Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) - photo 1
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Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)

Lot 77
15.12.2023 11:00UTC +00:00
Classic
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£ 6 048
AuctioneerCHRISTIE'S
Event locationUnited Kingdom, London
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ID 1108876
Lot 77 | Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)
Estimate value
£ 3 000 – 5 000
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)
Autograph letter signed (‘Your privy councillor, EBB’) to [Richard Hengist] Horne, n.p., 13 December 1843
6½ pages, 107 x 88mm, on two bifolia, later pencil annotations. Envelope. Provenance: Christie's, 29 June 1995, lot 310.

Declaring that poetry should not be compared with the other arts, ‘because Poetry contains them all’: an ebullient letter from the ‘tolerably good-tempered’ Elizabeth Barrett Browning to her literary collaborator, the poet and critic Richard Hengist Horne. EBB is glad to hear that Horne has been given an extension for the book, for it ‘was certainly most hard upon you to be pressed into press by such thumbscrewing’; she makes reference to [Horne’s epic poem] Orion – ‘composition in the manner of Beethoven, who was a poet if there ever was one’ – apparently answering a question of comparison between the arts of music and poetry. But the two should not be compared, she says: ‘And then for a poet to prefer being a musician (even in the great composing sense) is an inconsequence of reason and an ingratitude of genius which I never seriously attributed to you'. Turning to [John Edmund] Reade, she professes herself ‘not a “good hater”. Have not […] a single personal animosity in the world and also I am tolerably good-tempered – that is, I never threw chairs about the room in a passion since I was eleven years old’, so she is quite willing to pardon a friend of Horne’s. However, her objection to certain of his works ‘is not so much that they are Mr Reade’s, as that they are not his’. She expresses her pleasure that her correspondent has procured a portrait of Tennyson and offers her opinion upon Monckton-Milnes: 'I admired his first volume very much – but his later poetry seems to me to want fire & imagination'.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning was assisting Horne at this time with the compilation of A New Spirit of the Age, a collection of critical essays on distinguished contemporaries illustrated with portraits, published in 1844. John Edmund Reade was a poet and novelist, with ‘a remarkable capacity for plagiarism’, chiefly after Byron (DNB).

Published: Townshend Mayer (ed.), Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning addressed to Richard Hengist Horne (1877), vol I, no 31 (omitting some words and the final paragraph).
Place of origin:England
Auction house category:Letters, documents and manuscripts
Address of auction CHRISTIE'S
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