BOOKS OF THE WEEK
Frail, Strong, Peculiar Elizabeth Barrett Browning. By Dorothy Hewlett. (Cassell. 25s.) ON the occasion of the centenary of the birth of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, celebrated on March 6th, 1906, Alice Meynell wrote : " There can be no man or woman capable of the love of poetry, and insensible to hers. However unequal may be her' poetry, it is the breath of a spiritual creature, the beat of an ardent heart. It is moved by every generous passion. It has profuse beauties and no ignoble faults. Her husband wrote of her that her glories would never fade,' and she lives possessed of no less than glory."
Just over a quarter of a century later, in 1932, another critic, taking down Aurora Leigh from the shelves, had occasion to reconsider the literary reputation of its author. Fate, wrote Virginia Woolf, " has not been kind to Mrs. Browning as a writer. Nobody reads her, nobody discusses her, nobody troubles to put her in her place.... The primers dismiss her with contumely. Her importance, they say, ' has now become merely historical. Neither education nor associa- tion with her husband ever succeeded in teaching her the value of words and a sense of form.' In short, the only place in the mansion of literature that is assigned to her is downstairs in the servants' quarters, where, in company with Mrs. Hemans, Eliza Cook, Jean Ingelow, Alexander Smith, Edwin Arnold, and Robert Montgomery she bangs the crockery about and eats vast handfuls of peas on the point of her knife."
Another couple of decades have passed since Virginia Woolf's essay on Aurora Leigh appeared in the Second Common Reader. What is the position now ? Having floundered so long and so deeply in the trough of the wave, is Elizabeth Barrett Browning about to rise once more into critical favour ? And, if so, is she to be assessed on her intrinsic merits, or valued simply as a period piece, for whom, in no pious spirit, certain connoisseurs will long and industriously search the junk-shops of literature ? There is no doubt that a great deal that Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote, not excepting certain of the Sonnets from the Portuguese, cannot today be sampled without the wryness of distaste. But there is also no doubt that she possessed one quality, a rare one, which will always save her from extinction, both as a writer and as a personality. " We cannot read the first twenty pages of Aurora Leigh," wrote Virginia Woolf, " without becoming aware that the Ancient Mariner who lingers, for unknown reasons, at the porch of one book and not of another, has us by the hand, and makes us listen like a three years child while Mrs. Browning pours out in nine volumes of blank verse the story of Aurora Leigh." It was this same quality which held Carlyle entranced by Lady Geraldine's Courtship, the nineteen pages of which Elizabeth dashed off in a single day ; that brilliant narrative sense, evident also in many of her letters, which makes us regret, today, the fact that, omnivorous novel-reader as she was, she did not choose this medium of expression for her very unequal but very real powers. This narrative sense, moreover, was the expression of a hidden force of personality, which throughout her life enabled the frail woman effortlessly to attract and dominate the men and women who came into contact with her. After her death, her husband confessed that he did not know the date of her birth. " The personality of my wife," he told Dr. Fumivall, " was so strong and peculiar that 1 had no curiosity to go beyond it, and concern myself with matters which she was evidently disinclined to communicate." It is this " strong and peculiar " personality, to be encountered both in her poetry and in her letters, that makes it impossible for her to be wholly neglected. It is capable, even today, of claiming the attention and the respect of those who submit themselves, however warily, to the field of her influence.
A new biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning has long been awaited. Miss Dorothy Hewlett offers us a detailed and informative work, which carefully assembles and assesses most of the available evidence. Miss Hewlett's description of the early years at Hope End, with ample quotation from the juvenile letters, dramas and sonnets produced beneath the spires and minarets of that fabulous nursery, is particularly valuable. She does service, too, in emphasising the geniality of Mr. Moulton Barrett ; the playfulness and high spirits which served all his life to endear him to his children. The book is illustrated with twelve half-tone plates, several of them at once pleasing and unfamiliar ; and it has as a frontispiece an unpublished portrait of Elizabeth and her dog, Flush, a delightful water-colour painted in the back-bedroom in Wimpole Street by Elizabeth's young brother Alfred, on September 27th, 1843. BETTY MILLER.
Previous page
