The Artistry of Exile: Romantic and Victorian Writers in Italy by Jane Stabler (review)

Jane Stabler’s latest book ‘explores the way in which exile concentrates the aesthetics of two generations of 19th-century British writers who felt forced to leave England and chose to live in Italy’. It is not a book driven by an overall thesis, but one that seeks to attentively follow ‘the uneven experience of exile’ itself. As a result, while the book deliberately avoids aligning its many subject authors to a single overarching argument about Romantic/Victorian/nineteenth-century exile, it is bursting with insights into not just the meaning of exile for a range of British writers in Italy, but how it felt to actually experience that exile. As such it is a highly original, endlessly stimulating and invaluable contribution to the exciting work on nineteenth-century British writers and Italy that has been coming out over the last few years.

Stabler’s introduction looks back across the European history of both the idea and reality of exile from the Classical through to the post-Waterloo periods, and stresses exile’s intersections and overlaps with ‘the categories of [...] refugee, expatriate, [...] émigré and tourist’. Not aiming ultimately to extract a definition of nineteenth-century Italian exile from the ‘artistry of exile’ she finds in her Romantic and Victorian texts, Stabler instead places and keeps that artistry ‘in dialogue with distinct historical experiences of 19th-century exile in Italy, as recorded in the journals and letters of those who lived through it’. However, her introduction does outline the recurrent ‘themes’ that, for her, emerge from this dialogue, as well as the ‘key forms and motifs’ through which, the book will argue, ‘the literary treatment of exile’ in the nineteenth century ‘transmits the experience of exile’. The recurrent themes of the study include: exile as a ‘double experience of perdition’; a fascination with ‘depictions of abandonment, persecution, rupture, and loss’; the ‘hoarding of books and the bitter-sweet sensation’ of ‘remembered sound’ from home and the ‘effect of estrangement’ from one’s ‘native language’; ‘efforts to cultivate a cosmopolitan outlook’; ‘the weighing up of the intellectual gains of exile, as opposed to its emotional damage’; ‘alienation’ from home and a subsequent antagonism ‘against the abuses of retributive justice and arbitrary power’; the ‘crisis of identity and purpose’; the ‘literature of exile’ through which writers ‘informed themselves about Italy’. Stabler’s ‘key forms and motifs’ include ‘metaphors of distance, attention to things, and epistolary and conversational modes that are mixed with lyric, drama, and narrative’.

Chapter 1, ‘The bow shot of exile’, looks at the ways in which Lord Byron and Elizabeth Barrett Browning ‘draw on the fellowship of exiled literary precursors from the Judaeo-Christian and classical traditions’, developing a sense of exile as ‘a “populous solitude”’ (as in the communal sense of exile shared by the rebel angels of Paradise Lost) and finding ‘consolation’ in the idea of ‘communities’ of exiled thinkers. To this end, as Stabler stresses, many nineteenth-century exiles, such as Byron and Barrett Browning, treasured ‘books and conversation’ and entered into ‘dialogue with [their] literary precursors’. But then there is also the abiding sense of the ‘distance from home’, exemplified in Barrett Browning’s ‘“bow shot” that measures the distance of exile’ in Casa Guidi Windows, an image Stabler traces back to one Classical archetype of exile, ‘Philoctetes, the master archer from the Iliad’. She then follows this figure back into the Romantic period’s idealisations of solitude.

The second chapter, ‘Fare thee well!’, aims ‘to keep the airy mental leap of leaving home in touch with the physical and psychological upheaval of being forced to move house’—with the ‘domestic context of exile’, a recurrent interest throughout this study. Focusing primarily (but by no means only) on the banishment from court of Caroline, Princess of Wales, Fanny Kemble’s A Year of Consolation, Anna Jameson’s Diary of an Ennuyée, Lady Blessington’s Conversations of...