3400. Frances Anne Kemble to EBB

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 20, 200.

[Rome]

[26 April 1854] [1]

Dear Mrs Browning—will you condescend to take a place vacated in my carriage by my friend Miss Bertie Mathew [2] on friday morning & go with us into the Campagna?—when I offered a seat to Mr Browning it was similarly resigned by one of our friends who was going with us & I had but the one[—]now I have another for my friend Bertie is not well enough to come with us and I shall be really delighted if you will consent to come & fill her place[.]

Your affectionate

Fanny Kemble

Address, on integral page: Mrs Browning / Via Bocca di Leone.

Publication: George S. Hellman, “Some Unpublished Papers of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine, 132 (March 1916), 532.

Manuscript: Scripps College.

1. Date based on reference to letter 3401, which this letter prompted.

2. One of three unmarried daughters of Brownlow Bertie Mathew (1760–1826) and his wife Harriet Anne (née Taylor, d. 1838): Elizabeth (1813–91), Harriet Anne (1815–81), and Caroline (1817–63). A Miss Bertie Mathew is listed in the Brownings’ second joint address book (AB-4) at “22 Vicolo de’ Maroniti.”

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