3817. EBB to Mary Howitt
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 23, 7–8.
39 Devonshire Place
[ca. 10 July 1856] [1]
My dear Mrs Howitt I shall be very, very glad to see you & know as one your face & your books. Do you think that I have not thought that, years ago?– And it will give me pleasure to make the acquaintance of your daughter—& not merely, let me say, as your daughter. [2]
But you refer to another subject which is more questionable–. And indeed it will be best to tell you at once frankly, that my husband & myself have a peculiarity .. will you call it so in these days? .. (you are too good-natured to set it down as an affectation) the peculiarity of objecting extremely & earnestly to being offered up to the public during our lives, in any possible form of the fashionable diet, .. “memoirs,” “ana,” or “personal sketches”– We cannot admit even of so masterly a hand as Mr Howitts—& in fact we have made up our minds long ago never to provide a hint of information of this kind. We never did,—tho’ there has been a little unauthentic talk about us here & in America, which our friends may have the comfort mostly of contradicting. For my own part, I have suffered so intensely from certain indiscretions of this kind, [3] from the purest & kindest motives, that I will ask you & yours to prove your cordiality of feeling to me at the beginning of our acquaintance, by leaving me & mine in the personal obscurity we covet. Dear Mrs Howitt, because our books belong to the public, ask every right of judgement upon them, .. do our persons? .. do our lives? I have a right to my life, I think, till I am dead. Afterwards, if people dont forget us, they lay us on the anatomizing table, & we dont shrink … usually. Though I, even in that position, mean in the spirit, to rap loudly, protesting.
Text: Carl Ray Woodring, Victorian Samplers: William and Mary Howitt (Lawrence, Kansas, 1952), p. 201.
1. Approximate dating based on Mrs. Howitt’s response in letter 3823.
2. Doubtless, the eldest of the Howitts’ two daughters, Anna Mary Howitt (afterwards Watts, 1824–84), writer, painter, and women’s rights activist. She had signed, as had her mother and EBB, the Petition for Reform of the Married Women’s Property Law (see letter 3745, note 2).
3. EBB alludes to the disclosure of personal information about herself that appeared in Mary Russell Mitford’s Recollections of a Literary Life (1852); see letter 2993, note 4.
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