SD2756. Princess Victoria to Queen Victoria
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 31, 318 (in part).
Stettin,
March 4, 1865
I have read “Aurora Leigh” and dislike it extremely. I had heard it so much praised and called so curious and interesting that I took it up. I cannot understand or follow the strain of thought at all. I looked for the genius and found nothing but eccentricity and most disagreeable coarseness, which I suppose is meant to be force of language. I think it thoroughly without taste and poetry. The feeling is very crude and does not touch me—in fact I put it down with disgust. How different from the pure simplicity of Miss A. Procter’s poems—the grace of the language and the tender yet passionate feeling expressed in such earnest and yet childlike words.
I do not think a style overloaded with adjectives (quite misplaced ones too) a proof of genius and I never liked Mrs. E. Browning’s. I wonder at their being so much liked; and for a woman I think her turn of mind very disagreeable and was quite disgusted with some of her descriptions; she does not seem to possess the instinct of the beautiful or to have an elevated imagination.
Text: Your Dear Letter: Private Correspondence of Queen Victoria and the Crown Princess of Prussia, 1865–1871, ed. Roger Fulford (New York, 1971), p. 19.
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