SD1489. Cornelia Augusta Crosse to Recollections
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 17, 269 (in part).
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[ca. August 1851]
It was, then, with no ordinary feelings of pleasurable anticipation I learnt that we were bidden specially to meet “Mrs. Browning at dinner” at Mr. Kenyon’s. It was during their visit to London in 1851, but on this particular evening Mr. Browning, for some reason or other, was not present. I think the guests only numbered fourteen—Mr. Kenyon disliked a crowded dinner-table; Mrs. Browning was the guest of the evening, and, with his old-fashioned courtesy, our host introduced every one to her, for those present were nearly all strangers to the poetess. How rarely the personality of a favourite author fulfils expectation! Mrs. Browning’s face was not the one I had pictured to myself. In reality, at least to my finding, she had a distinctly hard-featured, non-sympathetic aspect; the brow was a noble soul-case, and the eyes were dark and penetrating, but the mouth was hard and immobile for any play of expression, while the lower jaw showed something of the strength of obstinacy. She wore her hair in long ringlets, which, falling very much over her face, and when seen in profile, suggested the unpleasing idea of blinkers, that harshly cut across the graceful curves of brow and cheek. It was this style of arranging her dark hair that made Mrs. Browning look, not old-fashioned, for that would have given a touch of sentiment, but strangely out of the fashion. Her slight pretty figure was rather disguised than set off by garments that fell lopping round her; but, thank Heaven! she was entirely and utterly free from the bad taste of the self-styled clever women, who acknowledge themselves to be failures, as women, by aping a masculine style of dress and address.
In conversation Mrs. Browning seemed reserved, with a certain proud aloofness of manner; at the same time there was a listening reticence in her attitude that did not help the playful tossing to and fro of talk. Occasionally she flung her remarks into the midst of the discussion, and such remarks were weighed, measured, and full of sense and purpose. It was evident that Mrs. Browning had not thrown off the habit, acquired in the years of silence in her darkened chamber, of conversing, in a one-sided way, with the best books, which is vastly different from conversing with the best men.
Text: Mrs. Andrew Crosse, “The Wedded Poets,” Temple Bar, January 1892, pp. 35–37.
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