurns that subserviency of opinion which is generally considered necessary to feminine softness’ (BC 1:349; 355). Moreover, in a later, thinly disguised autobiographical piece about the wilful ‘Beth’, written, according to Kelley and Hudson, for her niece in the early 1840s (BC 1:360), Barrett went further in the articulation of her hatred of conventional women, arguing that she ‘could not abide their littlenesses called delicacies, their pretty headaches, & soft mincing voices, their nerves & affectations’ (1:361). Condemnation indeed.

It is hardly surprising, then, that Barrett rebelled against anything which smacked of conventional middle-class femininity. Her diary is full of references to robust physical activity on the hills surrounding her home in a clear belying of the stereotype of the ailing and invalided girl (‘I cantered up the road & up the hill, without holding the pummel. The poney [sic] carried me swiftly’; ‘I got off the horse, & ran around [ … ] in my allegro style’, D 38), and her letters also record her annoyance with the ‘glittering kaleidoscope of Fashion’ (BC 1:109) and the ‘stupid Evening[s]’ of social visiting (BC 2:81) which she increasingly left to her sisters Henrietta and Arabella. Indeed, as Barrett later told her close friend Mary Russell Mitford, at the age of ten she rather ‘leant towards being poor Lord Byron’s PAGE’ (MRM 2:7), thereby recoiling from the feminine stereotypes around her through a fantasy of cross-dressing which oddly would have both empowered her (as a boy rather than a girl) and made her subservient to one of the most notorious sexual libertines of the age. The ambiguous nature of power differentials in relationships and the possibilities which cross-dressing provided for subverting the status quo would become key ideas in many of Barrett’s later writings, while, as we will see in the next chapter, Byron himself was to be one of the major influences on her early thinking about both poetry and politics.

The major influence on Barrett’s developing proto-feminist consciousness at this stage, however, was Mary Wollstonecraft, the Jacobin mother of feminism whose work Barrett read with eagerness and enthusiasm. As she wrote to Mitford in 1844:

I used to read Mary Wolstonecraft [sic],— (the ‘Rights of woman’,) . . when I was twelve years old, & ‘quite agreed with her.’ Her eloquence & her doctrine were equally dear to me at that time, when I was inconsolable for not being born a man. Ah—if I had thought that I sh^d have lived all my life without leaving my petticoats, both in the actual & metaphorical sense, how, at ten years old, I sh^d have frowned myself to scorn!

(MRM 3:40)

While we can question the perspective of Barrett’s statement here – by 1844 there is no doubt that she had escaped her psychological petticoats at least – the quote clearly points to the importance which Wollstonecraft’s key work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, had in the young girl’s philosophy. By the time Barrett was reading Vindication, a quarter of a century had passed since its original publication. Nevertheless, the text’s radical and subversive views on the gender socialisation of middle-class women, who are portrayed throughout the work as physically and intellectually enfeebled, still shocked a conservative establishment which viewed Wollstonecraft, in Horace Walpole’s famous image, as a ‘hyena in petticoats’ (Todd, 2000: 168) – itself an interesting precursor of Barrett’s own petticoated image. Wollstonecraft suggested that reform for women needed to be part of a wider reform of society as a whole, and particularly as part of a dismantl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• A Note on Names
• Texts Used
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: A Poet Lost and Regained
• 1 Constructing the Poet Laureate of Hope End: Elizabeth Barrett’s Early Life
• 2 Audacious Beginnings: Elizabeth Barrett’s Early Writings
• 3 The Culture of the Soul: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Poetics
• 4 The Voice of a Decade: Elizabeth Barrett’s Political Writings of the 1840s
• 5 Genre: A Chapter on Form
• 6 ‘How Do I Love Thee?’: Love and Marriage
• 7 ‘’Twixt Church and Palace of a Florence Street’: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Italy
• 8 ‘Where Angels Fear to Tread’: Aurora Leigh
• Chronology
• Abbreviations
• Bibliography
• Index