Love, Letters and Literary Detective Work

From The Writer's Almanac:

Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning eloped on this date in 1846. They had been courting in secret for a year and a half, through the mail, unbeknownst to her father. It had begun when Browning wrote Barrett a gushing fan letter, saying, "I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett ... and I love you too." She wrote a long letter in return, thanking him and asking him for ways she might improve her writing. Barrett was an invalid, and was reliant on morphine, and it was some months before Browning convinced her to meet face to face. Barrett's father didn't like Browning, and viewed him as a fortune hunter. 

On the day of the wedding, Browning posted another letter to Barrett, which read, "Words can never tell you, however, — form them, transform them anyway, — how perfectly dear you are to me — perfectly dear to my heart and soul. I look back, and in every one point, every word and gesture, every letter, every silence — you have been entirely perfect to me — I would not change one word, one look." They were married at St. Marylebone Parish Church, and Barrett returned to her father's house, where she stayed for one more week before she ran off to Italy with Browning. She never saw her father again. After the wedding, she presented Browning with a collection of poems she'd written during their courtship. It was published in 1850 as Sonnets from the Portuguese.

The Brownings were married fifteen years; Elizabeth died in 1861; Robert, in 1889.

In a new article in Humanities, Nicholas Basbanes notes that in time, the correspondence of the Brownings- prodigious letter writers even by the standards of their times- met an apparently final and unhappy end:

[A] great deal of Browning family property had been scattered to the four winds following the death in 1912 of the couple’s only child, Robert Barrett Browning, known as Pen. His dying prompted sixteen cousins and an estranged wife to make claims on the estate, forcing a massive sale to be held the following year at Sotheby’s.

Enter Phillip Kelley, an independent scholar whose half-century labor of love has tripled the number of recovered Browning letters- “11,601 and counting” says Basbanes. Kelley, unable to find philanthropic or academic support for a fully annotated edition of the letters, has spent the last half century publishing them himself, in twenty-two volumes of a projected forty. The project has been heralded as one of the great achievements of modern scholarship. “The letters of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning represent one of the largest and most comprehensive bodies of literary and social commentary on the nineteenth century.”