Elizabeth Barrett Browning on Love and

Truthfulness
You must prepare yourself to forbear and to forgive
will you?
By Maria Popova

Elizabeth Barrett Browning on Love and Truthfulness

For two people to be honest with each other about what is most difficult, even when
truthfulness comes with a razing edge of sorrow, is a hard-earned privilege measured
by the magnitude of their love for one another. In thinking through this recently or,
rather, living through it I was reminded of Adrienne Richs beautiful sentiment
about how relationships refine our truths: An honorable human relationship that is,
one in which two people have the right to use the word love is a process, delicate,
violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they
can tell each other.

That delicate and violent process is what unfolded between the poets Elizabeth Barrett
Browning (March 6, 1806June 29, 1861) and Robert Browning (May 7, 1812
December 12, 1889) two of the most celebrated and influential writers of the
nineteenth century during their electrifying courtship, carried out in secret. During
it, Barrett penned the sonnet whose memorable opening line has permeated culture so
profoundly in the century and a half since as to now border on triteness: How do I
love thee? Let me count the ways.

Having first fallen in love with each others poetry, the two had many reasons for
reservation about transmuting mutual admiration into romantic involvement, beyond
the usual insecurities, self-doubts, and fears of deficiency that take root in the hearts of
prospective lovers. Barrett, bedeviled by acute spinal pain and ill health since
childhood, had spent seven years writing in a darkened room, nearly immobile. When
the two poets finally met in person, she was approaching forty well into
spinsterhood by the eras standards. Browning, six years her junior and less famous,
considered himself no longer in the first freshness of life and had for a number of
years prior made up [his] mind to the impossibility of loving any woman.

And yet.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning by Thomas Buchanan Read (1852)

In one of their early flirtations, collected in The Love Letters of Elizabeth Barrett and
Robert Browning (public library | free ebook), Barrett makes a stunning invitation to
unmitigated honesty as the sole gateway to love stunning in its bold defiance of the
eras mores of formality in epistolary etiquette, in the fact that Barrett calls herself a
man in the letter, and in the courage it takes for any human being, in any era, to
invite the difficult truths that pave the way for authentic connection.
Barrett writes in February of 1845:

Dont let us have any constraint, any ceremony! Dont be civil to me when you feel
rude, nor loquacious when you incline to silence, nor yielding in the manners
when you are perverse in the mind And let us rest from the bowing and the
courtesying, you and I, on each side. You will find me an honest man on the whole, if
rather hasty and prejudging, which is a different thing from prejudice at the worst. And
we have great sympathies in common, and I am inclined to look up to you in many
things, and to learn as much of everything as you will teach me. On the other hand you
must prepare yourself to forbear and to forgive will you? While I throw off the
ceremony, I hold the faster to the kindness.

For months, Barrett tussled violently with the hazards of surrendering to love,
oscillating between allowing Browning to approach with the unconditional love he was
offering and pushing him away for his own sake she implored him not to get
involved with a confirmed invalid through months and years liable to relapses and
stand on precarious ground to the end of [her] life. But the invitation of love
prevailed. In September, she returns to truthfulness as the ground base of connection
and writes:

Believe that I am grateful to you how grateful, cannot be shown in words nor even
in tears grateful enough to be truthful in all ways.

Barrett and Browning wed exactly a year later, eloping to Italy and incurring the wrath
of Elizabeths father, who disowned her. For the remaining fifteen years of her life, the
Brownings marriage drew nothing short of awe from a great many of their friends,
who remarked in their private letters and journals upon this relationship marked by
uncommon reciprocity of devotion, respect, admiration, and adoration. The pioneering
sculptor Harriet Hosmer, for whom the Brownings became second parents during her
formative time in Italy, would later describe Robert as the most devoted husband the
world has ever seen and would remember that the couple lived in a world of their
own, happiest when alone therein.

Complement this particular portion of the wholly resplendent Love Letters of

Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning with Alice Walker on what her father taught
her about the love-expanding power of telling the truth, then revisit other stirring love
letters by Kahlil Gibran, Vladimir Nabokov, Virginia Woolf, John Keats, Albert
Einstein, John Cage, Franz Kafka, Frida Kahlo, Hannah Arendt, James Joyce, Iris
Murdoch, Margaret Mead, Charlotte Bront, Oscar Wilde, Ludwig van Beethoven, and
James Thurber.