2039. EBB to Mary Russell Mitford
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 11, 91–92.
[London]
Saturday. [?20] [September 1845] [1]
Ever dearest Miss Mitford, how I thank you for this pretty translation of your thoughts of me—for so I like to consider it. It is the prettiest pen wiper I ever saw! How kind, and how I thank you!–
Will you give the five shillings to your gardener—(I enclose the order) & thank him for finding my brother’s pin? [2]
And more I would say, but am very much in anxiety & tribulation about Pisa—— It is all uncertain whether I shall go or not—& in the meantime I am vexed out of patience.
You see the winter is stooping through the wet & damp to come nearer to us. But you do not suffer the rheumatic pains, I hope & trust.
Mr Kenyon’s address is 40 York Place, Regent’s Park—but you will not find him there, as he has left town for an indefinite time. He has been most kindly anxious about me .. I mean, about sending me off as soon as possible—seeing the wisdom & the propriety—but even such a god could not cut the knot [3] .. which is tightly knotted .. too tightly: and it seems a hard thing to have one’s life in one’s hand for the best uses of it, & to be forced to drop it again. Well! Write to me of Balzac– If I do not go, I shall be nearer you. I wish I had the least news to tell you in the world, but none comes near me—except that I heard of the digging of the foundations of Miss Martineau’s cottage [4] the other day, & of her descanting on Magnetism without any foundations at all. For the rest, she is said to be quite well, .. & ‘looking quite handsome’ to boot. She does not write to me.
Believe in the true affection
of your EBB.
Publication: EBB-MRM, III, 141–142.
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. This letter falls between letter 2028, in which EBB said she would write Kenyon’s address “on the flyleaf of my letter” but evidently forgot, and letter 2062, in which she said that she would definitely not go to Italy.
2. See letter 1970.
3. An allusion to the Gordian Knot.
4. Construction on Harriet Martineau’s cottage had begun on 28 August 1845 (Harriet Martineau’s Letters to Fanny Wedgwood, ed. Elizabeth Sanders Arbuckle, Stanford, 1983, p. 83).
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