‘Thin…’ EBB to Arabella MB 22–25 June 1847, #2681. ‘For above three hours… EBB to Arabella MB 13 September 1847, #2701.
p. 191
‘The windows…’ #2701. ‘Milky way…’ EBB to Henrietta MB 21–24 February 1848, #2719.
The ‘little baby-house’ is almost certainly number 8 Piazza de’ Pitti. EBB to Henrietta MB 23–24 November 1847, #2711. ‘Such tiny rooms! […] But the situation, .. nothing cd be perfecter than the situation […] a bad staircase, steep & narrow .. & on the second floor the people agreeing to take us for twenty scudi a month, that is four pounds, nine shillings—’: EBB to Henrietta MB 20 October 1847, #2707.
‘In came…’ #2719.
p. 192
‘My usual health…’ EBB to Mitford 22 February 1848, #2720. Morning sickness: #2719. EBB miscarries on 16 March. EBB to Henrietta MB 15 March to 1 April 1848, #2724. Possibly a sedentary life and low BMI mean light periods, hard to differentiate from problematic spotting. Though EBB thinks ‘there must be a great mistake in the time… Of course it is natural…’ #2720.
Casa Guidi Windows Part 1 Ll. 478–81, 516–22.
p. 193
Blackwood’s turns down the poem in October 1848. EBB supplies a limited number of notes for the first, book publication. Cooperative ideas realised as Ateliers Nationaux. ‘Really we are not communists…’ EBB to Kenyon 1 May 1848, #2730.
p. 194
‘As if the hope of the world…’ #2730.
The Globe and Traveller (10 June 1851), p. 2.
p. 195
‘Next summer we shall let…’ EBB to Arabella MB 10–11 May 1848, #2731.
She continues: ‘Florence is the cheapest place in Italy, which brings it to being the cheapest place in the world. Also this is the cheapest moment for Florence, through the panic.’
‘The carpet… We wanted… The bedrooms…’ EBB to Henrietta MB 18–20 November 1848, #2751.
p. 196
Again, perhaps at first EBB doesn’t realise she’s pregnant.
p. 197
Domett is Colonial Secretary 1862–63. ‘I cannot well…’ RB to Domett 22 May 1842, #964. Meeting Elizabeth: ‘I have some important objects in view with respect to my future life—’ RB to Alfred Domett 13 July 1846, #2483.
RB and EBB visit Dante’s tomb in the pre-dawn because they’re leaving for Florence and prefer travelling in the night cool. And because, not having registered the required paperwork, they aren’t actually allowed in. In 1810 Dante’s actual bones were hidden from the occupying French in a pillar in the adjoining cloister.
‘He looked east…’ EBB to Mitford 24 August 1848, #2744.
p. 198
Wilson also wants to call Dr Harding for RB. ‘Most active members…
Wineglass…’ EBB to Arabella MB 7–11 October 1848, #2748. EBB suspects quinsy too: EBB & RB to Mary Louisa Boyle 3 December 1848, #2754.
Mahony has nursing experience, from nursing in Cork Cholera Hospital during the 1832–33 epidemic. Thomas Francis Woodlock, Catholic Encyclopedia vol. 12 (1913 edition). https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Catholic_Encyclopedia_(1913)/Father_Prout [retrieved 11 June 2019].
‘He plants himself…’ #2748.
p. 199
‘Disagreeableness… Little dear…’ #2748. The couple have just one night off from Mahony in two months.
Vanity Fair completes a nineteen-part serialisation in Punch in July 1848. EBB reads it in volume form. EBB to Mitford 30 April 1849, #2787. The Fraserians, an 1835 group-portrait line drawing by Daniel Maclise, also includes Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey, although they weren’t regular contributors. As for sententiousness, Virginia Woolf will be right to say that ‘the long years of seclusion had done [EBB] irreparable damage as an artist’. ‘I want to be…’ RB to EBB 3 August 1846 #2521. ‘Oh to be with you…’ RB to EBB 7 August 1846, #2529. ‘Society by flashes…’ #2792.
p. 200
‘Laughed a little…’ EBB to Henrietta MB 16 May 1847, #2678.
‘Robert came in from his walk the other evening with an “Ah, ha! I have been kissed by somebody since I saw you last.” I suppose he meant to make me dreadfully jealous; instead […] it came into my head that you and Arabel were in Florence […] Robert seeing me quite gasp for breath, hastened to explain that it was only his haunting friend, Father Prout,—who spending an hour or two in Florence on his road to Rome, of course met Robert, & kissed him in the street, mouth to mouth, a good deal to his surprise.’ EBB to Henrietta MB 23–24 November, 1847, #2711.
‘Mrs Jameson says…’ #2678. ‘A strange sort of person…’ Mitford to Charles Boner, 22 February 1847, SD1310.
‘At a young ladies’ school in Chelsea, Mary received an education strongly rooted in literature and French’: ‘Mary Russell Mitford (1787–1855)’ in The Brownings’ Correspondence, vol. 3, pp. 319–321.
‘Femmelette’ is used in Julien Chevalier’s L’inversion de l’instinct sexuel au point de vue médico-légal of 1885. Cited in Jeffrey Merrick, Bryant T. Ragan, Bryant T. Ragan, Jr, Homosexuality in Modern France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 159–60. G. R. Emile Batault’s 1885 categorisation of male hysterics in the Salpêtrière Hospital contrasts a ‘perfumed and pomaded femmelette’ with a ‘robust working man’ of healthy masculinity: G. R. Emile Batault, Contribution à l’étude de l’hystérie chez l’homme (Paris: republished Hachette, 2017). In the twenty-first century femmelette will be campily reappropriated by the French gay community, like the English ‘queer’.
p. 201
Alfred Domett also goes on to a scandalously passionate heterosexual relationship, apparently conducting an affair with his future wife, Mary George, a married Wellington school teacher for years. ‘Alfred Domett’ in Te Ara: The Encyclopedia of New Zealand https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/1d15/domett-alfred [retrieved 14 June 2019]. https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Nelson-14202 ‘The Church of England in the Early Days of Ahuriri’, Daily Telegraph, issue 5511, 27 April 1889 [retrieved 14 June 2019].
p. 202
‘I wd have sent…’ #2748. In the same letter EBB admits her tumble and describes Mahony: ‘Not over refined in the way of him, though so highly cultivated in intellectual respects. Then it is a grace in these fathers of the church, to be “fraternal” they think.’
‘The second life…’ EBB to Henrietta MB 18–20 November 1848, #2751.
p. 203
Righi ‘may get from forty to seventy pounds a year perhaps, which in Florence is a high point of
