To an extent, from love, rather than from fear, the Barrett children were somewhat awed by the implications of their father’s attitude: no suitor other than a saint would be worthy of any of them, and a saint would hardly be the most likely material from which a spouse might be made. They might privately, among themselves, poke affectionate fun at their father’s protective concern for their spiritual salvation; but it was one thing to feel proud that they were special in his eyes, quite another when his interdict, as final as a ruling of the Last Judgement, frustrated their genuine emotions and commonplace desires. In a letter of 12 December 1845 to Robert Browning, Elizabeth summed up a situation that had unexpectedly arisen to affect her personally and to which she had once referred in jest to Arabel:
‘If a prince of Eldorado should come, with a pedigree of lineal descent from some signory in the moon in one hand, & a ticket of good-behaviour from the nearest Independent chapel, in the other’ …
‘Why even then,’ said my sister Arabel, ‘it would not do.’ And she was right, & we all agreed that she was right. It is an obliquity of the will—& one laughs at it till the turn comes for crying.
The rectitudinous Mr Barrett was not in principle opposed to the institution of marriage—he was himself a living testament to its virtues, beauties and benefits; but he was absolutely opposed to any occasion for sin, and, in that respect, an inappropriate attachment could not be countenanced. Where he suspected sin he generally discovered it. When one looks for devils, it is not difficult to find them. His religious principles had not descended upon him suddenly. There had been no voice in a thunderclap or vision in a lightning flash. He had experienced no moment of sudden revelation. They had waxed gradually within him, secreted like amber that, on exposure to the moral dilemmas of life, had hardened and trapped the insects of his intolerance. Irvingism had taken deep root, nourished by Edward Barrett’s naturally devout Protestantism and his cautious, conservative Liberal politics. It was partly this slow evolution of his character into something grim and forbidding that inhibited the Barrett children from recognizing the process of transformation until it was too late to do anything to modify it. And so, by and large, it had become accepted as an element influencing their own lives.
The Barretts might admit that their father had their own good at heart, but that concept of the absolute good was utterly inflexible and did not yield to the more elastic idea of good as conceived by weaker characters. Edward Barrett’s love was as oppressive as his ire. G. K Chesterton puts it precisely: ‘He had, what is perhaps the subtlest and worst spirit of egotism, not that spirit which thinks that nothing should stand in the way of its ill-temper, but that spirit which thinks that nothing should stand in the way of its amiability … The worst tyrant is not the man who rules by fear; the worst tyrant is he who rules by love and plays on it as on a harp.’133 In his deep anxiety about loss, to prevent any further harm to the Barrett family, he perversely suffocated the children by his insistence on the family’s self-sufficiency, by his efforts to exclude any external threat to their well-being, and by his belief that they should be all in all to one another and be kept together.
Elizabeth, though strong-willed as a child, perfectly capable of throwing books and other objects around a room when she fell into a pet at being thwarted in her desires, did not as a mature woman challenge her father’s authority directly in the matter of marriage. Instead, she secretly attempted to make over her own money to Bro so that he could marry as he pleased. She was foiled in this underhand strategy. Mr Barrett had no legal right to stop any of his children marrying, but his personal wishes and his threats to disinherit any of them who defied those wishes were intimidating enough. He would cut any of them off without a shilling and cast them out of his life—regretfully, no doubt, but unhesitatingly.
For one thing, Elizabeth was afraid of her father’s anger and would not confront it directly. She could not in general bear, as she wrote to her brother George after her own marriage, ‘agitating opposition from those I tenderly loved—& to act openly in defiance of Papa’s will, would have been more impossible for me than to use the right which I believe to be mine, of taking a step so strictly personal on my own responsibility.’ For another thing, she retreated into her perceived weakness less as a self-professed invalid and more as a helpless woman. To Robert Browning, who had lost his temper over Mr Barrett’s apparent tyranny, she wrote on 12 June 1846: ‘You said once that women were as strong as men, … unless in the concurrence of physical force. Which is a mistake. I would rather be kicked with a foot, … (I, for one woman! …) than be overcome by a loud voice speaking cruel words … being a woman, & a very weak one (in more senses than the bodily), they would act on me as a dagger would … I could not help dropping, dying before them—I say it that you may understand.’ So much for the invigorating spirit of Mary Wollstonecraft’s feminism. There was a third factor, however: Elizabeth, like the rest of her brothers and sisters, had been inculcated with a strong sense of family, and the Barretts were not only profoundly loyal to one another, they loved one another deeply. The children’s loyalty and love for their father was no less real and no less committed than among themselves.
Bro, who had come to Torquay to be with Elizabeth, went sailing with three friends at midday on 11 July 1840. The sea was calm and the weather was fine, except for a brief squall that blew up suddenly in the afternoon. By nightfall, the boat had not returned. It never did. The Barretts explored every strategy they could devise to convince themselves that Bro could be alive. Every possible eventuality was examined and analysed until, at last and reluctantly, they gave up hope after three days. Bro’s body was not discovered until three weeks later when it was washed ashore, with the corpses of one of his friends and the boatman, in Babbacombe Bay on 4 August. They were buried in a local churchyard two days later. Elizabeth despaired: she had quarrelled with Bro on the morning of the 11th. Her last words to her beloved brother had not been friendly. She convinced herself, too, that her illness had been the primary—the only—reason for Bro being in Torquay at all. He had stayed with her at her request, and she felt responsible for having kept him with her. It was her fault that he had been there, she reasoned, and so it was her fault that he had died. The blame was hers. Her guilt was fathomless.
For the three weeks between Bro’s disappearance and his funeral, Elizabeth was scarcely conscious. Her mind, when not blank, was tormented—delirious visions of ‘long dark spectral trains’ and ‘staring infantine faces’ filled it; dreams were ‘nothing but broken hideous shadows and ghastly lights to mark them’, driving her, she said later, almost to ‘madness, absolute hopeless madness’. For three months, she did nothing. Her father stayed with her, every bit as despairing and suffering as his daughter in their mutual loss. He returned to London in December. Elizabeth had finally felt strong enough to write a letter to Miss Mitford in October. Mary Mitford offered very practical comfort: understanding her friend’s grief, empathizing sincerely with her loss, she tactfully offered Elizabeth a puppy from her own golden cocker spaniel’s recent litter. It was a generous offer—such a dog was a very valuable gift—and Elizabeth at first refused. But she was persuaded to accept.
Flush, when he arrived in January 1841, was six months old and irresistibly pretty. Of course, he became thoroughly spoiled and as devoted to his new mistress as she to him. Vitally, Flush became the object of her adoring attentions; Elizabeth became responsible for this scrap of excitable animal life. Flush pulled her out of her self-absorption, relieving some of her guilt about Bro—though not entirely. She pushed the painful memory of Bro to the back of her mind, to inhabit some dark place where nobody was permitted to enter. For the rest of her life, she would not talk of him and others learned not to refer, within her hearing, to Bro or the tragedy at Torquay.
Elizabeth returned to London on 11 September 1841. Her three years’ absence had been the most wretched of her life. The house in Wimpole Street, and her niche within it, seemed a haven of security from which she intended never again to be plucked and thrown into the difficult, dangerous world beyond it. Even to let anyone beyond Elizabeth Wilson (known as Lily), her capable and companionable personal maid who had replaced Crow, her immediate family and Flush into her room seemed unnecessarily hazardous. Not that visitors were