BIB_ID
402715
Accession number
MA 2148.48
Creator
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 1806-1861.
Display Date
[1854] January 10.
Credit line
Acquired from the University of Illinois, 1961.
Description
1 item (8 pages) ; 21.2 x 13.6 cm + envelope
Notes
Year of writing determined from postmarks and internal evidence. See the published editions of the correspondence, cited below, for additional information.
EBB gives the place of writing as "43 Via Bocca di Leone", an address in Rome where the Brownings are known to have lived.
Envelope with stamp and postmarks addressed to: "Angleterre viâ France/ George G Moulton Barrett Esqre/ 50. Wimpole Street/ London."
The last part of the letter is written on the inside flap of the envelope.
With a seal containing the word "Ba" (EBB's nickname).
EBB gives the place of writing as "43 Via Bocca di Leone", an address in Rome where the Brownings are known to have lived.
Envelope with stamp and postmarks addressed to: "Angleterre viâ France/ George G Moulton Barrett Esqre/ 50. Wimpole Street/ London."
The last part of the letter is written on the inside flap of the envelope.
With a seal containing the word "Ba" (EBB's nickname).
Provenance
Acquired from the University of Illinois, 1961.
Summary
Asking about their father's health, after receiving news that he was suffering from a cough and asthma ("Do let Arabel write me every detail, for I shall be very anxious, let me struggle ever so much against it--"); commenting on the preface by J. Newton Brown to a new edition of Robert Hall's sermon "Modern Infidelity Considered with Respect to Its Influence on Society", which accused EBB and a number of other poets of heresy; writing that she is unsurprised and unaffected by it: "What we should chiefly be sorry for is that Robert Hall should have an editor with so little common sense--& for the rest, I really fail in getting up the steam to be sorry at all. When women go into a crowd they cant help being jostled a little by greasy coats--happy they, if nobody treads on their toes! Now I consider that the least of my toes is perfectly unaffected on this occasion"; referring to the criticism received by Henrietta Armantine Soulé (wife of the United States Minister to Spain) at a ball in Madrid in November 1853, and the duel that ensued; responding to each of Brown's charges against her, among them that her work "tends to Swedenborgianism", that she used to be a liberal Unitarian, and that she is currently "opposed to the whole Christian church"; defending her faith ("if a union with the Christian church means a recognition of Jesus Christ as my Lord & my God, then [it is] a calumnious error to represent me as a schismatic from the church & an example of modern infidelity"); writing that Edith Story, the daughter of William Wetmore Story, has had attack after attack of "Roman fever"; describing Thackeray's busy social life in Rome; recounting meeting the author John Gibson Lockhart at the actress Adelaide Kemble's house and Lockhart's comments about Thackeray; writing about a quadrille party in the apartment of their downstairs neighbor, the painter William Page, and Robert teasing her about her "dissipation"; describing Mrs. Kemble and their friendship with her; sending news of Pen, including that he has begun to memorize and recite poetry (Tennyson, Herrick, passages from Shakespeare); telling George that Wilson has been experiencing sessions of automatic writing and that, during one of these sessions, EBB received a message from their mother, Mary Moulton-Barrett, and another spirit (possibly her brother Edward); mentioning that she herself has been experimenting with automatic writing; defending her belief in the validity of these phenomena; mentioning that she has received a "most interesting letter" from Mrs. Gaskell.
Catalog link
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