2947. EBB to Dora Greenwell
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 17, 107.
London.
22 September. [1851] [1]
Dear Miss Greenwell, [2]
Our visit to England has been very brief & much crowded with engagements, & I have not had time or quiet for reading any book through. Still, it would be hard for me to go without thanking you again for yours– [3] I have glanced between the pages & seen everywhere the purest aspirations in art & life, noble significances, & a poetical fancy & melodious locution by no means common even in these verse-writing days.
With every warm wish for your success in books & beyond them, from myself & my husband,
believe me dear Miss Greenwell,
most faithfully yours
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Publication: None traced.
Manuscript: Scripps College.
1. Year provided by EBB’s reference to her “brief” visit to and imminent departure from England; the Brownings left for France on 25 September 1851.
2. Dora Greenwell (1821–82), poet and devotional writer, was the second child and only daughter of William Thomas Greenwell (1777–1854), of Durham, and his wife Dorothy (née Smales, 1789–1871). Her Poems (1867), dedicated to EBB, contained the sonnets: “To Elizabeth Barrett Browning in 1851,” which was first published in Poems (1861), and “To Elizabeth Barrett Browning in 1861.” A signed manuscript of the earlier sonnet formed part of lot 261 in Browning Collections (see Reconstruction, L111).
3. Perhaps a copy of her most recent publication, Stories That Might Be True: With Other Poems (1850), or an earlier collection, Poems (1848).
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