Literary Couplings: Writing Couples, Collaborators, and the Construction of Authorship

"Singing Song for Song”: The Brownings “in the Poetic Relation”

Dear Cory, I opened the newspaper recently and encountered once again “How do I love thee?”—this time in an article about a psychotherapist teaching a seminar on “the dying art of love-letter writing.” At least this is better than the bathos of a fashion-magazine ad asking “How can I glove you?” or a Canada Postal Service ad inquiring “How shall I mail thee?” On every side we find the romantic story—or the residue of it in those five inescapable words—when what interests us in the Brownings is their poetical and textual relations. As usual, the therapist was invoking the Brownings’ example without regard for their actual writing; she dispenses advice that they certainly didn’t follow! Don’t write long letters. Don’t use disclaimers. Be accurate in describing your lover’s appearance (even to the lover?). Still, I’m grateful for the article because it suggested collaborating through letters, given the geographical obstacles we cannot overcome. We have talked about writing a joint essay on the Brownings so often in hours snatched out of conferences that I suspect it will be difficult to disentangle some of our 151 “Singing Song for Song” The Brownings “in the Poetic Relation”      ideas. But maybe that reflects what we think needs more investigating in the case of literary couples like the Brownings Should we begin with the question of what attracted the Brownings to each other—in their writing, first, and then in their letters before they met in person? (That first meeting in May 1845 must have been a charged moment!) I’m also intrigued by the ways in which they played the roles of muse, mentor, editor, and audience for each other. My impression is that they continued to act as muses and audiences for each other throughout their lives. Following the first flush of enthusiasm in the courtship and honeymoon period, though, they seem to have been less inclined to engage in substantive editorial interventions with each other. Do you agree? By the way, I propose that we refer to them as EBB and RB. We certainly don’t want to call him “Browning” and her “Elizabeth” or “Mrs. Browning,” as critics traditionally did (much as they spoke of “Mill” and “Harriet”). And “Barrett Browning” seems an awkward anachronism. EBB seemed happy with her double-barreled maiden name Elizabeth Barrett Barrett—there’s a name to roll out resoundingly!—and was pleased when RB pointed out in their courtship letters that her initials would not change with their marriage. For a woman who had long signed her manuscripts “EBB,” this continuity must have seemed propitious! (Aurora Leigh similarly manages to retain her authorial identity by marrying a cousin with her own last name.) As we’ve often remarked, it’s surprising the Brownings never formally collaborated on a poetical work despite RB’s hint, early in their correspondence (May 1845, before they had met), “I should like to write something in concert with you—how I would try!” (The Brownings’ Correspondence, 10:201).1 Scott Lewis’s wonderful edition of EBB’s letters to her sister Arabella includes references to plans, in the first year of their marriage, to collaborate on a “collection of poems on Italy,” though EBB stresses “with our separate signatures” (see her letter of March 1847; 1:59). I wonder why she emphasized “separate signatures”? Were both too invested in the Romantic figure of the “solitary genius” to contemplate merging their poetic identities? (EBB’s letters in the early 1840s are shot through with references to her worship of “genius.”) The anxieties of authorship and influence must have taken convoluted forms between two loving partners who were also ambitious poets. I sense such anxieties at work in the focus 152      on who has the first word and who has the last in RB’s “A Woman’s Last Word” and “One Word More” (remember that in manuscript the latter was originally entitled “A Last Word, to E.B.B.”). I know that we both believe the Brownings strongly influenced each other’s experiments with genre and poetic technique. Do you think such poetic intimacies encouraged “gender-bending”? In RB’s “A Lovers’ Quarrel” the male speaker says, “Teach me to flirt a fan / As the Spanish ladies can,” and speaks of tinting his lady’s “lip / With a burnt stick’s tip” to turn her into “such a man...