Kenyon's collection includes all of EBB's letters that he could get hold of in 1897, but there are some conspicuous gaps. The courtship correspondence with Robert Browning of 1845-6 was published separately by Robert Barrett Browning in 1898; a couple of other sets of letters have appeared since: to Mrs Ogilvy, to Richard Hengist Horne, and to EBB's sisters, in particular. What Kenyon has managed to get together here gives some biographical detail and a lot of fascinating mid-Victorian literary gossip. All the same, these letters are not the most interesting ones on the whole: the juicy biographical detail that gave Virginia Woolf and Margaret Forster the material for their novels is mostly in the letters to the Barrett sisters (only published in 1929), and EBB never quite hits the same level of emotional interest that she has in the love letters.

About two-thirds of the letters date from after the Brownings' marriage, and chronicle their semi-nomadic lifestyle. EBB is not he world's greatest travel writer: we hear about the people (mostly literary expats or revolutionaries) she meets in Paris, Florence, Rome, etc., and quite a bit about the wars and revolutions that take place outside her windows with remarkable regularity, but not much about the buildings and landscape. Not surprising for someone who found it quite a strain to be out of doors or in public places, even when she was in good health.

Personal and family concerns play only a fairly minor part in most of the letters, boasting about her son and worrying about other people's health being the main topics. The really big theme throughout, not surprisingly, is literature. What she's reading; what she would like to read but can't get in Italy (Balzac, in particular); what the critics are saying about her, about Robert, or about their friends; what she thinks of other writers she's met or corresponded with. One oddity is her talent for getting to know the "wrong" member of the family: Tennyson's brother, Bulwer-Lytton's son and Trollope's mother are all members of her circle at one point. That's not to say she didn't have her own fair share of genuine lions to write to: inter alia, there are letters to Harriet Martineau, Ruskin, and Thackeray here.

Politics is always an important theme, especially in the later letters where she becomes almost obsessive about Italian unification and her support for Napoleon III - universally execrated in the English press, but in her view the best hope for liberating Italy. Her other great hobby-horse is spiritualism. However absorbed she gets in these issues, she's still well-aware that she's likely to be at odds with the friends she's writing to, just as she is with the English readers and critics who were disappointed by Casa Guidi Windows and Poems before Congress. She never writes like a deluded fanatic, but always tries to put a reasonable case. (Of course, she was married to the author of "Mr Sludge, the medium".) Incidentally, it is fascinating to reflect how, contrary to the idea we might have of Victorian respectability, the verse-novel Aurora Leigh, which is essentially about sex, sold far better than the political poems, and was condemned by a much smaller section of the press. In contrast, EBB seems to be quite puzzled by the phenomenon of Harriet Beecher Stowe: a woman she likes very much personally and approves of politically, but whose books she finds absolutely unreadable...

Kenyon is a bit intrusive as an editor: the biographical interjections that are supposed to lead us through the gaps in the letters often seem to be simply summaries of what we are about to read, passages and names are cut without explanation, but he offers us little protection against the numerous episodes where EBB fires off a string of near-identical letters to different people within a short time after a period of neglecting her correspondence.

Worth dipping into occasionally for nineteenth century gems, but probably quite a slog if you're not currently afflicted with EBB-itis.

[Read as a Gutenberg etext] ( )