Correspondence

2907.  EBB to Mary Russell Mitford

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 17, 14–15.

Florence.

March 22 [1851] [1]

My dearest Miss Mitford, I have your letter. So grieved I am at your being unwell again! Plague on all your damp houses! [2] Wrong, wrong, wrong, it was, to stay in yours! But the winter is over. Divine weather we are having here, with sunshine instead of fires!

All our plans are sopra sotto. [3] We come nearer to you .. to Paris .. and pay a visit to England—but first go to Rome & perhaps Naples—nothing being very undeniably clear except Rome in May. I cant write today. You shall hear from me before long.

Meanwhile I send you (at last) a copy of my new edition– [4] You are the only person, in or out of my own family, to whom I give one .. except one intimate enemy who required a sop .. no, not an enemy, .. only somebody who had fancied herself aggrieved by me. [5] I am forced away from giving copies, by the terms of Chapman & Hall, who have everything in their own hands.

You will find plenty of faults in these volumes, but will try to love them as you love the writer, in spite of faults.

A book is published lately called “Traditions of Tuscany in Verse”, by Mrs David Ogilvy. She & her husband are most cultivated persons & admirable in various ways,—& have been our best friends during our residence in Italy. She is a pretty woman & the mother of three pretty children. If you meet with the book, look at it with interest for my sake:—also you may like much of it for its own.

I am reading the Daltons, [6] & disagree with you .. oh, how far! If as you say, “It is written by a gentleman in contradistinction to the professed author,” I am impertinent enough to wish that it were less gentlemanly & more professional. Why I see in it neither nature, nor Florence .. it has given great offence here by its personalities. [7] O you, who love Balzac!–

Your ever attached

EBB–

Address, on integral page: Miss Mitford / Three Mile Cross / near Reading.

Publication: EBB-MRM, III, 321–322.

Manuscript: Wellesley College.

1. Year provided by EBB’s reference to Mrs. Ogilvy’s Traditions of Tuscany, in Verse (1851).

2. Cf. Romeo and Juliet, III, 1, 91. In this and subsequent quotations from Shakespeare’s works, the line numbers correspond to those used in The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston, 1974).

3. “Upside down.”

4. This copy of EBB’s Poems (1850), signed by Miss Mitford, is now with Meredith.

5. i.e., Mary Ann Smith; see the beginning of the 19 December segment of letter 2896.

6. The Daltons; or Three Roads in Life (1852) by Charles James Lever is set partly in Florence. It was serialized in 24 numbers from May 1850 to April 1852.

7. In a letter to the Newark Daily Advertiser, published on 28 September 1854, Elizabeth Clementine Kinney referred those readers who wanted more information about Prince Demidoff to “The Daltons, where he appears at large, under the title of Prince Medichoff, among sundry other foreign residents of Florence” (p. 2).

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