A mutual appreciation, a mysterious voice whispered on the air, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s views on marriage. EBB thanks Mulock for dedicating her recent book to her, The Head of the Family, 1852: “I hear from England that you have dedicated a book to me with too kind and most touching words”. Although she has yet to see the book, she thanks her warmly (“thank you from my heart”), and recalls seeing another work of Mulock’s and the effect it had on her: “I read a book of yours once at Florence, which first made [me] know you pleasantly, and afterwards […] there came a piercing touch from a hand in the air – whether yours also, I cannot dare to guess – which has preoccupied me a good deal since. If I speak to you in mysteries, forgive me” [21 January 1852]. She had planned to wait until receiving the book to write again, but “But the misfortune is that Mssrs Chapman & Hall waited too”. Having intended to wait “till we get the book” so she “can speak of it with knowledge” she decides she can wait no longer to reply. Mentioning how Craik’s letter had brought tears to her (and her husband’s) eyes, she confirms their mysterious, almost psychic, connection: “The voice which called “Dinah” in the garden” was hers - “certainly I did call from Florence with my whole heart to the writer of those verses – (how deeply they moved me!)”
She writes that she had made earlier enquiries after the anonymous author who had dedicated ‘Lines to Elizabeth Barrett Browning on her Sonnets’, but it had been in vain; and so she is especially glad to have made Dinah’s acquaintance at long last [27 April 1852]. In the third letter, after The Head of the Family finally reached them, EBB praises Dinah’s “undeniable talent and faculty, combined with high and pure aspiration”. She calls the book “a clever book, a graceful book, & with the moral grace besides”, but offers a criticism of the hero’s marriage: “I am romantic about love – oh, much more than you are, though older than you. A man’s life does not develop rightly without it” [2 June 1852]. The final letter sees her trying to arrange a meeting in London between other engagements: “If you knew how I am turned round & round in London in perpetual gyration – like a fakir, without his prospect of ultimate inspiration by giddiness. It’s the effect of coming home for a few weeks only, you see” [17 August 1852].
A wonderful ardent correspondence illustrating the mutual appreciation between two generations of writers.
Letters 1, 2 and 3 are published in The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1897, vol. 2, pp.44, 67 and 72.
