Look closer though and, for all Robert’s insistence that there isn’t ‘a hair’s breadth of retouching’, the picture turns out to have been clumsily overpainted. In fact within two sentences his letter contradicts itself, framing Macaire-Warnod as ‘the Artist’ who’s worked up detail that got lost in making this copy. Yet with its brushstroke hair, torso straight as a ruler and expressionless face, this naïve rendering is hardly the work of a professional. Who apart from Robert – who is a keen amateur artist – could have a motive for intervention so strong that it overrules plain sight and common sense like this?
We can’t be absolutely sure we’ve caught him red-handed. Though great American photographer Mathew Brady seems to have been authorised to sell prints of the image Francis & Co received, for $3 a pop, it’s hard to believe that he would have retouched so clumsily. But what we do know is that, luckily, Robert has kept back an untouched original. It’s this version that Barlow and Rossetti use, and we can see a detail of it in copies taken by British photographers Elliott and Fry. In it, the unexpurgated Elizabeth Barrett Browning has a dark shadow of tiredness or pain under her left eye, and the greying of her hair is difficult to assess, but she’s every bit as characterful as Rossetti’s recreation. This real-life woman has dark eyes and arched, dark eyebrows. Her nose is long; so is her upper lip, with its sexy overbite. Her face is asymmetric. Cover the right side and the left seems soulful and focused; cover the left and the right appears amused.
In the twenty-first century we recognise instantly the Brownings’ anxiety about this key publicity shot, and their need to control the image of the international celebrity that fifty-two-year-old Elizabeth Barrett Browning has become. As readers we like to feel, with Elizabeth’s fictional alter ego Aurora Leigh, that ‘This special book […] stands above my knowledge, draws me up.’ Yet we also expect a glossy, artfully posed author photo; it’s almost as if we need an ideal appearance to embody the mind we idealise as we read. In our own post-postmodern times, the Romantic cult of the visible and what it can express seems gobbled up by its own children, the visually framed identities that ‘are’ our social media selves. Elizabeth’s struggle with her portrait reminds us that this process is nothing new.
The irony is that, despite being so anxiously aware of the ramifications of image-making, she’s destined to become a notorious object lesson in how distorted ideas about famous individuals get established. The Brownings would have been astonished and mortified to see myths about their private life obscure first her work, and eventually even her identity. Let’s remind ourselves that Elizabeth Barrett Browning is a pivotal figure, changing the direction of English-language poetry and influencing both her contemporaries and subsequent generations of poets and readers. In her lifetime, acknowledged as Britain’s greatest ever woman poet, she receives international critical acclaim and attracts a huge readership. Yet within seventy years of her death, popular culture will have reduced this figure – who when she died was mourned as a public, political heroine in revolutionary Italy – to a swooning poetess in whose little, couch-bound life only a tyrannical father and an ardent poet-lover contribute drama.
The damage will be done above all by Rudolf Besier, author of The Barretts of Wimpole Street, a man of whom it’s probably safe to say that he makes no particular study of how women emerge as writers: though he seems happy to incorporate gossip to gee up this drama. In the 1980s Lady Anne Holland-Martin will recall to the Browning scholar Philip Kelley how, at the after-party for its premiere at the Malvern Festival Theatre, ‘It was felt [Besier’s] play needed a dramatic impact. During the conversation, those who had lived in the community for generations recalled in vivid terms the handed-down memories about Edward Moulton-Barrett … the rest is history.’ Three film versions follow Besier’s 1931 Broadway hit: a Norma Shearer and Charles Laughton vehicle (1934), 1957’s remake with Jennifer Jones and John Gielgud, and the 1982 TV movie with Jane Lapotaire and Joss Ackland. There are also no fewer than seven further remakes for television of Besier’s domestic melodrama.
By the 1970s – when Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and John Updike crowd the book charts – the roaring boys of North American literary criticism will go a stage further, maligning Elizabeth Barrett Browning as relevant to the history of literature only through marriage or, worse, as hindering that real writer, her husband. In 1973’s Oxford Anthology of English Literature, handsome paired volumes designed as an authoritative student resource, Lionel Trilling and Harold Bloom pronounce:
Miss Barrett became an invalid (for still mysterious reasons) from 1838 to 1846 when […] she eloped with the best poet of the age. Her long poem Aurora Leigh (1856) was much admired, even by Ruskin, but is very bad. Quite bad too are the famous Sonnets from the Portuguese […] Though the Brownings’ married life was reasonably happy, Mrs Browning’s enthusiasms […] gave her husband much grief.
But perhaps the tendentiousness of this is unsurprising. The Anthology’s editors print just one minor poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning; but then the only other writing by women to feature in its more than four and a half thousand pages comprises one minor poem each by Edith Sitwell and Stevie Smith, two by Emily Brontë, and passages from Dorothy Wordsworth’s private journals: in total, fewer than two dozen pages, or around 0.5 per cent of their ‘canon’. Literary revisionism on this scale is strenuous stuff. Excluding all of the Brontë novels, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf can be neither innocent nor accidental; and it illustrates vividly how literary canons are not born, but made.
Within the continual process of reputation-making and remaking that is literary history, Elizabeth Barrett Browning remains a bellwether for the rising and sinking stock of women writers.
