There are big modern biographies of most of Browning’s contemporaries, and more are published every year, but Browning himself is comparatively unknown to present-day readers. Elizabeth Barrett Browning is, to be realistic, the more immediately colourful and engaging character—the drama of her early years as a supposed invalid, the romance of her marriage to Robert Browning and their escape to Italy, the currently fashionable interest in her as an early feminist and as a radical in terms of her views on politics and social justice. Her husband, by contrast, is perceived as a more reactionary and conventional, a more prudish and private character. If judged solely by the quantity and quality of their letters to friends and acquaintances, his personality is less immediately engaging, and, for all his superficial sociability, more introverted and private.
In contrast to the relative scarcity of biographies of Robert Browning, there is an astonishing quantity of critical monographs and papers hardly penetrable to any but the Browning academic specialist. What has recently been lacking, is a chronological narrative of Browning’s life as an upstage drama to complement the downstage chorus of critics of his work. This present book is a conventional, chronological biography of Browning. Despite the enormous and constant critical attention paid to Browning, and the number of books about Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the marriage of the Brownings, there have been few modern biographies that give themselves over mostly to the life and character of the man himself.
The standard late twentieth-century biography of Robert Browning that confidently, authoritatively, and entertainingly treats his life as thoroughly as his poetry is The Book, the Ring, and the Poet by William Irvine and Park Honan, published in 1974. Robert Browning: A life within life, Donald Thomas’s biography, published in 1982, is the conscientious work of a scholar who combines a life of the poet with critical analysis of his work. Clyde de L. Ryal’s 1993 biography, The Life of Robert Browning, is an attractive, authoritative literary critical work that provides an overview of Browning’s life and work as a bildungsroman without the distraction of—for the purposes of his book—unnecessary domestic detail.
In this present biography, I have of course been heedful of as much recent biographical work on Browning as seemed to me relevant to my purposes—specific references are gratefully (and comprehensively, I hope) acknowledged—but I have not neglected earlier biographies in my search for such materials as Nathaniel Hawthorne might have characterized as the ‘wonderfully and pleasurably circumstantial’.
A principal resource for any Browning biographer must be the official Life and Letters of Robert Browning (1891) by Mrs Alexandra Sutherland Orr, a close friend of the poet. Mrs Orr wrote her biography at the request of Browning’s son and sister. Besides the obvious constraints of these two interested parties at her shoulder, she was writing, too, soon after Browning’s death, as a close friend as much as a conscientious critic. She is thus, and naturally, tactful. Though she is not deliberately misleading, nevertheless she will occasionally suppress materials when she considers it discreet to do so, and will sometimes turn an unfortunate episode to better, more positive account than we might now consider appropriate. A close, long-standing friend of Browning’s, William Wetmore Story, supplied Mrs Orr with details of their long friendship. On reading the published biography in 1891, he commented that it seemed rather colourless, but admitted that Browning’s letters ‘are not vigorous or characteristic or light—and as for incidents and descriptions of persons and life it is very meagre’. Subsequent biographers have supplied the deficit.
My second principal biographical authority is Gilbert Keith Chesterton, whose short book about Browning, published in 1903, is valuable less for strict biographical fact, which now and again he gets wrong, than for consistently inspired and constantly inspiriting psychological judgements about the poet and his work, which he gets right. Like Mrs Orr, Chesterton’s value is that he was closer in time and thought to the Victorian age, more attuned to the Browning period and the psychology of the protagonists than we are now, closer to the historical literary ground than we can be. Chesterton’s Robert Browning has never been bettered. It remains unarguably perceptive and uniquely provocative. Besides its near-contemporaneity to its subject, Chesterton’s book is valuable because it evokes Browning’s character with the very ironies and psychological inversions that Browning himself often employed in his poetry. Time and again Chesterton proposes the converse to prove the obverse, exactly as Browning could easily—with poetic prestidigitation—prove black to be white or red.
Two lively, thoughtful women—Betty Miller and Maisie Ward—have contributed more recent biographies that sometimes convincingly and sometimes controversially propose psychological and psychoanalytic interpretations of Robert Browning, his poetry, and his life. Their insights are regularly disputed, and perhaps for that very reason they regularly startle their readers out of complacency. They ask questions, raise points, that—right or wrong—are still worth serious consideration by Browning’s critics and biographers.
I should also say that I have generally relied on earlier Browning criticism, which retains much of its vigour and sparky originality. This is by no means to belittle latter-day critics, many of whom write ingeniously and excitingly, but merely to indicate that for the purposes of this biography I have for the most part personally preferred period sources and contemporary authorities. An exception has to be made for The Courtship of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, Daniel Karlin’s close and authoritative study of the love-letters that preceded the marriage. This book is indispensable to any modern biographer of Browning, not just for Karlin’s detailed analysis of the voluminous correspondence but also for the tenderness and imagination he brings to its interpretation.
There is—or has been—a discussion about how far the biography of an objective poet is necessary, in contrast to the permissible biography of a subjective poet. Browning gave his own views on this in his essay on Shelley. Since Browning himself is generally reckoned to combine subjective and objective elements in his work, then it probably follows that a biography detailing the day-to-day activities of the poet may be as relevant as a critical commentary on his poetry. G. K. Chesterton remarked that one could write a hundred volumes of glorious gossip about Browning. The Collected Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, when the full series is finally published, will be exactly that. But for all the froth and bubble of Browning’s social life, not a great deal happened to him—there is a distinct dearth of dramatic incident. One is inclined to sigh with relief, like Joseph Brodsky who says of Eugenio Montale, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1975 for the poetry he had written over a period of sixty quiet years, ‘thank God that his life has been so uneventful’.1
And yet, as Chesterton concedes of Browning biography, ‘it is a great deal more difficult to speak finally about his life than his work. His work has the mystery which belongs to the complex; his life the much greater mystery which belongs to the simple.’ By and large, my biographical preference has been for a straightforward (I won’t say simple) chronological narrative rather than a series of thematic chapters. And so, this biography is divided into three major sections. These large sections deal successively with three subjects associated with three themes: adolescence and ambition, marriage and money, paternity and poetry.
I like, too, the unfashionable Victorian biographical convention of ‘Life and Letters’. Much of this book is based on the correspondence of Robert and Elizabeth Browning, from which I have quoted