3096. EBB to Bessie Rayner Parkes
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 18, 199–200.
58 Welbeck Street
Friday morning. [27 August 1852] [1]
My dear Miss Parkes, [2]
I little thought when I had the pleasure of sitting by you & hearing your name at Mrs Procter’s, [3] that you had addressed to me such touching verses. [4] Mrs Procter has brought your volume to me & pointed out the page which, she says, relates to me—and now, I can’t help writing to you to thank you warmly from my heart for the words which have touched it so deeply. Thank you, thank you. There was no need of the grace & poetical feeling—the kindness would have been enough to have moved me without the rest. And the kindness makes it pleasanter, too, to acknowledge the merit.
I hope I shall see you again before I leave London. Always I shall wish you the best good,—& you will believe .. will you not? .. that these are the wishes of a “friend” [5]
sincerely yours
Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
Address: Miss B R Parkes / 2 Savile Row.
Publication: None traced.
Manuscript: University of Notre Dame.
1. Date provided by reference to SD1599 ([1 September 1852]), in which this letter was enclosed, and in which Mrs. Procter mentions Bessie Parkes’s Poems (1852).
2. Elizabeth (“Bessie”) Rayner Parkes (afterwards Belloc, 1829–1925) was the daughter of Joseph Parkes (1796–1865), a prominent Birmingham politician, and his wife Elizabeth (née Priestley, 1798–1877), granddaughter of the theologian and scientist Joseph Priestley (1733–1804). Bessie Parkes later inscribed copies of her works to the Brownings (see Reconstruction, A1809–11). In 1858 she and Barbara Leigh Smith founded The English Woman’s Journal, which ran until 1864.
3. Probably two days before at one of the Procters’ Wednesday soirées.
4. “To *****” in Poems (1852). Although EBB’s name is not mentioned, it is possible to conclude from the context that the poem is addressed to her. In the second edition of Bessie Parkes’s Poems (1855) “Elizabeth Barrett Browning” replaced the asterisks.
5. A quotation from the poem cited above: “And when they told me, ‘You shall travel south,’ / I chiefly thought, ‘In Florence dwells my friend!’” (lines 7–8).
___________________
