2956. EBB to Mary Russell Mitford
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 17, 113–114.
London.
September 24. [1851] [1]
My dear dearest Miss Mitford, though I have behaved to you like a savage (who cant read or write) it’s impossible for me to leave England without saying one ‘goodbye, God bless you.’ One thing that kept my conscience still, was hearing from Mrs Dupuy [2] that you had’nt a moment in which to read letters just now, because you were absorbed in a third volume [3] .. which is sure to absorb other people presently.
I have been, for my part, trodden down & crushed with engagements, visits, & heaps upon heaps of things necessary to do. For a fortnight I was sole nursery maid to my child. Oh, not in play, but in good earnest. Wilson went into the country to see her family, & the child wd let no human being do anything except myself. I had to sleep with him, dress & wash him, feed him .. I was not let out of his sight a moment. So, I missed the Royal academy, the national gallery, all, worth seeing—and Robert would not go alone—we have really seen nothing in London,—except faces, & the new Houses of Parliament & the zoological gardens where our child went with us– Then, two or three times I have been quite unwell .. suffering from cough. It is better now,—but still, it seems wise not to linger among these nascent fogs, but to get settled in Paris while there’s a shred of sunshine in the season to hold by.
Ah—dearest friend—you are not a prophetess—which is strange! There has been no meeting, no accident, no happy result in any way. I wrote to say that I was here .. to beseech my father at least to kiss my child—and my husband wrote a letter which I fondly thought, would be irresistible. There was a violent reply to Robert, together with two packets enclosing all the letters I had written in the course of five years, seals unbroken .. several of them written on black edged paper, suggesting the death of my child, perhaps. The doubt had not moved my father to break a seal. They all came back to me. So now, I cannot write again– I must leave all in God’s hands & wait. It was a great blow to me, the sight of those poor letters– He had cast me off for ever, he said, as a child!—& that, indeed, proved it.
May God bless you, dearest friend. Write to me poste restante, at Paris, & tell me how you are, how you have managed about your house, & book .. all about yourself, in fact. I love you & pray God to bless you, & am ever & ever
Your attached
Ba–
Robert’s warm regards to you—always.
We had tea with Mr Rogers yesterday evening. He is wonderfully well, & most benignant.
Publication: EBB-MRM, III, 327–329.
Manuscript: Yale University.
1. Year provided by EBB’s reference to “a third volume” of Recollections of a Literary Life.
2. Sophia Dupuy (1783–1862), eldest daughter of Joseph Parsons of Ashford, Kent, and his wife Elizabeth (née Ingles). She married on 3 April 1802 at Stratford-upon-Avon, Isaac Dupuy (1769–1829), of Covent Garden, London, proprietor of estates in St. Christopher, West Indies. She died at 37 Wimpole Street, 26 July 1862.
3. Of Recollections of a Literary Life (3 vols., 1852). On 3 October 1851, Miss Mitford wrote to Mrs. Tindal: “I have another terrible job in progress, finishing my own work. The friend with whom I left powers to dispose of it, sold three volumes instead of two, so I have one more to write. It will be called ‘Recollections of Books,’ and will be almost an autobiography” (Chorley, II, 42). The “friend” was Henry F. Chorley, to whom Miss Mitford dedicated Recollections. It contained about one-third of the essays that she had published in The Ladies’ Companion between July 1850 and May 1851.
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