Since when was genius found respectable?

Elizabeth Berridge

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING by Margaret Forster

Chatto & Windus, £14.95, pp.416

SELECTED POEMS OF ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING introduced by Margaret Forster

Chatto & Windus, £12.95, pp.330

It is one of the ironies of posterity that anyone who has made a considerable mark on his or her own times should be remem- bered for one thing only. Up to a few years ago Elizabeth Barrett Browning was cast as the invalid of Wimpole Street, prayed over by her father, as Chesterton put it, `with a kind of melancholy glee'. Then brought back to life and liberty by the dashing young poet, Robert Browning, she was off to Italy to live happily ever after and write a few poems.

Previous biographers, notably Alethea Hayter, Dorothy Hewlett and Gardner Taplin, went some way to setting the record straight; as did the re-publication of Aurora Leigh by the Women's Press in 1978, and a recent reassessment of her work by Angela Leighton.

Margaret Forster goes further. She has drawn together information from sources discovered in the last three decades, and skilfully adjusted many perspectives. Eliza- beth Barrett Browning is first seen in her family background as a complex, high- spirited child, soon to become a courageous woman of near-genius: a woman mercifully with a sense of humour and not without faults.

Miss Forster pays tribute — as do all Browning scholars now limbering up for the R. B. centenary next year — to the obsession of one man, Philip Kelley, of Baylor University, Texas, who set up his own press in order to publish all known and unknown Browning correspondence. To date, five volumes have appeared in addition to Elizabeth's letters to friends, and the early diary she kept for a year at Hope End: all with impeccable notes.

Elizabeth (as Miss Forster sensibly chooses to call her) was an inveterate letter-writer. Conversation tired her, and 'talk on paper' was a necessary distraction for a frequently house-bound, clever woman of sensibility and wit bursting with lively ideas and literary ambition. From an early age she learned to husband her physical resources; when her mother died, she pleaded fatigue and handed over the running of the house to her sisters. Later she was to tell Robert that she had never ordered dinner in her life; indeed, it was only when she was in her forties and her maid Wilson was ill, that she arranged her own hair and dressed herself. But she never used ill-health to prevent Robert socialising in Rome or Florence, urging him to go out and bring back the latest literary and political gossip. It is evident from Casa Guidi Windows that she relished her role as spectator of history in the making.

While there are no startling revelations in these 400 pages, one legend is exploded. Elizabeth was never seriously considered for the Poet Laureateship in 1850. In fact, the Athenaeum was campaigning — not too seriously — for the abolition of what it called 'an offensive title', so meaningless that any poet would do. Her name was mentioned along with the ironic remark that if she were elected 'it would in a manner recompense two poets by a single act.' A telling comment, for the Brownings cannot easily be assessed apart, as Betty Miller with some insight illustrated in her controversial Robert Browning: A Portrait.

What Margaret Forster emphasises is the success of the marriage, and Robert's unselfish care. That two writers could live in such close proximity and still allow each other space is what interests her, and she makes the point well, recreating 'the happy winter' of 1853 in Florence, when they rose early and worked in separate rooms Elizabeth busy with Aurora Leigh and Robert working on Men and Women. 'An artist must make a solitude to work in, if it is to be good work at all,' she wrote. They were lucky. Despite their small income there was always someone to take care of Penini and ensure their privacy. The birth of a son, to a delicate woman of 43 with an opium habit, had been a miracle and put the seal on family life.

Elizabeth's physical courage in the face of ill-health was allied to her moral strength. She hated injustice and spoke up for women she admired; accepted sexual deviancy. Yet she was no feminist. What she wanted was recognition that a woman was as capable of a vocation as a man and should be regarded as a writer or poet without condescension or special pleading. `Womanliness,' she asserted, 'whether in life or poetry, is a positive thing and not the negative of manliness.'

They genuinely admired each other's work and Elizabeth was never in doubt that Robert was the better poet. She was shaken and angered by the poor reception of his Men and Women. Popularity can be a matter of luck and timing, and Browning had the misfortune to publish in the middle of the Crimean war, when it was Tennyson who hit the jackpot with the heroics of 'The Charge of the Light Brigade'. In 1856, however, the war was over and people ready to buy books and be uplifted in an entertaining manner. Elizabeth, with Au- rora Leigh, had her finger on the public pulse.

Her own poetry has, with the exception of Aurora Leigh — that astonishing, febrile hybrid — been neglected, and a long overdue and welcome selection is pub- lished alongside this biography, inviting a reassessment of such anti-male digs as `Lord Walter's Lady', which so outraged Thackeray that he refused it for the re- spectable Cornhill.

Alas, for me, 'Lady Geraldine's Courtship', which so enthralled contem- porary readers, earns its inclusion in The Stuffed Owl (see a fragment entitled Snob- lesse Oblige). But there are rich pickings. Here again is Pan, 'making a poet out of a man, down in the reeds by the river'. Perfect, concise imagery. What better summing-up, in fact, of Elizabeth's person- al struggle and those 15 hard-working, celebratory years of a fulfilling marriage?

Elizabeth Berridge edited and introduced The Barretts at Hope End: The Early Diaries of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Murray, 1974)