Passionate lovers, in curls and side-whiskers, oppressed, defiant, eloping—in this guise thousands of people must know and love the Brownings who have never read a line of their poetry. […] But fate has not been kind to Mrs. Browning as a writer. Nobody reads her, nobody discusses her, nobody troubles to put her in her place.
Yet Woolf was herself complicit. Her comments date from the year she published Flush: A Biography, her own version of the famous costume drama – written from the point of view of Elizabeth’s pet spaniel.
Today, we can’t ignore how central the construction of identity is to Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s story; and how this holds as true for her life itself as for the myth-making that surrounds it. Hers is a story about how a writer becomes – and that’s what this book tries to mirror. Elizabeth dramatises the two-way creation of every writing self, from without and from within. That the life of the body both enables and limits the life of the mind is the paradox of the thinking self. John Keats’s early death, or the seventeen-year-old poet-suicide in Henry Wallis’s ‘The Death of Chatterton’, are moving because they remind us that a dead poet falls silent. But life imposes its own limits on the writer. For every Lord Byron or Malcolm Lowry, seizing the day in ways that their work celebrates, there is a John Clare or a Primo Levi trying to write experience away.
Writers’ bodies create resistances, forcing interplay between self and world. Elizabeth Barrett Browning turned twelve in 1818, the year that Frankenstein’s creature first found out how deeply the wearer of a body can be changed by what happens to it. And perhaps it’s no accident that he is the creation of another woman writer. There are so many reasons why women may find that their bodies define their lives to a greater extent than do men’s that it’s surely no surprise if they chose to write about embodiment.
It used to be a feminist truism that René Descartes had it wrong, and there is no separation between mind and body. Yet bodies do disguise, shield, and isolate minds. A woman being whistled at by scaffolders may be mulling her dystopian novel, the mother in the labour suite may have done pioneering work on biodiversity, that figure wearing the Marigolds may be a leading human rights lawyer. More: to spend any time with someone whose body is failing is to understand that recognising the unimpaired selfhood ‘within’ it is both human and humane. So are we ghosts in a curvaceous machine, to borrow from the twentieth-century British language philosopher Gilbert Ryle’s formulation? Or do we inhabit the body in ways that are inseparable from how we think and feel? Or, again, do many Western philosophy courses start with the thought experiment that goes, How do you know you’re not a brain being stimulated in a vat? because, in a way, that’s what we dream of? A virtual life, in which we experience ourselves as pure will, without the resistances of the concrete world?
Today, the screen world seems to offer us this ideal existence. And if we turn back two centuries, we find Elizabeth Barrett Browning, too, used the written word in ‘virtual’ ways to take part in the wider world while remaining bodily at home on her daybed. For she does see herself as a ghost in a machine; her strong-willed thinking self as set within an often frustrating body. It isn’t only that illness and contemporary ideas of femininity exclude her from much that she longs to do and be. Living in the shadow of mortality from young womanhood onward, she wants urgently to continue to exist after bodily death, and for her loved ones to continue to exist too; as both Nonconformist Christianity and the spiritualism she explores assure her they will. This separation of mind – whether as ‘soul’ or ‘ghost’ – from body is unfashionable in the twenty-first-century West, but to dismiss it is to fail to understand how Elizabeth and her contemporaries experience embodiment. In the event, the thinking self who speaks in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s work has triumphantly outlived her bodily existence. But how telling it is that the fictionalised character of ‘Elizabeth’ that’s replaced her in the popular imagination – someone passive and poorly, bullied and rescued, barely even a poet – is almost entirely bodily, scarcely a mind at all.
Yet there’s another turn in the story. This often triumphant life is also the mirror and beneficiary of its brutal times. Jamaican and Madeiran ancestry make Elizabeth question her own ethnicity. A sensibility that will change the course of literary history is built on a shifting, uncertain self-image. But if we think that the shadowy self she imagines in the mirror is truly black, or that she’s haunted by the figure of another self denied the leisure and literacy that have made her a poet, we should think again. Elizabeth Barrett Browning is the daughter and granddaughter of slavers: it’s their prodigious sugar fortunes that have allowed her extraordinary talents to develop. Even her elopement is financed by this money, despite the fact that by the time she runs away both she and her husband are abolitionists.
The self jars against circumstance. When Elizabeth emerges from this mercantile and firmly unliterary background as a child prodigy, and declares not only that she will be a poet, but that she already is one, it should be a reach too far. In 1806, the year of her birth, women can neither vote nor, in England at least, own property once married. Even the wealthiest receive relatively little formal education and are
