SD1300.1. Jane Octavia Brookfield to Harry Hallam

Addendum to The Brownings’ Correspondence, vol. 14.

23 Great Pulteney St.

5 Dec., 46.

My dear Harry,

Your princely gift arrived yesterday and William being immersed in Sermonic cogitation has acquiesced in my proposal of taking his letter out of his hands into these unworthy substitutes …

Of course you know that our friend Browning ran away with a sister poet the other day? Miss Barrett-Barrett (y two Barrett’s?) who has been nearly bedridden for years; they are now in Italy away from a brutish father (selon Mr. Moxon) who opposed the match and entailed the necessity of its being achieved in a surreptitious (gracious! what a word!!!) manner. Miss Wynn lent me Miss Barrett’s poetic effusions with a strong encomium from herself. I see she has a good deal of poetry in her, but her “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship” is evidently conceived in consequence of reading Locksley Hall, and the whole poem recalls it; though such a laboured piece of 40 pages was never put together I suppose. (Excuse a somewhat lame conclusion to my attempt at a Critique.) …

Text: Charles and Francis Brookfield, Mrs. Brookfield and Her Circle (London, 1906), pp. 198–201.

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