Marlene Wagman-Geller

Sep 12, 2024 by Marlene Wagman-Geller

 

 

“Poetry elevates the mind to Heaven.”

–Elizabeth Barrett Browning

 

Casa Guidi (opened 1995)

Florence, Italy

 

An immortal sonnet begins, “How do I love thee?/Let me count the ways.” Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s grande amore was her husband, Robert, and their Florence home. To tread the halls of the literary couple, take a gondola ride to Casa Guidi.

                

When recalling the Victorian writer, most people envision Elizabeth as a princess locked in a tower until her rescue by her poet-prince, but she was far more. Elizabeth was born in 1806, the first child of Mary and Edward Barrett Moulton-Barrett’s twelve children. In a family fond of nicknames, Elizabeth was Ba, her sister was Addles, and her aunt was Bummy.

     

The Barretts’ home, (that bore the unsettling name Hope End), was a five-hundred-acre estate in Herefordshire that showcased their Moorish-style mansion, replete with minarets. The source of their lavish lifestyle was a Jamaican sugar-plantation that profited on slave labor. Elizabeth later confided to art critic John Ruskin, “I belong to a family of West Indian slaveholders, and if I believe in curses, I should be afraid.” Ensconced in a cocoon of childhood innocence, Elizabeth rode her pony, tended her white roses, and arranged theatrical productions with her siblings. Her teenage aspirations were to be the greatest female poet, liberate Greece from the Ottoman Empire, and have Lord Byron succumb to her charms. Edward, a poet-prodigy, proclaimed his daughter, “the Poet Laureate of Hope End;” he published fifty copies of her verses. She dedicated her poems to her adored father.

                

With the demise of slavery in the Caribbean, Edward’s financial reversal led to the loss of Hope End, and the Barretts relocated to 50 Wimpole Street in London. The ever more controlling Edward informed his children that he would disown them if they ever married. A theory behind his bizarre request was his fear an ancestor had fathered a baby with a Jamaican slave, and a dark-skinned child would make this manifest.

                

When Elizabeth was fifteen, along with her sisters–Henrietta, Arabella, and Mary–came down with an undisclosed illness, followed by a bout of measles. Elizabeth, the only sister who did not recover, suffered from muscular spasms and wore a spinal sling for nine months. She likened her symptoms to a cord tied around her stomach “which seems to break.” Her medical treatment included opium that led to a life-long addiction. Due to her health issues and overprotective father, Elizabeth seldom left her chaise lounge that she shared with Flush, her cocker spaniel. Her canine companion was the subject of her poem, “To Flush, My Dog,” as well as Virginia Woolf’s Flush: A Biography. On three occasions, the Barretts paid a ransom to thieves who had abducted their cherished pet. 

                

John Kenyon, a distant cousin, popularized Elizabeth’s writing and her devotees included Victorian giants William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Thomas Carlyle, George Eliot, and Hans Christian Anderson. Although a stranger to romance, Elizabeth wrote of it in “A Woman’s Shortcomings” that cautioned, “Unless you can die when the dream is past-/Oh, never call it loving.”

                

In 1844, Elizabeth published “Poems” that led to her nomination for poet laureate. In the 1978 film, An Unmarried Woman, actress Jill Clayburgh proclaimed, “Balls!” said the Queen, “If I had them, I’d be King!” In a similar vein, due to her gender, the award went to Alfred, Lord Tennyson. England took another century and a half to appoint a female recipient. A feminist in a patriarchal society, Elizabeth detested the concept that women needed protection. In “An Essay on Women,” the poet pondered, “Are vases only prized because they break?” Unlike her female contemporaries, Elizabeth published her volumes under her own name rather than a male pseudonym. Her innovative style impacted literary history, and the poet influenced writers Virginia Woolf, Oscar Wilde, and Rudyard Kipling. Her fame extended across the ocean to Amherst, Massachusetts, where fellow reclusive poet Emily Dickinson kept a framed portrait of Elizabeth in her bedroom. Emily said that her life “had been transfigured by the poetry of that Foreign Lady.” Edgar Allan Poe dedicated “The Raven” to Elizabeth and wrote, “her poetic inspiration is the highest–we can conceive of- nothing more august.”  Harriet Beecher Stowe and Nathaniel Hawthorne travelled to Italy to meet the esteemed lady of letters.

                

At age thirty-four, Elizabeth lost her brother Samuel through a fever he had contracted at Cinnamon Hill, the family’s Jamaican estate. To assuage her grief, to seek a cure for her illness, to find a reprieve from Wimpole Street that she described as “the straitness of my prison,” Elizabeth departed for the seaside town of Torquay in Devon, England. Her favorite brother, Edward, “Bro,” accompanied her; the trip transformed to tragedy when Edward died in a sailing accident. Elizabeth remained in Devon for a year where the sound of the waves reminded her of the “moan of a dying man.” 

                

Life forever changed when Robert Browning sent Elizabeth a fan letter that declared: , “I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett.” John doubled as Cupid when he arranged Robert’s invitation to 50 Wimpole Street. Initially, Elizabeth put a brake on her heart as she could not understand how a man, six years her junior, could have feelings for a thirty-nine-year-old opium addicted reclusive invalid. Nevertheless, a twenty-month, clandestine courtship–of which Flush was privy–followed in which the couple exchanged 574 letters. In her poem, “First Time He Kissed Me,” Elizabeth expressed her elation, “A ring of amethyst I could not wear here, plainer to my sight/Then that first kiss.” For the only time in three decades, Elizabeth left her house. The couple wed in a private ceremony at St. Marylebone Church. Following in the footsteps of his hero, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Robert brought his bride to Italy where he hoped its temperate weather would do more for her health than England’s damp climate. The blight on her happiness was her father never forgave her. After Edward’s death, among his effects were the unopened letters from his disowned daughter.

                 

When they arrived in Florence in 1847, the couple were enamored with its sublime beauty that Elizabeth described as the “most beautiful of cities devised by man.” They found their forever home in the fifteenth-century Palazzo Guidi–so named after its seventeenth century owner, Count Camillo Guidi­, that Elizabeth christened the more personal Casa Guidi. She expressed her elation, “I am very happy-happier and happier.” What made her even more ecstatic was despite her illness, opium addiction, and miscarriages, at age forty-three, she gave birth to Robert Wiederman Barrett Browning, nicknamed Pen. Their rent included free admission to the nearby ducal Palazzo Pitti where they strolled the bucolic gardens with their son. To the chagrin of her husband, Elizabeth dressed Pen in the fashion of a Renaissance prince, with velvet pants, embroidered blouses, and wide-brimmed hat from which his long curls peeked through.

                

Casa Guidi: Visitors to the literary site can view the eight-room home with its high-ceilings, filled with reproductions of Victorian furnishings. The drawing room has sea foam green walls and heavy red curtains that cover tall windows, colors in keeping with the Italian flag. On the top of the bookcase stand terracotta busts of Robert and Elizabeth. On the Brownings’ first wedding anniversary, they watched from their balcony as 40,000 people paraded past their window in a political demonstration for the Risorgimento, the movement for Italian unification. The spectacle inspired Elizabeth’s “Casa Guidi Windows,” an impassioned plea for liberty.  The poem became the country’s anthem, and Italians viewed her as the poet of the Risorgimento. At their home, Robert and Elizabeth entertained fellow expatriates Anthony Trollope, John Ruskin, and Walter Savage Landor.

                

Casa Guidi had been the home where Penn entered the world, and where Elizabeth breathed her last. On the day of her funeral, the Via Maggio, the shopping district on the Brownings’ Street, shut down. Mourners carried her coffin to the Protestant Cemetery of Florence, known as the English cemetery. Lord Frederic Leighton, the famous British artist, designed her marble tomb that rests on six pillars. Robert and the twelve-year-old Pen left Italy, never to return. Before his departure, Robert commissioned George Mignaty to capture Casa Guidi on a canvass in memory of his fourteen-year sojourn.

                

Pen Browning eventually repurchased Casa Guidi and did his utmost to recover every relic that had once graced his childhood home. He became an artist, a pupil of Rodin, and yet never achieved his parents’ acclaim. He ran up debts, (which his father paid), and ran through his wife’s money. Robert’s last words were of his adored son, “Oh, my dear boy, my dear boy.”

                

On the exterior of Casa Guidi, a plaque is inscribed to “Elisabetta Barret Browning/Who in her woman’s heart reconciled/a scholar’s learning and a poet’s spirit/And whose poems forged a golden ring/between Italy and England,” placed there in 1861 by a “grateful Florence.” In her last moments, Robert held his last duchess in his arms. Her final word: “Beautiful.”

 

The Window of Her World: When Roman soldiers founded Florence around 60 B.C., they called it Florentina which means “may she flourish.” As Elizabeth gazed upon her adopted city, the name took on symbolic overtones, as she blossomed when removed from the confines of 50 Walpole Street.

 

 

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