From the archive: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s measure of constraint

July 1974: Claire Tomalin on the publication of a newly discovered diary by the poet

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In 1974 a newly discovered diary by the 19th-century poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning was published. The biographer Claire Tomalin reviewed it for the New Statesman, having recently taken up the post of literary editor at the magazine.

At the age of 25 Elizabeth Barrett was living in her father’s mansion set in the Malvern hills; her mother had died a few years earlier and although she was the eldest child of the family she was entirely subject to the will of her father and her aunt. Her diary for the months from June 1831 to April 1832 (lost for many years, published in full by the University of Ohio Press in 1967 and here in a tactfully condensed form) gives more than a hint of the suppressed rage that burned inside many 19th-century women. “A sort of cage-bird life,” she called it, looking back on her youth, when she came to write Aurora Leigh in 1856.

At 12 she had read Mary Wollstonecraft; at 15, fallen victim to an undiagnosed affliction which seems to have been largely a response to realising that she could no longer do as her brother did but must henceforth stay at home. And at home – Hope End it was named – she read Latin and Greek in a sort of voracious grind, wrote verses, pondered theology, taught her younger brothers, argued about church-going with her bland aunt, endured the social round, played her guitar, tamed a squirrel and found young men boring. One night she dreamt she was married and in a panic to dissolve the bond. There were bouts of high spirits when she rode and scrambled energetically on the hills, but these were usually followed by what she noted down as “fainting and hysterics”.

During the ten months of the diary the giant figure of Papa was mostly absent, involved in painful negotiations to sell Hope End, which he could no longer afford. This cast a shadow; still, Elizabeth’s foremost preoccupation was her passion for a Greek scholar living nearby, the blind Mr Boyd, at whose house she was a visitor whenever she could wheedle transport. Mr Boyd was something of a Casaubon, though safely married and the father of a daughter much troubled with suitors. His speciality was memorising thousands of lines of Greek, and Elizabeth’s desire to be with him at every possible moment was of course useful to him: she read aloud and tested his memory; he in turn called her “funny girl” for knowing all the plays of Euripides. Once, sitting alone with him during a thunderstorm (storms affected her deeply and marked more than one dramatic moment in her life) she drew the metal comb out of her hair and let it “stream like a meteor”. Often she wept on parting from him; and she confided her jealousy of rivals to her diary. (Mrs Boyd, though “empty-minded frivolous & flippant” and “a very trying person to spend a day with” had to be respected because “she is his wife”; other learned young women caused pain.)

“I am one of those weak women who reverence strong men,” Elizabeth wrote at the time of her own marriage, 15 years later. It is tempting to see this weakness as wilful: denied the physical and intellectual freedom of a man herself, she had to construct strong men to adore.

The streak of silliness that runs alongside her bluestocking brilliance may also be a product of this rejection of her own strength. At the end of Aurora Leigh, which is certainly a feminist poem, she, like Charlotte Brontë, blinds her hero to fit him for marriage to her heroine. It’s a queer form of revenge and may have harked back in her case to the real blindnesses of Mr Boyd.

What else did she observe in 1831? Almost incessant rain, when rain mattered because it doubled the difficulty of going out; and the struggles over the Reform Bill:

“Mr & Miss Peyton, Mr Deane, H, & I have settled the English form of government for next year. It is to be a parthenocracy. For Universal suffrage will include our sex, the married people will neutralise each others votes by voting pro & con; & then how can the young men be uninfluenced by the young ladies? Impossible!”

[Further reading: From the archive: John Carey’s normal people]