In common, too, with the young Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett had determined in her teens that to be a poet was an honourable profession, that poetry was real work of deep spiritual and high artistic value, that she herself could become a proper poet—‘one of God’s singers’. Her ambitions extended far beyond the charming verses that young dilettantish women composed as prettily as they painted watercolours. Since Elizabeth’s parents, like Robert’s, were respectful of major poetry and serious poets, they made no difficulty about their eldest daughter’s devotion to such a creditable art and encouraged her aspirations. From the age of eleven, after all, she had shown not just promise, but uncommon ability. However they might privately enjoy the lighter-minded versifying of the other children, her parents and siblings soon learned that Elizabeth’s poems were no laughing matter and to tread warily if ever tempted to take them lightly. By the age of twenty-one, Elizabeth was a published poet. She had proved the worth of her work to herself and enjoyed the regard of those who valued it. To buy time to pursue her high vocation and continue her scholarly studies, she insisted on respect for the importance of her work and indulgence for her precarious state of health.
Her physical condition had markedly improved: she no longer rode or walked great distances or played boisterously with the younger children as she had done before her first illness, but she did stroll around the house and the gardens of Hope End and tutored her younger brothers in Latin. For the best part of the day, however, she closeted herself in her room, writing and reading in bed until late in the morning and preferring not to join the rest of the family when visitors were entertained. Now that her physical frailty had become established, accepted by custom and usage, she no longer had to emphasize her mysteriously non-specific weakness by regular consultations with doctors: coughings and a susceptibility to colds were enough to provoke sympathy and promote a collective agreement within her family that Elizabeth should be protected from anything that might worsen her delicate state of health. For intellectual stimulation, she corresponded lengthily with neighbours, older gentlemen such as Sir Uvedale Price (author, in 1794, of An Essay on the Picturesque, which introduced a new aesthetic category), Sir James Commeline (a local vicar and classical scholar), and especially with Hugh Stuart Boyd, a scholar, translator, and poet who lived at nearby Malvern Wells. She fell half in love with Mr Boyd, who was sadly afflicted with blindness, the only man outside her family that she consented to see and to make the effort to visit. But Mr Boyd, a gentleman of some moderate private means, happened to be married already and the father of children.
Mary Barrett, exhausted by the birth of her twelfth child, Octavius, in 1824, distressed by the death of her mother, Grandmother Graham-Clarke, and suffering from rheumatoid arthritis, died at the age of forty-seven in October 1828. Elizabeth was twenty-two years old. As the oldest daughter, she might have been expected to take over the running of the Hope End household, but no such duty was imposed upon her. Instead, Aunt Bummy, Arabella Graham-Clark, an unmarried sister of Mary Barrett, came to live with the Barretts. She was forty-three years old, the same age as her brother-in-law, and capably took over the management of the household, so relieving Elizabeth of any domestic obligations. The death of his wife deeply affected Edward Barrett, who turned to religion for spiritual comfort.
On his trips to London he had fallen under the influence of the powerfully charismatic Scottish preacher Edward Irving who, by 1825, had started to go seriously off his theological head—and not quietly. Irving’s big moment of revelation arrived when, sensationally, he predicted the imminent second coming of Christ. From 1828, he began teaching Christ’s oneness with humanity in all its attributes and thus, heretically, to assert to his followers the sinfulness of Christ’s nature. Edward Barrett’s mind became infused with the Irvingite belief that salvation lay in purity, that translation to the next world, preferment in the afterlife, could be achieved only by remaining uncorrupted by this wretched and sinful world. Irving preached zealously to large crowds that flocked to hear his dramatic denunciations of the errors of turpitudinous humanity. His authority, he claimed, derived directly from God, whose mouthpiece he had become. As an instrument of the divine, Irving was regularly inspired to invoke the wrathful retribution of the Almighty upon the godless and the guilty.
Bereft of her mother, Elizabeth adhered emotionally to her father. They had always been close, though never dependent on one another. Edward Barrett’s feelings towards his eldest daughter were sympathetic towards her physical fragility and psychological sensitivity. His general conduct as a good paterfamilias was not exceptional: he could be severe when necessary in his principles of good Christian conduct, and strict, though not abusive, about correcting any backsliding among the young Barretts, though he tended to be more indulgent towards Elizabeth than towards the rest of his children. But now Elizabeth became clinging, resentful of his business trips to London, anxious even when he was out of her sight at home. She wept pitifully when he went away and wept for joy when he returned safely. It is now generally accepted that, in the first years after his wife’s death, Edward Barrett did not become abnormally possessive of Elizabeth: quite the reverse, in fact. If anything, it was Elizabeth who felt, however irrationally, abandoned and insecure to the extent that she became virtually reclusive and sought comfort to an unusual degree in the powerful protective presence and reassuring company of her father.
Mr Barrett, in turn, looked to his family for solace in his grief and loneliness. He was liable to fall into rages, justifiably or not, but he could generally put on a good-humoured face. If he was sometimes a beast, he was at least—like Dr Arnold of Rugby—a just beast. In whatever temper, thunderous or sunny, it was perfectly evident that he greatly missed his wife. As he turned inward upon himself and his children, so he excluded friends and barely tolerated the intrusions by various remote members of the Barrett and Graham-Clarke families. Like Elizabeth, he conceived a horror of visitors and refused to make visits to other houses. His children amply and affectionately returned his love for them, and so for a while their mutual need for security coincided. For the most part, harmony reigned throughout Hope End. Then, in 1830, just two years after the death of his wife, Edward Barrett’s mother died. His shock was unspeakable. He had no words to describe the immensity of his loss. For that matter, the entire Barrett family was shocked to the extent that they were all shackled even more securely together in the isolated house and in their passionate, almost exclusive involvement with one another.
Edward Barrett was experiencing other difficulties, beyond the deeply wounding, irreparable losses in his private life. Some long-standing business and financial worries, caused by sustained mismanagement of his interests in the West Indies and a damaging lawsuit, were brought to a head by a slave rebellion in 1832 on the Jamaican plantations managed by his brother Sam. Additionally, the imminent prospect of the complete abolition of slavery (which eventuated in 1833) implied higher production costs and an inevitable tumult in the price of sugar. The monetary losses would be severe. Hope End, a significant drain on his resources (it was heavily mortgaged and creditors were pressing), would have to be sold. He kept much of the land, but the loss of the house was bad enough. It represented, even worse, a loss of his fundamental security in the world after the deaths of his wife and mother, and a serious loss of face—humiliating evidence of failure. If such precious things could so easily slip from his grasp, what might he lose next? In fact, Edward Barrett was far from ruined: the prospect before him was not that he would be a poor man, but he would no longer be a rich man.
The Barretts left Hope End on 23 August 1832. Mr Barrett had taken a large, comfortable house by the sea at Sidmouth in Devon, and the family settled more or less cheerfully, at least without protest, into their new lives. Elizabeth slept soundly, her appetite increased, and her cough was less troublesome: perhaps the sea air had something to do with the revival of her health, and probably, too, the stimulation of a new,