Dared And Done: The Marriage of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning - Hardcover

Markus, Julia

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150 ratings by Goodreads

9780679416029: Dared And Done: The Marriage of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679416021 ISBN 13: 9780679416029

Publisher: Knopf, 1995

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A Riveting and brilliant work of biography. The story of two great English poets, Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, whose work was immediately recognized and adored by their contemporaries, whose courtship ranks with the great love stories of all time -- and in whose marriage romance was not merely sustained but intensified.

We enter their story through the sealed Victorian world of the Barretts of Wimpole Street: Elizabeth, at thirty-nine, a poet of international fame, a child prodigy who had grown to be a middle-aged spinster, a woman for whom romantic love seemed not to be possible, confined by illness, morphine, and the tyranny of her father, scion of rich Jamaican slaveholders, rum and sugar traders.

It is to this fortress that Robert Browning, already an admired young poet and playwright, already a devotee of Elizabeth's, lays siege. ("I love your verses," he had written Elizabeth in his first letter to her, long before they met. "I love your verses with all my heart -- and I love you too.") And miraculously Elizabeth let life in.

Julia Markus chronicles their extraordinary courtship, their marriage in secret (Browning to Elizabeth: "How you have dared and done all this ... for my only sake?"), and their radiant honeymoon in Italy.

Markus shows us how the political events of the times inspired the great dramatic monologues of Robert's middle years and how Italy's stormy reunification inspired Elizabeth's later work.

We come to see Elizabeth as an artist with a fierce and final confidence in poetry and its effect on the poets' lives. We see husband and wife celebrate the birth of their son, Robert Wiedemann "Pen" Barrett Browning (Browning to her sisters: "I sate by [Elizabeth] as much as I was allowed, and I shall never forget what I saw, tho' I cannot speak about it").

We see them among their artist/writer friends: in London with Tennyson, Thackeray, Rossetti, and others; in Rome with William Story, the American lawyer, poet, sculptor; with Harriet Hosmer, the stonecutter, who was one of the models for Aurora Leigh; with Charlotte Cushman, the American actress, who held readings of Elizabeth's novel in verse. We see Elizabeth in Paris meeting her heroine George Sand, whose society of socialists and theatrical types Robert described as "ragged Red."

We come to understand Elizabeth's dependence on the ever-present drug in her life ("I should not be alive except by help of my morphine") and her constant battle with depression. And we see Elizabeth, encouraged by a woman with whom she was infatuated, move from interest to obsession with spiritualism, a cause that became the only source of serious dissension between the Brownings.

We follow the course of their rich marriage, from the beginning when each saw the other as a brilliant poet, a compassionate and strangely similar heart, through the years in which they discovered each other's differences, each remaining a complex and thrilling human being to the other.

To tell their story, Markus for the first time makes use of much of Elizabeth's unpublished correspondence, amid a wealth of other documents. She delves fully into the Brownings' Creole background and shows how it affected their lives and their work (Elizabeth was the first of the Jamaican Barretts to be born in England in many generations).

Brilliantly interweaving the Brownings' own words with her authentic and perceptive narrative, Julia Markus brings these two great poets -- their marriage, their work, their times -- alive as never before.

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About the Author:

Julia Markus graduated from Boston University and received her Ph.D. from the University of Maryland. Robert Browning was the subject of her doctoral thesis, and she has written extensively on both Brownings. She served for eight years on the Board of Directors of the Browning Institute. Ms. Markus is the Director of Creative Writing at Hofstra University. She is the author of four novels: Uncle, which won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Award, American Rose. Friends Along the Way, and A Change of' Luck. Her articles and reviews have appeared in Smithsonian and The New York Times. She lives in Connecticut and New York City and is at work on a novel.

From Booklist:

Novelist turned literary historian Markus has lifted the veils of misconception that have long concealed the truth about that most poetic and celebrated of love stories and marriages, that of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning. Along the way, Markus also reaffirms Barrett Browning's standing as a major English poet. It's ironic, Markus says, that Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese "landed on the cute shelf" in bookstores when it is, in fact, a serious cycle of poems about the choice between love and death. The eldest child of a tyrannical father whose fortune came from his family's Jamaican plantations, Barrett Browning was a 39-year-old invalid and recluse when the handsome, robust, and sincere Browning strode into her life, already in love with her from reading her poetry. His love and conviction transformed Barrett, who triumphed over her ailments and defied her father (he had forbidden all 12 of his sons and daughters to marry). Markus offers the convincing theory that Barrett was ashamed of his racially mixed background and lived in fear of having dark-skinned grandchildren. The lovers, however, were fearless on many fronts. As Markus chronicles the personal and artistic growth of this devoted couple, she insightfully analyzes their social and political milieu and how it shaped their lives and poetry. A fascinating study of what was truly a union of mind, body, and soul. Donna Seaman

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