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

Lot 79
15.12.2023 11:00UTC +00:00
Classic
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£ 9 450
AuctioneerCHRISTIE'S
Event locationUnited Kingdom, London
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ID 1108878
Lot 79 | Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)
Estimate value
£ 6 000 – 9 000
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)
Autograph letter signed (‘Elizabeth B Browning’) to John Ruskin, Florence, 2 June 1855
4½ pages, 198 x 126mm, bifolium. Envelope, bearing the final half-page of text. Provenance: Sotheby’s, 17 December 1979, lot 139.

An important, densely-written letter to John Ruskin on the importance of authenticity in poetry and her disregard for mass readership, talking of her sadness at leaving Italy. EBB hopes to prove to Ruskin ‘how my head turns around’ as she writes, to explain why it has taken so long; she and her husband are both so grateful for his kind words and praise, ‘even to fancy that anything I had written could be the means of the least good to you, is worth all the trumpet blowing of vulgar fame’, even as she understands that any perceived excellence is partly down to Ruskin: ‘My verses catch fire from you as you read them’. The decision to leave Italy for England has finally been made, ‘no more of the shadow dancing which is so pretty at the opera and so fatiguing in real life’, not without significant reluctance: giving up ‘this still dream-life of our Florence’, the tapestries and the paintings, for ‘dingy London lodgings’ is a source of some sorrow; ‘I have all sorts of pain in England – everything is against me’. Her poetry – ‘which you once thought ‘”sickly” […] and why not?’ – has been called affected: ‘a charge I have never deserved, for I do think […] that the desire of speaking or spluttering the real truth out broadly, may be a cause of a good deal of what is called in me careless and awkward expression […] I never could adopt the counsel urged upon me to keep in sight always the stupidest person of my acquaintance in order to clear and judicious forms of composition. Will you set me down as arrogant, if I say that the longer I live in this writing and reading world, the more convinced I am that the mass of readers never receive a poet […] without intermediation? The few understand, appreciate, and distribute to the multitude below. Therefore to say a think faintly, because saying it strongly sounds odd or obscure or unattractive for some reason, to ‘careless readers’, does appear to me bad policy as well as bad art. Is not art, like virtue, to be practised for its own sake first? If we sacrifice our ideal to notions of immediate utility, would it not be better for us to write tracts at once’. Ruskin should not think her ‘pert’, EBB was quite abashed by his praise; Robert Browning is also very pleased, particularly that ‘Catarina’ was singled out, ‘his favourite among my poems for some personal fanciful reason besides the rest’. She points to the works of De Quincey and Byron to defend her use of the word ‘nympholept’, mentions James Jackson Jarves, before offering a charming description of her six-year-old her son [Pen Browning], who is already a poet.

The Brownings became friends with John Ruskin on their trip to London in 1851; when they returned in 1855, he was once again among the artistic luminaries who welcomed them back into London society, alongside Tennyson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Thomas Carlyle and Adelaide Procter. He would continue to praise Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poetry: when Aurora Leigh was published, he called it 'the greatest poem' of the century.

Published: The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1897, vol. 2, pp.198-202.
Place of origin:England, Italy
Auction house category:Letters, documents and manuscripts
Address of auction CHRISTIE'S
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