1799. EBB to Anna Brownell Jameson
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 10, 1.
50 Wimpole Street
Dec. 29. 1844.
I did not intend, my dear Mrs Jameson, to give you so bad an idea of me as you seem to have received; for I am, in fact, used to lose my voice (& find it again,) until the vicissitude comes to appear as natural to me as the frost itself. The worst general consequence is the not being able to talk—a [‘]‘chimæra dire” at a distance,—but endurable, even to a woman, after certain lengths of apprenticeship—& mine has been as long & gradual as Wilhelm Meister’s own! We have had trying weather indeed—& I have borne it, .. I thank you .. very well on the whole. It made me feel a little heated & uncomfortable,—& the loss of voice proved of course the susceptibility of the organ, considering that I never left this room: but, upon the whole, I was well enough, (& am), to confirm my own assurances of being essentially better in the most important respects. You see how frankly I trust to your kindness, & intrude all this report upon you in a full faith!– And for a reward of the faith, I may hope to see you before long!—may I not?– And you are not to think that I shd not have been delighted before to hear you in a monodram .. as I heard Mr Kenyon one morning, when he came & talked for half an hour as he can talk, while the audience cd only clap her hands or shake her head for the yea & nay. I shd have been delighted to be just such an audience to you—but, with you, I was too much a stranger, to propose such a thing; & the necessary silence might have struck you, I thought, as ungrateful & uncomprehending. Well—but now, I am not dumb any longer—only hoarse—and whenever I can hear your voice, it will be the better for me altogether.
Dear Mr Kenyon is at home, in Regent’s Park; & if he does not see you,—the worse for him, I am sure he thinks! I often hear him speaking of you– I heard through him, the other day, what he had heard from better authority than a rumour, .. that the clairvoyante at Tynemouth, upon being addressed during her state of trance & before several competent witnesses, in French Italian & German, .. answered distinctly & to the point.!! I am more & more bewildered by the whole subject. I wish I could disbelieve it all .. except that Harriet Martineau is well!: and perhaps it wd not be impossible to separate her case (if that were all!) from the connection in question. Her last letters are indeed full of the beautiful in sentiment & expression,—I agree with you gladly. And yet, as composition, & for pure eloquence & beauty, I prefer the first letter to any that followed,—while in respect to logic, the latter papers do I confess, strike me, as in many places as inconsequent & selfcontradictory. The truth appears to me, that her mind rocks & vibrates on the position it has assumed—& no wonder. She believes in a great prospect which she is too dizzy to see. It must be so I think, in such a position.
Her truthfulness, in the face of the consequences she foresaw,—her truthfulness at the cost of the painfulness of such a publicity, .. I admire very much!—far more than all the eloquence. She talks of Godiva—but she pays a greater price than Godiva did. Her ‘peeping Toms’ are multiplied almost to the extent of the population. There is not a shut window in her Coventry. And, from the extract in the Athenæum, Mr Greenhough’s medical statement is against & not for her, which she is likely to feel more than Mr Dilke’s confutation? You see Mr Dilke confutes by the shortest possible way, .. of not inquiring!!–
How many thoughts Lady Lovelace’s name brings to me.!—though she is interesting to me on only one of the three grounds you mention. But that ground, how broad it is & sacred!—& how many Dreams & waking Fancies have hung up their harps on the willows of it!– I saw her once when she was a child,—for one moment, in a shop at Hastings. The woman of the shop said to somebody who stood near me, .. “Yes!– that is Miss Byron.”– I have heard that now she is scientific in her tastes, & a mathematician like her mother—and I wish I could hear .. I wish I might ask you, so as to make you answer me,—whether she loves her father in his memory & his poetry, & reads those exquisite concluding stanzas of the third Childe Harold, (is it not the third canto?) with the love he put into them.
But you will be afraid to write to me again, if I write so much in return.
Believe me, dear Mrs Jameson,
Your grateful & faithful
Elizabeth B Barrett.
Publication: BC, 10, 1 (in part, as [ca. 1845]).
Manuscript: National Library of Scotland.
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