SD2052. Lydia Maria Child to J. Peter Lesley & Susan Lesley
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 24, 255 (in part).
Wayland,
March 10th 1857
… Ah Peter! Peter! how came you to deny your Master, in the pages of Aurora Leigh? Did you not know him, because he spoke of love, and freedom, and universal brotherhood, in language not translated from the old Greek? Because it was fresh lava, a flowing flame from the seething volcano of a living soul? Oh, you must have the lava nicely cooled down by the centuries; in nice order to cut into crosses and rosaries! I’m glad you got overtaken, Peter! I’m glad you heard the cock crow, in season to repent.
It is many years since I have read a book that took such full possession of my soul, (from the first pages of it to the last,) like that Aurora Leigh. It is a string of diamonds and opals, from beginning to end. Morally great, intellectually great. It makes me thoroughly dissatisfied with my own productions. Every thing I ever wrote seems mere pap for babies; pap that will answer for a few hours, to nourish very small bodies, and is then fit for nothing but to be thrown away.
It is curious to see some of the newspaper notices of that wonderful book. The Boston Post calls it “a large dose of poor reading.” The N. York Express regrets that there are indications of a “leaning toward woman’s rights, and other isms”; but consoles itself with the idea that Mrs. Browning is “too far off to do us any harm.” Many “old women, of both sexes,” are troubled by what they call its coarseness. They marvel how a lady writer can make allusion to the classical story of Danæ. Because Hercules is disguised in petticoats, he must be kept eternally at the distaff, forsooth! He is better employed gathering the Apples of Immortality, and consecrating them to Minerva. …
Publication: The Collected Correspondence of Lydia Maria Child, ed. Patricia G. Holland and Milton Meltzer, Kraus Microform, Millwood, New York, 1980, letter 996.
Manuscript: American Philosophical Society.
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