SD2382. Sarianna Browning to Joseph Milsand
Published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 28, 352–353 (in part).
151, rue de Grenelle
May 21st [1860]
My dear Mr Milsand,
I hope you perceive that I have been rather longer than usual in answering your letter, but just as I was about to write to you on Saturday morning, it occurred to me that you would like to hear of other people as well as of myself, and I waited till the evening had passed to report any thing that might interest you–
But it poured with rain during the beginning of the said evening,—nobody came, and my good intentions have ended only in making you wait longer than usual for a letter stupider than usual.
I did not describe to you Mrs Smith and her daughter, because I have not seen enough of them to form an opinion—when I have made up my mind I will let you know—one thing is certain—Miss Smith plays on the piano magnificently– Miss Parkes paid me a farewell visit last week, and brought with her a friend, also in the female philanthropical line, whose special mission is to exhort and guide a factory where a thousand women are employed. She was a middle aged lady, very simple and pleasing in her manners, I thought,—and she gave me much information very unaffectedly. Though declaring that in our present state of society, women’s working is an absolute necessity, yet she laments it as a great evil both for the women and their husbands. Unfortunately, the women begin to like it, and she often meets with cases where the husband wishes his wife not to work at all, but she insists upon it, for the sake of the nine shillings a week which she can gain. This lady and Miss Parkes had been to the institution of the Enfants trouvés, there being no similar one in England, and they were horrified,—said the sight was hideous. 35 had been received the day before their visit and seven a day, is the number of deaths. Of course, the wretched infants had been neglected before being abandoned. Both ladies begged to see Robert’s newly arrived portrait (they knew him at Rome) and I, who in my sisterly blindness had considered it flattered, was much amused at their finding out that it wasn’t half handsome enough, though every one agrees that it is wonderfully like. Miss Parkes said the artist had missed the extreme fineness of Robert’s features, and made it coarser and more like Dickens,—the other lady discovered all sorts of absent charms, and I was wondering what makes Robert such a favourite with so many of my sex, when he is certainly not over-polite in his general bearing to them. By the bye, Miss Parkes applied a microscopic glass to the photograph, and the likeness came out much stronger.
I did not mean that Ba’s poems had sold, in America, a quarter of a million in books, but in the paper that published them, though in all forms, the sale there is immense. The last falsehood circulated about her in England and America, is, that the Poems before Congress were written by the spirits, she acting as medium. All sorts of grave and impertinent comments are made on this absurd story, which I believe <***>
Publication: None traced.
Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library, Joseph Milsand Archive.
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