3978. EBB to Sarianna Browning
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 24, 35–37.
[Florence]
[ca. 25 March 1857] [1]
My dearest Sarianna, Robert will have told you of the grief I have had, [2] which, though I ought to have been “prepared for”, as people say, still made itself felt—more selfishly in this case than in others of the kind. But the long past is called up & killed again under such strokes, & they shake us to the roots of the heart. For the rest, .. for her, it is well. We must feel so–
We were thinking of going out of mourning, but have renewed it for three more months. My family in Wimpole Street have put it on as a matter of course, she was so much one of them. Only, I cant consent to dress my Peni in black,—I cant,—at this season especially, when the flowers & the children look brightest in hope.
Fanny Haworth has gone to Rome,—and though she is really very foolish & very very unhappy, I miss the potential of her, coming in every day or two to bewail herself .. poor, poor thing! The worst is that she did it to everybody as well as to me—which made me less merciful & more vexed. She ought to be in England, railed round safely with conventions—but even then …! And with so much accomplishment, so much power to do better!– What a pity. The Italian match broke like a bubble. [3] He intimated on the last day that he had another attachment.! A very good conscientious man—and she will go farther & fare worse .. there’s the worst of it. Meanwhile she’s at Rome—had a wretched journey by sea & land, which was her intention, in going. But she told me she should give up travelling very soon, her spirits being unequal to the desolation of it, & her purse to the expenses. Then it seems to her that her health is decidedly worse in Italy. She could’nt sleep here at nights .. which is a common effect of Florence; and, add the heat when it comes, & I should really be afraid for her. Louis Napoleon is so struck with Hume that he promises to secure his avenir, [4] & sends to America for his sister. [5] It is true. It comes to us through the princess Lubormiska, [6] the sister of the Count Braniski [7] with whom Hume has lived for a year & also from Mdme Aguado, one of the empress’s ladies, who writes to her mother in Florence. The empress’s collar was taken from her neck by “the spirits,” & a pocket handkerchief was taken from her hand & removed to the other end of the room where Hume was. She was terrified they say– Louis Napoleon’s chair was roughly shaken, & he received a blow on the cheek from a “spirit” professing to be Louis Philippe.!! The empress does not conceal her opinion that the causes of the phenomena in question are spiritual. She has the deepest interest in the investigation & in order to keep the seances harmonious, excludes all sceptical persons.
The “ship” justifies my fears by not only refusing to pay this year at all, but by exacting payment from us .. of how much we dont know yet. So that three hundred & fifty pounds of our last year’s income fail now—and if we had not other resources, things wd go ill. [8]
The sun blazes & burns, & Robert has been slightly bilious, by standing near a window, he says, .. and I have preached blue pill [9] for a week or ten days. In vain, though. Still, he is better,—& there is not much wrong. Penini is quite well, & so am I–
How very very sorry I am that the dear Corkrans shd have the anxiety you mention. [10] Give them our love, do. Still, let the Morning Herald be sold twenty times, (and we saw the sale of it announced in the papers) it must have a Paris correspondent, .. & I dont see why Mr Corkran should be shaken in his seat. Pray mention this subject particularly.
How did you like the Revue des deux Mondes? [11] The translations were better done than in the detestable Revue Britanique which made me sick [12] —but for the rest .. it is not Milsand. Give our dear friend my love.
Here’s Robert waiting. Oh—let me tell you– Miss Lynn is to marry Mr Linton the engraver. [13] She nursed his wife, [14] & was engaged to marry him .. at least [15] three months after her death. Peni’s & my best love to the nonno– His & your
ever affectionate
Ba.
Publication: None traced.
Manuscript: Lilly Library.
1. Dated by EBB’s reference to Fanny Haworth’s arrival in Rome; she had left Florence on 21 March 1857.
2. The death of Mary Trepsack (see letter 3976, note 2).
3. The match with Giovanni Lotti.
4. “Future.”
5. Christine Mackenzie Home (1845–1907), who accompanied her older brother Daniel back to Paris after his brief visit to America in the spring of 1857. She was said to have psychic powers akin to her brother’s (see Waddington, p. 443). Empress Eugénie took Christine under her protection and placed her in the convent of the Sacred Heart, where daughters of French nobility were educated (Mme. Dunglas Home, D. D. Home, His Life and Mission, 1888, pp. 80 and 83).
6. Sic, for Lubomirska (see letter 3683, note 10).
7. Sic, for Branicki (see letter 3744, note 12).
8. A loss of £100 would have resulted from the death of John Kenyon, whose annual gift in that amount ceased upon his death in December 1856. EBB implies that she received £250 last year in dividends from her shares in the David Lyon. The “other resources” were EBB’s Bank of England stock and sales of her and RB’s books, particularly Aurora Leigh, which reached a third edition in July 1857.
10. Edward Baldwin (1803–90), the owner of three newspapers, The Standard, the St. James’s Chronicle, and The Morning Herald (John Frazer Corkran’s employer—see letter 2982, note 9), had filed for bankruptcy on 5 March 1857, claiming debts of £76,000 (see The Times, 6 March 1857, p. 9). In order to pay his creditors, the newspapers were to be sold, lock, stock, and barrel, at public auction on 28 April 1857. An advertisement to that effect appeared in several newspapers on 8 April, including The Times (p. 16). We have been unable to trace an earlier notice of the sale. The auction failed to produce a buyer at the reserve price of £13,500, but in June the papers were sold to James Johnstone (1815–78) for £16,500. Corkran’s fear of losing his job was justified. In his application to the Royal Literary Fund in 1862, he explained that in 1857 his connection to The Morning Herald “ceased in consequence of the transfer of the property to other hands”; i.e., Johnstone’s (31 March 1862, ms at RLF).
11. For its notice of Aurora Leigh in the issue of 15 March 1857 (pp. 322–353). The reviewer, Émile Montégut, concludes that the poem “explains why our reality is so ordinary and why our ideal is so vague and abstract.” For the full text of this review, see pp. 302–314.
12. Aurora Leigh was reviewed by Amédée Pichot in the January 1857 Revue Britannique (pp. 102–114). Extracts were presented in translated prose, Pichot maintaining that much of the poem is so prosaic that no harm is done. He drew heavily from the review of Aurora Leigh in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (January 1857), sometimes with acknowledgement, even to the point of borrowing the name of Aurora’s maiden aunt (nameless in the poem), “Marjory,” a complete invention. Pichot agreed with Blackwood’s that Aurora is “a flawed character, a woman who is incongruous and contradictory in her actions and in her language.” For the full text of his review, see vol. 23, pp. 356–363.
13. Elizabeth (“Eliza”) Lynn (1822–98), novelist and essayist, married William James Linton (1812–97), wood-engraver, writer, and radical republican, on 24 March 1858 in London.
14. Emily Wade (1813–56), younger sister of Linton’s first wife, Laura (née Wade, 1809–38). Since it was illegal to marry a deceased wife’s sister, there was no formal marriage. Both sisters died of consumption.
15. Underscored three times.
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