3638. EBB to Dante Gabriel Rossetti
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 21, 277–278.
[London]
[1 October 1855] [1]
Dear Mr Ros[s]etti
On considering your proposition about the sketch, I find myself so hampered with last things to do on these last days, & also so fearful of giving offence to my other artist friend [2] (who sketched very rapidly she told me, & whom I refused the sitting to notwithstanding) that I must beg of your goodnature to excuse me for tomorrow, & to defer till next summer the honour you intended to do me,—when, if you are in the same mind, .. I will sit for you as often as you please.
I am sure that your sympathetic feelings will understand at least one of the two reasons I have for writing this. You would not like me to humiliate an artist & a woman, even in so little a thing as in sitting for a sketch.
Most truly yours, in true appreciation
Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
Publication: Arthur A. Adrian, “The Browning-Rossetti Friendship,” PMLA, 73 (December 1958), 539 (in part).
Manuscript: Huntington Library.
1. This letter was likely written the day after the Rossettis’ visit of 30 September (see the fifth paragraph in letter 3640). D.G. Rossetti’s reply of 1 October 1855 (letter 3641) is postmarked 6 p.m. of that day.
2. Eliza Fox. A few years later at Rome she drew EBB’s portrait, on which the subject commented in a letter to Henrietta: “I have fallen into a trap … & am sitting for my portrait to Miss Fox, who prayed me to let her come & ‘do it.’ As I refused her once in London, I had not the heart to say a second ‘no’” (8 December [1858], ms at Camellia).
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