Peter Washington
A Widower Writes
Robert Browning: A Life After Death
By Pamela Neville-Sington
Weidenfeld & Nicolson 336pp £20 order from our bookshop
The Poetical Works of Robert Browning, Volume IX: The Ring and The Book, Books IX-XII
By Stefan Hawlin, Tim Burnett (edd)
Oxford University Press 408pp £85 order from our bookshop
AS ALL HIS biographers have discovered to their cost, a life of Browning is inevitably a life of his wife. Although the poet was married late and widowed early, his years with Elizabeth Barrett left their mark on all his later work and threw a retrospective light on the earlier. When Mrs Browning died in 1861 (the same year as the Prince Consort) he became the Albert 'to Browning's Victoria, controlling her husband's life from beyond the grave. Portraits of her hung in every room of his London house and he guarded her reputation more fiercely than his own.
Often sentimentalised (not least by Browning himself), the relationship of husband and wife, although famously happy and fulfilled, had its shadows. Her dominance cast one of them. Despite - and perhaps in part because of - her physical frailty, Elizabeth was the stronger personality of the two. Their marriage affected
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'We must all "shoot down the canard", McManus writes, that the World Cup is going to a nation "that doesn’t know or appreciate the Beautiful Game".'
Barnaby Crowcroft on the rise of Qatar.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/full-of-gas
Delighted to make my debut in @Lit_Review with a review of Philip Short's heavyweight new bio, Putin: His Life and Times
(Yes, it's behind a paywall, but newspapers and magazines need to earn money too...)
https://literaryreview.co.uk/vlad-the-invader
'As we examined more and more data from the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters ... we were amazed to find that there is almost never a case for permanently moving people out of the contaminated area after a big nuclear accident.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying