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Press multi-volume and online edition of The Browning Correspondence, edited by Philip Kelley et al., www.browningscorrespondence.com, includes not only letters (here given as # numbers) but supporting documents (here given as SD numbers), images and portraits, and contemporary critical responses to the Brownings, and is by far the best resource for research. So authoritative and comprehensive is it that I have adopted its numbering throughout these references. Also indispensible for any Browning scholar is The Brownings: A Research Guide, www.browningguide.org/, also prepared by Kelley et al. Published before much of this material had been made available, the last full-length solo biography is Margaret Forster’s wonderfully readable and emotionally insightful Elizabeth Barrett Browning (London: Chatto & Windus, 1988). Robert is more recently and comprehensively served by Ian Finlayson’s authoritative Browning (London: Harper Collins, 2004).

Key to abbreviations

EBB – Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Edward B MB – her father, Edward Barrett Moulton-Barrett

Samuel B MB – her ‘Uncle Sam’

Edward MB – her brother ‘Bro’

Samuel MB – her brother Sam

Mary MB – her mother

Henrietta MB and Arabella MB – her sisters Henrietta and Arabella

RB – Robert Browning

Mitford – Mary Russell Mitford

DEDICATION

p. v

The last line of Aurora Leigh [AL].

FRONTISPIECE

Epigraph

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, AL Bk 2, L. 485.

p. 1

C. S. Francis & Co. commission this cheap successor to daguerreotype, taken on 18 September 1858. RB to Charles Stephen Francis 19 September 1858, #4243; RB to Edward Law 19 September 1858, #4244.

p. 2

Barlow is selected by William Michael Rossetti. Barlow’s offprint is held at the Armstrong Browning Library. Alicia Constant, ‘Artefacts Relating to EBB’s Aurora Leigh’, http://blogs.baylor.edu/19crs/2016/01/21/artifacts-related-to-ebbs-aurora-leigh/ [retrieved 11 September 2018].

Rossetti’s request for ‘the shoulder & back to be slightly lowered’ has been taken as evidence that EBB developed a humped back. D. A. B. Young, ‘The illnesses of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’ in British Medical Journal vol. 298 (18 February 1989), p. 441. Simpler and more likely is that she’s hunched over by chronic pulmonary disease.

‘An evening resort…’ Dante Gabriel Rossetti to William Allingham 18 December 1856, SD2023. ‘As unattractive a person…’ Rossetti to Walter Howell Deverell 30 August 1851, SD1501.

p. 3

RB to Edward Chapman 19 September 1858, #4246.

The ‘horrible libel’, a medallion by the sculptor Marshall Wood, is reproduced in The National Magazine (14 February 1857), p. 313. RB retains the original ambrotype, ‘so satisfactory that I keep it myself and only send a copy to Francis’. RB to Edward Chapman 19 September 1858, #4246.

Sent via the Fulton. RB to Charles Stephen Francis 19 September 1858, #4243.

Brady advertised in the New-York Daily Tribune.

p. 4

AL Bk 8, Ll. 283, 285. As famously argued in Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’ in Phyllis Johnson, ed, Aspen vol. 5 + 6 (1967).

p. 5

Lionel Trilling and Harold Bloom in Frank Kermode, John Hollander, Harold Bloom, Martin Price, J. B. Trapp, Lionel Trilling, eds, The Oxford Anthology of English Literature (New York, London, Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 1475.

p. 6

The 1980s also see the last full-length biography, Margaret Forster’s Elizabeth Barrett Browning (London: Chatto & Windus, 1988). Important studies of EBB as a ‘woman writer’ published in this era include Angela Leighton, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1986) in their Key Women Writers series; Marjorie Stone, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995) in their Women Writers series; and Germaine Greer, Slip-Shod Sibyls: Recognition, Rejection and the Female Poet (London: Viking, 1995), pp. 95–101, 394–400, 424.

Woolf misses the verse novel’s grand narrative of becoming a woman poet.

Virginia Woolf, ‘Aurora Leigh’ in The Second Common Reader (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1932).

Virginia Woolf, Flush: A Biography (London: The Hogarth Press, 1932).

p. 8

Under the principle of coverture. Such non-professional occupations as governess or seamstress are open to unmarried women.

The father of Mary Ann Evans (1819–1880) invested in schooling because the future George Eliot was a plain child whose marriage prospects he considered poor.

EBB, ‘Glimpses into My Own Life and Literary Character’, in Philip Kelley and Ronald Hudson, eds, The Brownings’ Correspondence (Winfield, Kansas: Wedgestone Press, 1984), vol. 1, pp. 348–56, p. 351.

p. 9

AL Bk 2, Ll. 494–97.

AL Bk 1, Ll. 959–61.

Michael Field is a pseudonym for Katharine Harris Bradley and Edith Emma Cooper.

p. 10

AL Bk 2, Ll. 33–34.

‘The worthiest poets have remained uncrowned / Till death has bleached their foreheads to the bone’, AL Bk 2, Ll. 28–29.

AL Bk 1, Ll. 1049–52.

p. 11

AL Bk 2, Ll. 232–36.

AL Bk 2, Ll. 240–43. Even in the year of Elizabeth’s birth, when roughly 60 per cent of women (and 40 per cent of men) are illiterate, female literacy is not bizarre. David Mitch, ‘Education and Skill of the British Labour Force’, in Roderick Floud and Paul Johnson, eds, The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain, vol. I: Industrialisation, 1700–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 344.

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Hogarth Press, 1929), p. 6.

p. 12

Though EBB still hadn’t read Godwin’s Memoir in her forties. Charlotte Brontë, quoted in Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë (London: Smith, Elder, 1857), Bk 1, p. 140. By the time Aurora Leigh is published, biographies are bestsellers. Samuel Smiles’s 1857 The Life of George Stephenson and of his son Robert Stephenson sells 25,500 copies in its first six years. Richard Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public 1800–1900 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998), p. 388.

BOOK ONE

Epigraph

AL Bk 1, Ll. 1139–40.

p. 14

The Gentleman’s Magazine vol. 108 (September 1810), p. 202. ‘Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy vol. XII’ in The Monthly Journal vol. 93 (September–December 1820), pp. 161–62. Though still within the cool, thirty-year Dalton Minimum, in 1810, ‘Summer was generally dry and hot’: Lucy Veale, Georgina H. Endfield, ‘Situating 1816, the “year without summer”, in the UK’, in The Geographical Journal vol. 182, no. 4 (10 August 2016), pp. 318–30.

AL, Bk 1, L. 1083. A local but also central-northern English place name, ‘hope’ comes from the Old English ‘hop’. University of Nottingham Key to English Place-names http://kepn.nottingham.ac.uk/map/place/Herefordshire/Hope%20under%20Dinmore [retrieved 29