Correspondence

3569.  EBB to Anna Blackwell

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 21, 192.

138. Avenue des Ch. Elysèes

Monday evening– [2 July 1855] [1]

My dear Miss Blackwell, [2]

I am really afraid of what you may be thinking of me, if you did not understand my verbal message this morning. Your note came before I was dressed—your messenger could not be expected to wait—& my only resource seemed, to say a ‘oui’ which passed through my maid & which may have been shipwrecked somehow. As You did not come “between two & four”, I do fear it did.

I write this lest you may think me quite a barbarian (& ungrateful besides–)

I am in such haste I scarcely make myself intelligible, I feel.

Most truly yours

Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Publication: None traced.

Manuscript: Lilly Library.

1. Date provided by reference to the following letter.

2. Anna Blackwell (1816–1900), poet and journalist, was the eldest of thirteen children born to Samuel Blackwell (d. 1838), of Bristol, and his wife Hannah (née Lane, d. 1870). The Blackwells emigrated to America in 1832. Anna settled in France in the late 1840’s and probably met the Brownings in Paris in 1851 or 1852. She shared EBB’s interest in spiritualism and later wrote on the subject, testifying to her own psychic experiences.

___________________