SD1706. Catherine Horne to Richard Hengist Horne
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 20, 363 (in part).
[London]
January 6th 1854
My dear Ganner,
Do not read this until you are alone, and I must ask you to prepare your mind for what may be a most painful surprise to you. I hope it will not be so painful as it would once have been. Do not judge me harshly or hastily and do not above all feel unkindly towards me, and believe that I am only able to write you this letter after long and painful struggle and more suffering than I can tell you. But I have struggled through and feel (and Mary feels too) that my feelings being what they are it would be unjust to you and wrong in every way to delay telling you the truth. Only I wish you to believe that there is no motive but those I give you for my determination. That I have had to struggle and maintain myself body and soul until I have acquired more strength and firmness and independence is one great reason that I have come to my present decision. It is this then. But first dear Ganner do not think me cold and hard and unfeeling if I seem so, you know I never could write, and have always been obliged to suppress my feelings, so you must remember and excuse anything that seems unkind. Well then I feel Ganner that I can never again be to you anything but a friend—your wife no longer. Of course I could be outwardly so, but then I know, from what you said on Browning[’]s marriage, you would seek elsewhere for what I did not give you, and that I would not endure. Do not think that your absence only has caused this. Of course I do not deny that it has become stronger, and that had you never gone to Australia I should never have acquired strength to do this, but years ago very soon after we were married, I felt that I did not love you as a wife (I imagine) should love her husband. …
Address: Rd Hy Horne Esqr / Captain Chisholm’s / Melbourne / Australia / Via Marseilles.
Docket: Rec’d at Warmanga 18th March 1854.
Publication: None traced.
Manuscript: Huntington Library.
___________________
