2839. EBB to Isa Blagden
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 16, 87–88.
Casa Guidi
Saturday morning. [ca. April 1850] [1]
My dear Miss Blagden,
We return your play (and the other books) with a great many thanks– It is a remarkable performance for a writer so young, & we agree that its boldness in catching at situations and intimating passion, under the circumstances you describe, is full of promise which you are bound to keep. [2]
Here is a list of prices, measures, & coins!– You shall have plenty of visitors at the villa, [3] and in the meantime Robert will go to see you tomorrow if he can– Yes, come on monday as you pass, but dont think of the Italian Painters, [4] who can wait the extremest point of your leisure– Our friend is acquainted with yours .. Mr Burton, [5] I mean.
Most truly yours
Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
Publication: Acta Academiae Aboensis Humaniora, 27 (1964), 82.
Manuscript: Kungl. Biblioteket, Stockholm.
1. Approximate dating based on EBB’s reference to enclosing “a list of prices, measures, & coins,” which suggests an early period in Isa Blagden’s residence in Italy.
2. This play could be the same one that Miss Blagden had discussed with Edward Bulwer-Lytton eight years before. In a letter dated [late January 1842], she had asked him to accept “the accompanying Play and Lines” (ms with Cobbold). In a subsequent letter dated [7 February 1842], she stated that she had written the play “with the rash presumption of seventeen” (ms with Cobbold). The play was printed privately, and we have been unable to trace a copy.
3. Villa Moutier, located behind the Palazzo Poggio Imperiale, just outside the Porta Romana in Florence. It was owned by the Brunelleschi family in the late 15th century.
4. Possibly Memoirs of the Early Italian Painters (1845), by Anna Brownell Jameson.
5. Unidentified.
___________________
