‘Lives here alone…’ #3413. ‘He feels…’ #3508. EBB continues, ‘Upon Wilson’s thanking him very much for the compliment to herself, he condescended to make another exception in her favour.’
p. 237
‘But with an Italian .. a Tuscan […] there is no legal marriage, except by the act ecclesiastical’; EBB to Arabella MB 10 July 1855, #3575; EBB to Alfred MB 9 July 1855, #3574.
‘Half America…’ EBB to Henrietta Cook 13 July 1855, #3578.
Sarianna and Arabella are also present for that September reading.
Papa and the ‘mesmerizer’: EBB to Henrietta Cook 27 August 1855, #3604.
p. 238
The Barretts leave home on 30 August, ostensibly so that Wimpole Street can be redecorated, and return by the 27 September reading. ‘Tears enough…’ #3575. ‘Little warm, sunny, shabby…’ Ritchie, ed, The Letters and Journals of Anne Thackeray Ritchie, p. 82.
p. 239
‘Old charm…’ #3574. AL Bk. 6, Ll. 79–84. EBB fair-copies the first two books in January, the next three in February, and the sixth by 13 March. RB’s Men and Women reviewed: In November (UK) and December (America). Anon. in The Literary Gazette (1 December 1855), pp. 758–59; Margaret Oliphant in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (February 1856), p. 137; Henry Fothergill Chorley in The Athenaeum (17 November 1855), pp. 1327–28.
RB’s Shelley ‘Letters’ reviewed: The Literary Gazette (21 February 1852), pp. 173–75; John Forster in The Examiner (21 February 1852), pp. 117–18; Henry Fothergill Chorley in The Athenaeum (21 February 1852), p. 214. Anon. in The Leader (28 February 1852), pp. 205–206; Anon. in the Manchester Guardian (3 March 1852), p. 147; George Henry Lewes in The Westminster Review, April 1852, pp. 502–11.
EBB’s Poems (1856) adds Casa Guidi Windows and three uncollected poems to Poems (1850).
p. 240
‘Always a weight…’ #3578.
Kenyon’s bequest won’t be available for a year. His will dates from the week before his death. SD1993. Bryan Waller Procter to EBB c.4 December 1856, #3931.
p. 241
‘Shed tears…’ EBB to Anna Jameson 2 February 1857, #3963. ‘I think…’ John Ruskin to RB 27 November 1856, #3927. Further correspondence admiring AL: Leigh Hunt to EBB and RB 31 December 1856, #3949. #3927.
John Ruskin to RB 28 December 1856, #3947.
p. 242
Mostly enthusiastic: though a year after AL’s publication John Nichols in the Westminster Review ‘has leisure to be censorious’ about form and versification in particular. AL reviewed: Anon. in The Globe and Traveller (20 November 1856), p. 1. Charles Hamilton Aidé in Edinburgh Weekly Review (28 February 1857), pp. 7–9. Henry Fothergill Chorley in The Athenaeum (22 November 1856), pp. 1425–27. Anon. in The Albion (6 December 1856), p. 585. Anon. in New-York Daily Tribune (20 December 1856), pp. 5–6. Anon. in New-York Daily Times (9 December 1856), p. 2. George Eliot in The Westminster Review (January 1857), pp. 306–310.
Perceptively, Coventry Patmore admires the Sonnets from the Portuguese: at least one ranks ‘with the very best of Milton and Wordsworth. […] Nothing is more untrue than the common notion that deep and subtle thought is foreign to passion.’ In Aurora Leigh, she ‘seldom goes out of her way for an image’. The North British Review (February 1857), pp. 443–62.
p. 243
‘There has been…’ #3963. ‘I shall try…’ #3578. ‘Yet when it came…’ EBB to Henrietta Cook 13 May 1857, #3999. ‘Without a word…’ EBB to Arabella MB c.29 April 1857, #3991.
p. 244
In less than a fortnight RB is able to report that EBB ‘will get over the blow’ of Papa’s death. RB to Arabella MB [?29] April 1857 #3992.
They’re staying at Casa Betti. Annunziata’s details: source is ‘Simonetta Berbeglia, of Arezzo’, cited in Kelley et al, note to EBB to Sarianna Browning c.9 September 1857, #4043. ‘When I wanted…’ EBB to Arabella MB 12 April 1858, #4164.
p. 245
RB on mediums: John Casey, After Lives: A Guide to Heaven, Hell and Purgatory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 373.
‘A bad winter…’ #4164.
p. 246
Tuberculosis in Le Havre: Adolphe Lecadre, ‘Etude statistique, hygiénique et médicale relative au mouvement de la population du Havre en 1868’ in Recueil des publications de la Société Impériale Havraise d’Etudes Diverses (1868): pp. 45–114, 91. Cited in David S. Barnes, The Making of a Social Disease: Tuberculosis in Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), Chapter 6: https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft8t1nb5rp&chunk.id=ch6&toc.depth=1&toc.id=ch6&brand=ucpress [retrieved December 2019]. We can’t be certain EBB was free of tuberculosis by her death. ‘Plenty of distraction…’ EBB to Isa Blagden 7 January 1859, #4315.
p. 247
‘Beautiful dream…’ EBB to Eliza Ogilvy 17 October 1859, #4508, Eton.
EBB will publish ‘Napoleon III in Italy’ in Poems Before Congress next year. In Marciano, as EBB recovered, ‘The Brownings almost invariably came over in the afternoon to tea on the grass terrace’. Marchesa Edith Marion Peruzzi de’ Medici (née Story) in The Living Age vol. 285 (1915), p. 554.
p. 248
‘Ill-directed flight…’ Julia Ward Howe, Words for the Hour (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1857), pp. 145–47.
p. 249
RB appreciated: EBB to Sarianna Browning 7 April 1860, #4644, Lilly.
p. 250
RB’s new persona poems will appear in 1864’s Dramatis Personae.
‘Approaching antagonism…’ William Michael Rossetti, Some Reminiscences vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Library Collection, 1906 reissued 2013) p. 239.
Via Felice is now Via Sistina.
p. 251
‘Lord Walter’s Wife’ portrays the double standard by which unfaithful women are condemned but men are not.
EBB’s heart is ‘heavy’: EBB to Sarianna Browning 19 January 1861, #61047-00 [c.28 March 1861], MS at Lilly.
p. 254
Philip Larkin, ‘An Arundel Tomb’ in Archie Burnett, ed, The Complete Poems (London: Faber, 2012), pp. 71–72.
‘Slender, fragile…’: At nine, Pen appeared ‘At once less childlike and less manly than would befit that age’; Nathaniel Hawthorne, Notes of Travel (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1870), pp. 69–70.
p. 255
A memorial tablet for EBB: Simone Luigi Peruzzi to RB 21 June 1859, #4433.
Though the Casa Guidi images don’t take, Rome is at the cutting edge of contemporary photographic practices. Beth Saunders, ‘The Rise of Paper Photography in Italy, 1839–55’ in Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000), http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/rppi/hd_rppi.htm
