SD2015. Fanny Appleton Longfellow to Thomas Gold Appleton

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 23, 261 (in part).

[Cambridge, Mass.]

December 15, 1856

… I am reading … [Mrs. Browning’s] new poem, Aurora Leigh, and think it magnificent—the finest web she has spun yet. Get it, if you have it not, and revel in her rich, fresh fancies, and wonderful word pictures. It must be an autobiography, and gives you her deepest feeling on books and art and life, with touches of humor and sly sarcasm you would hardly expect from her. It is healthier than her former poems, the rose without a grub of her mature womanhood. …

Publication: Mrs. Longfellow: Selected Letters and Journals, ed. Edward Wagenknecht (New York, 1956), p. 206.

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