 Hello and welcome to tonight's event from the British Library, I'm Brett Walsh of the Cultural Events Department and I'm super excited to welcome you to this event on the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Before we kick off I have a few points of housekeeping. We will be taking questions later in the event so if you want to submit a question please use the form below the video and you can buy Fiona Sampson's new book using the bookshop button at the top of the screen there. So tonight's conversation is going to be chaired by Peter Salmon. Peter is an Australian writer living in the UK and he recently published a biography of Derrida called an event perhaps and it was released to critical acclaim in 2020. So without further ado I'm going to hand over to Peter. Welcome to the British Library tonight whichever wing of the British Library you're in there are many many wings throughout this country and it's fantastic to have you here. We're here to discuss to a mirror the new biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning by Fiona Sampson. So welcome to everyone. I will be harassing you about buying the book I'm assuming that most of you actually already bought the book. So, so ignore that if you have. I'll also be harassing you about asking some questions for Fiona during the night but at first level like to welcome Fiona Sampson who will now say hi to me. Hello Peter. And I'm going to do the bio of Fiona but we also have Mark Padmore who will be doing some of the readings tonight. But Fiona Sampson is a leading poet and writer published in 38 languages, but 27 books include eight poetry collections in addition to Percy Bisch Shelley and a critically acclaimed in search of Mary Shelley. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and published her acclaimed biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning in 2021. During some of the readings of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poetry tonight will be Mark Padmore who has an international career in opera, concert and recital. His work with directors Peter Book, Katie Mitchell, Mark Morris and Deborah Warner has performed with the world's leading orchestra. He was the artist in residence of the 2017-18 season with Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in 2016 was voted vocalist of the year by Musical America. So, welcome to everyone who's here and Fiona, congratulations on your book. Thank you very much, Peter. And I think it falls to me to introduce you. So Peter Salmon is a fellow biographer which is why it's a thrill to have him introducing me. In fact, we are speaking from the biographer's house and Peter's biography of Jacques Derrida, an event perhaps was published by Verso in November and has been very enthusiastically received. I was going to say ecstatically, but I realized that it's probably an inappropriate thing to say about the world of philosophy and Peter's also a novelist, but he's not a poet, I'm glad to say. Yes, I've dodged that bullet. So welcome to any poets who are out there. So we're going to be talking about Elizabeth Barrett Browning tonight particularly Fiona's biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Fiona can ask you why now for writing a biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Well, Elizabeth Barrett Browning was a canonical figure for me when I was well coming into poetry and actually even earlier than that. And she, she's one of those rare figures who is actually a woman who is in the old anthologies. And yet there hasn't been a biography of her since the 1980s when Margaret Forster wrote a great biography, which is called Elizabeth Barrett Browning. But at that point quite a lot of the archival material, the letters and journals from really from Elizabeth Barrett Browning's prime, and the time which he's doing most of her work were not yet available so it's a kind of bug which is absolutely wonderful about the earlier times. And there has been nothing that has told Elizabeth's own story since since then. And that seems to me a huge loss because she is still Britain's leading woman poet. She is the first female lyric poet. She is an important moderniser of poetry. She also turned from romanticism to Victorianism, which you might think is a mixed blessing but that's what she did. She is a paradigm of the lockdown life, which is something I'm sure we'll explore. And she influenced a huge number of other writers, I mean from Emily Dickinson to Swinburne, Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, Roger Kipling, she had very varied admirers. And so I think it behoves us to see and to remember what all the fuss was about. And I think it behoves us to listen to a short reading to start the night from Aurora Lee, her novel, which her poetic novel, which was the examination of a woman becoming a poet, wasn't it? And probably the first time that it happened. Yes. So let's go to that reading. Three, book one, lines one to eight. Of writing many books there is no end. And I, who have written much in prose and verse for others uses, will write now for mine. Will write my story for my better self. You paint your portrait for a friend who keeps it in a drawer and looks at it long after he has ceased to love you, just to hold together what he was and is. The beautiful voice of Mark Padmore reading the beautiful poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. I'm going to ask the most basic of questions at this point. Who was she? Well, yes. Well, she was many things, actually. I mean, I think one of the things that I think one of the reasons for writing biographies of women of the past, but also possibly contemporary women writers, one could argue, is that they, we are many things and somewhat in the eye of the beholder, but of course there are facts about Elizabeth's life. So she's born in 1806. So that makes our halfway between Mary Shelley and Charlotte Bronte. So she's nine years after Mary Shelley and 10 years before Charlotte Bronte. She had a really precocious childhood in a way self educated. She was writing poems from the age of six. She was writing in plays in French at the age of eight. She became a classicist and her first book was published to celebrate her 14th birthday. In other words, she wrote it when she was 13, the battle of marathon. As you do. She contracted a likely virus and post viral syndrome when she was 15, which was the start of a life of chronic ill health and disability against which she, her writing was in a sense a form of resistance. I always think of it as a kind of reaching past the confines of her room to her wider audience. She came to real critical attention in 1838 and then in 1844. So 1838 is her first sort of book of her maturity, Sarah from another poems and 1844 is poems 1844. She came to real critical attention and she's nominated to become the next poet laureate when Wordsworth dies, of course, she doesn't. She, but she's the first woman to be so nominated. She then Marius Robert Browning, who, to whose attention she has come first as a poet. She's off to Italy with him. She becomes quite radicalized. She writes very formative political poetry, which helps change British popular opinion about a number of issues, particularly Italian reunification but also abolition of slavery, the rights of women. And when she dies in Florence in 1861, she is given a sort of civic heroin funeral as a heroin of Italian reunification. So it's a kind of a public life, as well as the private life for which she is traditionally known. All of this is astonishing for any writer, of course, but I'm particularly interested in the fact that she was a woman doing all this at the time. You know, you're talking about politics, you're talking about the personal, you're talking about marriage tomorrow of Browning, but also, you know, I think in many, for many of us, we hear of Elizabeth Barrett Browning through how do I lovely, let me count the ways, but she has a very, very powerful impact, obviously. Yes, she did. She had, she had a great impact on particularly women writers of her epoch on beyond. I mean, she was the great permission giver for someone like Emily Dickinson. And not just someone like Emily Dickinson, but actually Emily Dickinson, who had the great wazetti engraving, which I think is the finest image of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, hanging in her bedroom, you know, her room in which she wrote and lived. But she's also moderniser. She's, I think that Elizabeth Barrett Browning, we forget that Elizabeth Barrett Browning was innocence in tandem with Dickens. It's the same gesture of moving towards the social utility and the moral purpose of literature. So like Dickens, she's writing for the new mass audience of the 19th century, the newly literate, newly middle class, lower middle class, the kind of clarks classes it were, the families who are used to reading by the far side. So like Dickens, she's publishing in the periodicals, as well as her book, she's publishing in periodicals, which are those eagerly-weighted periodicals that we remember, you know, people waiting for the next instalment of, you know, a little nail or whatever. And like Dickens, she's writing about the purposes of society, and she's writing in newly narrative, accessible, not so elevated ways. There's a kind of intimacy and quotidian character to her language, and slight sentimentality to her emotional register, and less abstraction, but more kind of moral principled writing. And that is really, she's really part of the shift into the Victorian zeitgeist, kind of the shift towards family values and a sense of the risks of modernity that, you know, romanticism had embraced, you know, science is fantastic, new, you know, what can we think of Frankenstein, you know, the Victorian experiences, on the one hand, let's make lots of money, but on the other hand, you know, a kind of dark satanic mills, I mean, okay, Blake, and he's earlier, but you know, there's a beginning to be good works of social conscience, and she's part of that dual approach that develops through the mid 19th century. Is she aware she's doing that? Yes, she's aware she's quite explicit about from quite young about the moral purposes of poetry, she that she sees poetry's purpose as to illustrate what would otherwise remain abstract in in the imagination. So she sees it as a kind of the handmade of thought actually she sees it as the handmade of philosophy. Right, yes. Certainly impressive reading the biography she she studied a lot of the philosophers to Greeks and so forth. And she does seem to have taken that on board is a stupid phrase for it, but she does seem to have incorporated that into what she was trying to do she was a she was a very intellectual writer wasn't she in many many ways. Yes, she was a class woman as well. I mean, I think she, she, you know, my last biography was of Mary Shelley and what's interesting about Mary Shelley is that, you know, she's there sort of fully you know she writes a masterpiece when she's still a teenager, and Elizabeth Barbarian is the opposite is a very conscious and dogged form of self construction, so that she is. She's quite aware that she on the one hand she says elevated note of the classics they are these the great works and she admires them but she also thinks that's how you learn prosody that's how you train yourself to be to be a poet that's 10,000 hours as it were that you have to put in the hard yards and actually does make a difference because you can see her emerging it's quite a conscious willed self development. I don't mean in a careerist way she's not quite so good at that although she's not bad at it, but in the technical terms, she has a strong sense, strong pragmatic sense about how you become a writer. The pragmatism returns the fact that she's a woman, which I think we will return to a few times. I mean that's difficult isn't it that that particular time to enter the literary scene to become part of the literary scene I mean how does she actually do that. Yes, it is very difficult. I mean she's interesting in that unlike. Almost all her female peers, she. She always had her name on the title page. So most of her most of her peers have to say the women we've we remember. They were pseudonymously, and a male pseudonym, George Elliot, the Bronte sisters of the Bell brothers, or they wrote anonymously so Jane Austen was a lady, and Mary Shelley was the author of Frankenstein, which is a little bit of a circular bit of nomenclature. Despite that she gradually acquired serious critical attention. And I think that rat starts again that does start in 1838 with the Seraphim where she starts to have. She's a serious publisher, and serious books from serious publishers simply are reviewed. And so, although there is always a strain of reviewing which something she satirises at great length and orally, when she's looking at a woman's emerging life. In which it's you know she's kind of a performing monkey because she's a woman who's a poet. Or there's a sense later when she's political poet that you know she shouldn't be troubling her head with these things she must have not understood them got them wrong. Nevertheless, there she is in full view. It's by the affinir, which is a very conservative establishment publication, you know she is at her reviews are in the mainstream press partly because at this stage there aren't little poetry magazines in the same way as there will be in the 20th century that's, that's a phenomenon of modernism it's not a phenomenon of romanticism and and of Victorianism. So, she, she is reviewed, and her poems are singled out for review, even when she's being published in anthology. And those reviewers are, you know, are sort of looking past a gender in a way. And I think that one of the things that that does reminds us thinking about the anthologies it makes us think about the importance of mentors in her life she was very wise and I think she it was I think this was intuitive she had a sense that she needed mentors she had a sense quite young I mean when her essay on poetry was published she, when she's 21 20 actually. She immediately acquires three mentors. Hugh Stuart Boyd, who's a local, a classicist local to her in Herefordshire, who was really problematic for her because his gifts were mediocre, and he was a married man who was trying to groom her to have a relationship so it's kind of real suppression going on containment. Completely unheard of in poetry ever since that that sort of. Yes, and executable. I mean, when you read his verse you can see why. There are a couple of points, particularly about a pleasure party going up on the wall for the hills and getting struck by lightning. And they're really quite McGonagallish I mean, he's okay with me because of the classical stuff, but the content is just mortifying. And Elizabeth who at that stage is already quite an acute critic, somehow sublimate system is able to see past it to some in a capacity in him, which of course, none of the rest of us can we can't see it in a capacity. So there's here's your boyd for some years he hangs around and hangs around in ordinarily in her psychic space. Then there's so moved our price was a family friend who is quite the opposite also a classicist, but the man who who brought the idea of the picturesque. And he's passed of the three romantic categories, the sublime, the beautiful and then he added the picturesque into British culture, who's a very old man by the time she gets to know him and, and has, you know, has very distinguished friends and his friends with Wordsworth indeed. He's a man who kind of gives her his blessing in a way. And then there is John Kenyon who is a distant cousin, and who is a literary figure and knows everybody, and he is a little bit later on in her 30s he is a wonderful and in fact remains a mentor also her that most of her life until he dies. And it's he who introduces her to Wordsworth. It's he who introduces her to Miss Mitford, who is the, the other mentor, the female figure the female novelist who Mary Russell Mitford, who then starts publishing Elizabeth, and starts introducing Elizabeth to other women like Lady Dacre who is Barbarina Wilmot. The ladies langothlin these very early 19th century important women writers to whom to from whom she sort of takes a baton, who hand their baton on to her. All these mentors are part of that same process. Yeah, fantastic. One of the things that I think is always interesting about poets, poets for women, is the way that they are often trad, traduced. And one of the things about Elizabeth Browning she wrote how do I love the let me count the ways which is very convenient in some sense that we can say oh here's an emotional woman poet but her political poetry is incredibly vital and wonderful and powerful. And it was a huge part of what she did and I know your experience as a poet is that you, you write poetry often that has intellectual heft, and it's, you know, ignored, or not noticed. But for Elizabeth Browning her politics were absolutely terrific, weren't they? Yes, they were. She, her political conscience evolved. So she, she is the daughter and the granddaughter of slavers. I mean one of the things that we tend to forget about Elizabeth Browning is that she believed herself to be Bame, and not without reason in the sense that her family were an old Jamaican family who had, they were engaged in marriage but all those kind of sexual crimes had gone on, all those exploitations, all those unequal relationships. And she had first cousins who were Bame, she had various kind of nieces who were, and nephews who were Bame so it was an entirely reasonable assumption on her part. But at the same time, like other family members who were actually so situated themselves, including, for example, her grandmother's close friend Treppy, who was Bame but also kept slaves. You know, she was part of, she was a, she was a beneficiary of slavery when she was a child. How, how were they beneficiaries of slavery? Can, could you just... Well, because they, they owned cast, they owned plantations and it was from that, from trading in sugar was how the fact, where the family fortune came from on both sides of her family, which also applies to Robert Browning's father side except that Robert Browning's father estued that. So, by the time she was a young adult, Elizabeth had come to realise that, I mean, conveniently, the Brits had abolished slavery, although in, in the imperfectly, and, but America hadn't. So, Elizabeth became an ardent abolitionist at the time when, you know, Britain and her family were no longer owning, owning, if you can own a person, which of course you can't, slaves, but Americans were. But it was sincere. I mean, she was kind of, she was revolted. She said, she has a very nice quote about how she says a philanthropist, so by the time she says in 1845, so she's not quite 40. She writes to a friend, a philanthropist and a liberal who advocates the slave trade is philanthropic veneering. In other words, you can't do slavery nicely. She understands that. And before she has left home, she writes the runaway slave at Pilgrim's Point, which is not, which is kind of horrifying even today and this is amazing to see the British Library have the manuscript of it. You can see how hard one the poem is. So it's a very, very dark poem and it's a poem in which there's not only enslavement, but rape, resulting in a child who is who's the colour of whose skin condemns it in its mother's eyes. And so the mother, the raped woman kills the child of the result of the rape, and she is murdered as a result by her rapist in effect. So it's a very, very dark poem. And in other words, it's saying that slavery isn't some sort of economic relation. It's a sadistic relation. And it's also saying that it's also not turning a blind eye to the sexual violence that was intrinsic to slavery. And that would have been extraordinarily shocking. It's shocking now to read it would have been extraordinarily shocking in 1848 when she gave it donated it to an abolitionist publication to sell in other words in aid of the good cause. Before that in 1843, she'd written The Cry of the Children, which is about indentured child labour, child slavery labour in Britain. She published that in Blackwood, so that's a really mainstream place, so lots of readers. I was going to ask, can I just go back to that slide of the runaway slave poem, because you're a poet yourself and you say that was a very hard one. Just looking at that manuscript, it really seems like she was attacking it in some sense, and it was a very difficult thing for her to produce. Is that your sort of understanding of it? Yes, absolutely. There's obviously a huge question about register, isn't there? How extreme do you make it? You're making it quite extreme by the kind of story you're telling, but then how melodramatic. There are errors of taste, which matter so much in some of these high stakes like this, that they become errors of, they become a kind of obscenity themselves. I mean, it's like the Adorno, you know, no lyric poetry after Auschwitz is what Theodore Adorno actually said, not no poetry after Auschwitz, that there are certain tones in which you cannot speak about certain kinds of thing. And there are certain tones which aren't appropriate when you're dancing on the rim of the volcano, so to speak. So, yeah, I think also, I mean, I've got a soft spot for manuscripts where people are writing some stanzas around to the side, and you can see that it's kind of an eratum, but it's not an eratum, it's a supplementary thought. It's not automatic, the stanzas when they order they are, it's a narrative poem, but it's also got reflective stanzas, you know, you can see, you know, the questions about order there too. Yes, now standing slightly outside the frame at this point is Robert Browning, also a poet, obviously, and who came into her life, and obviously many people who have experienced Elizabeth Barrow Browning have done it through the terrible, terrible Rudolph Bza. Play, film, film, film, where somehow Robert comes and saves Elizabeth Barrow Browning, and that's not strictly true, might one say. One might say that, yes, thank you for that Q, yes. I mean, you know, Elizabeth's life got a lot better when she fell in love and after years secret courtship married Robert Browning and they went to live in Italy in haste to secretly so her father couldn't stop them. Not strictly elopement but not far off. I mean got a lot better in a number of ways because she was really in love with Robert and he was really in love with her they also had a great time together. Because the climate was good for her health and the food was good for health, because she became able to do all sorts of things she had a literary salon life artistic salon life at that point, because she was able to have a child, although she had four miscarriages. But still at the age of 43 she had a child who survived, who survived her was his parents great kind of custodian and archivist first archivist so all of that. But it wouldn't be quite right to say that he rescued her in the sense that in the Rudolph Bezier sense because she was no swooning neocenic before that I mean she was talking about her craft she was extraordinary self made. You know at a time when she when to be a woman right and intellectual was unheard of. So problematic today but it was absolutely sort of beyond the cultural pale. She doggedly did that she could have been she could have settled for the domestic arts or a nice life as an English she didn't she pushed herself. Did she worked against the grain of kind of continual threat of death she kind of altered her beliefs she tried to find a sense of life after death and found she couldn't find that sense. She kind of was constantly. She worked, she worked very hard to create herself so in that sense he didn't rescue her also was largely her money they ran away on. And last but not least, we have to remember that he was six years her junior and that when they ran away together. He had had some success and great does success with his first book and then have seen as having taken a wrong turn and kind of lost it. And she was the, the great rising not just hope but the great emergent poet of her generation. And she was far ahead of him, both in terms of professional reputation, but also in terms of professional achievement and in terms of the modernity of her verse. I mean the books, the kind of narrative writing for which Browning after her death would become so famous include the books from men and women onwards, although she was alive when that was written, are taking on the lessons that she gave him as it were because they are her style of poetics further. She's not copying him, he is copying her, and it's a matter of public record you can see by the dates of the manuscripts and by the dates of the publication of the books. And yet, posthumously as it were the narratives been the reverse that somehow he was doing that and she kind of came along for the ride in in ways personal and professional. Can we actually actually be absolutely frank about this. When they get together, if you want to call that she's the better poet, and he learns from her. And I think, and one of the touching things about reading the biography is he acknowledges that that's not some dark secret in his life he actually acknowledged that they have a very happy marriage and he knows that he's the bloke who's not quite as good as his misses. Can we do it that way. Yes, that's true, but it pulls for him. So after a few years he gets he's got really got writers block. And then, as she gets ill, as she goes into her ffifties, early ffifties, he begins to have much more of an independent life. And he has a child this point as well. Well they've had a child. They've had a child, they've had Penn, yes. And there is always that sense that he has a separate study and she doesn't. So they are still observing the gender conventions, you know, even as they go through the motions of she is ill as the fat running. And quite soon, each the reviews of each one mentioned the other on pass on either to hers tend to be to sort of say oh well, you know, of course as the young Turk, you know, Robert Browning. There is a, I think a loss that comes with adding Browning to her name. I think I think I found the same thing working on Mary Shelley's a sense that whatever they contract within the couple and certainly Shelley's contract was lousy compared to the brownies contract. It's just so difficult to write about a writer who is a woman if her surname is the same as a man's Browning just does denote Robert and Shelley just does denote Percy Bish. If she hadn't married those people, then Godwin might have denoted Mary, who we know as Shelley, and Barrett would have denoted Elizabeth because she wasn't sharing with anybody, perhaps. But there is a kind of striking sort of the identity that comes along, just like in a mills and boon almost, you know, take your pick, happy marriage, or writing a reputation. I mean, of course, actually Elizabeth wrote her best work, while after she married and while she's with Robert. So I mean, you know, both of them thrived. But I don't think we should forget that there may have been difficulties. In cases, can we say, and I mean, it's a difficult thing to say that the the wives, if you want to put it that way, were the better writers. Oh, I'm quite a fan of Percy. But I don't think I don't think the wise were worse writers. Right. Okay. You know, and I think, I think that's the other thing you know that terrible sense that there has to be a comparative if you're with a man, you have to be less than him. So it's problematic that you're more than him. You're a sacred monster. You can't just be any longer. You're always going to be in relation for the rest of your life. Yeah, maybe talking of which we ought to hear a sonnet for the Portuguese, do you think. So what's great about these is that they are genuinely love poems. They are poems that Elizabeth wrote in secret about Robert, while Robert was courting her, and even Robert didn't know about them. She didn't tell him about them till quite a long time after they were married. Sonnets from the Portuguese, sonnet 22. When our two souls stand up erect and strong, face to face, silent, drawing nigh and nair until the lengthening wings break into fire at either curved point. What bitter wrong can the earth do to us that we should not long be here contented. Think. In mounting higher the angels would press on us and aspire to drop some golden orb of perfect song into our deep dear silence. Let us stay rather on earth, beloved, where the unfit contrarious moods of men recoil away and isolate pure spirits and permit a place to stand and love in for a day. With darkness and the death hour rounding it. Fantastic reading there by Mark Padmore. One shouldn't bring Europe into everything, let's bring Europe into this. One of the things about Elizabeth Browning was she was not a local poet in any sense. She moved to Italy and well Robert and her moved to Italy and had a huge influential career over there as well. In as a greedy was the place they moved to. Yes, that's right. Casa greedy is the name of Elizabeth and Robert's home eventually in Florence, not quite the first place they lived in Italy, but they live there fairly soon. And it's also the title casa greedy windows is the title she gave to a long poem that she wrote about Italian reunification. It's a sort of 30 page book as it were. It's in two parts written a year apart, more than a year apart, as her convictions waned, but Elizabeth was kind of unnatural for the Italian struggle for liberation from the Hatsburg Empire for a democratic and a republican unification unification. I think because she had this sense of the importance of self determination, which was partly a religious sense from her dissenting Christian background, and was partly a product of this, this living with disability this having to try and find ways to have autonomy even when she had very little bodily autonomy at times. What she wasn't, as she wrote to Kenyon telling him was actually socialist so on the one hand she was really inspired by scenes of joy at liberation. But then on the other hand she was slightly horrified when she realized that the upshot of a republic would be some of the things that were going on in France like guaranteed work and co-operatives and so on. She was not so much the terror as this she was really worried about. Why was she worried about that? Because she wasn't a socialist. She was actually quite conservative. Right, okay. You know, she, she lived, she, although Casa Guidi is not actually very big, and she wasn't actually as wealthy as, or she wasn't remotely as wealthy in her married life as her childhood. In the mansion of Hope End in Herefordshire where she spent 26 years growing up would have led her to believe. You know, she was quite class conscious and she did call her maids by their surnames and she, although she was loyal to them and loved them in the manner of her time, she didn't want to see the end of a hierarchical society. She just thought that the Italians ought to be ruled by Italians. Right. She also kind of, it would be simplistic to say that she liked the fancy dress of the parade, I mean much more than that. And I think having become an abolitionist, she kind of understood sort of a sense of the rights of man, and he did the rights of women. And so a sense of, you know, one man, one vote as it were, she would go as far as that I think. But she was very persistent in her love of Italy and her desire to see, or to see cavolo as a premiere and so on. I mean, she, it's not just cars and greedy windows, it's also, she also her last collection before her posthumous poems was poems before Congress, which is about. It takes its title from a Congress which was supposed to help Italy out of the difficulties which result from, well from blockades and from war. And Britain was supposed to come to this Congress and didn't. And so this book was received in Britain as a very anti British book was in fact, one could say it was more of a pro Italian book. But so it's two collections about Italy. But then again she's not doing something that's so different from other intellectuals on radicals of her time. I mean she was very attracted to Germany Italian. I mean, you know, she, she moves to, she gets married and goes to Italy in 1846. So you think of 1848 there we are it's coming it's coming down the down the track towards her. But you know Mary Shelley was also very taken up with Germany Italia so there's a very, there's a kind of zeitgeist you think going on as well, a kind of slightly, you know, this week's cause. Yeah, but it was a bit more than that for her wasn't it I mean she was not only doing the zeitgeist but she was one of the leading figures in this I mean in Italy, she had a state funeral. She was as this huge figure who was was talking about Italian liberation if you want to call it that and that that's a huge part of her existence. Yes absolutely and of course Italy then was a poor country we have to remember that. You know the sense it would be a bit like someone making the case in the States now for I don't know a country like I know Georgia or somewhere. It was such a disparity in the kind of expectations and national sense between Britain and Italy that that shifting the middle ground of Middle Britain's opinion about Italy was an enormous act of leverage that Elizabeth performed for on behalf of Italy, and she performed I think partly so successfully because she was also incredibly in touch with had a feel for that that that society that community she wasn't. She was very unromantic in the sense that she wasn't ahead of her time. She wasn't a radical she wasn't an elite in that sense she responded to, and wanted to respond to her generation her time. She was a very different project in a way she's in a sense articulated she's almost, you know purifying the dialect of tribe not quite that but she's mirroring back to her people, what their values are or should be a kind of slightly polished a slightly upscaled version of their values and their morals. I think I think we should hear a reading from cars agree windows before that. I'm just going to remind people if they want to do any questions, then do so now. Also, if you want to buy the book I know that's redundant because you've all bought it already, but two or three of you who are out there who just haven't invested their money just hit the button and buy the book and now we're going to reading of cars a greedy windows from cars a greedy windows. I heard last night, a little child go sinning neath cars a greedy windows by the church. Oh bella liberty. Stringing the same words still on notes, he went in search so high for you concluded the upspringing of such a nimble bird to sky from perch must leave the whole bush in a tremble green and that the heart of Italy must beat. Such a voice had leave to rise serene twix church and palace of a Florence street. A little child to who not long had been by mother's finger steadid on his feet. For me who stand in Italy today where worthy a poet stood and sang before I kiss their footsteps, yet their words gain say I can but muse in hope upon this shore of golden honor as it shoots away through the heart of Florence. The four bent bridges seeming to strain off like bones and tremble while the arrow we undertide shoots on and cleaves the marble as it goes and strikes up palace walls on either side and frosts the cornice out in glittering rows with doors and windows quaintly multiplied and terrace sweeps and gazers upon all by whom if flower or kerchief were thrown out from any lattice there the same would fall into the river underneath no doubt it runs so close and fast to its to war and war. How beautiful. The mountains from without listen in silence with a word said next. What word will men say. Here where Jotto planted his company lay like an unperplexed question to heaven touching the things granted a noble people who being greatly vexed in act in aspiration keep undaunted. What word says God for the heart of man beat higher that day in Florence flooding all her streets and piazzas with a tumult and desire. The people with accumulated heats and faces turned one way as if one fire both drew and flushed them left their ancient beats. Upward to the palace pity war to thank their grand Duke who not quite of course had graciously permitted at their call the citizens to use their civic force to guard their civic homes. One and all the Tuscan cities streamed up to the source of this new good at Florence, taking it as good so far. Pressage full of more good. The first torch of Italian freedom lit. Mark Padmore there reading three extracts from cars greedy windows the first is the famous scene setting the opening between the church and the palace between church and status Italy is. The second is the kind of standard syndrome her own Anglo perspective on an Italy of art history full of art treasures and the third passage describing what was actually her own first wedding anniversary. When she and Robert waved from their terrace to the Florentines and Tuscans processing to the pity palace which is just found the corner from cars a greedy to sort of render thanks to the Archduke for the concessions he'd made to Florentine. Well to Tuscan self determination. I'm good, but her books that you your biography drove me to and it's great. This astonishing book, which, you know, reading it, where does this come from it's just an amazing insight into writing about poetry and about life and so forth. Tell us about it. I think it's the basic question. Well, let me show you on a. There we are. It's not a first edition, but it's a it's an early edition. Stop you for one second if anyone here who's watching hasn't read or only read or only back to you. Really is. Many things one of which is a page Turner. It's really interesting. It's Elizabeth Browning's masterpiece. And it's a it's a novel in verse, which of course is why it hasn't had quite the rediscovery that the great 90th century women prose writers and novelists have had because we are allergic to verse it seems. Not only was it international bestseller which sold out 20 editions in its first months of publication, and, and critically acclaimed by everyone from John Ruskin to factory to. Well, to, to the panoply of critics and the newspapers about who we were talking earlier. Also the first woman's buildings romance so it's the first story by a woman about how a woman becomes and of course that's a very serious form by the time Elizabeth's writing. And it's published or orally. I mean, since Gertr's the Soirs of Young Werther, Werther, it's been a, it's been a significant form because a way of interrogating what makes us human. It's also the first woman's consular man. So it's the first account of how a woman maker becomes. And you can see therefore instantly the appeal to other women makers, particularly women poets at the time. Book five in particular is a kind of great long hours poetica in which Elizabeth Barrett Browning explores all her beliefs about what makes a good poem through the persona of or orally because it's or orally, or orally becomes a poet, and she becomes a poet through the enormous success of her autobiographical verse novel. So it's a masterpiece verse novel semi autobiographical written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning about Aurora Lee's autobiographical verse masterpiece, which is buried inside the book which we never get to read. I mean, we read or orally, but we don't read or release book or release book is told in stories told in nine books. And I borrowed that structure for Elizabeth's life, even though I have to say the phases and Elizabeth's life and the phases of or orally lease life don't match up, as you will probably have noticed having read both. Absolutely. But the thing about or orally, and I want to go back to this society that that idea of boxes within boxes that I mean it's incredibly sophisticated isn't it. Yes. I was going to say for its time but for any time that that she does this that she takes her struggle, if you want to put it that way, and she a fictionalize it but then puts it within this incredible structure. I mean it's one of the great books of the of the time isn't it. Absolutely. It's a it's a mighty book and yeah you're right in a sense it is the now scarred of her her era, because although orally has acquired a dramatic life. You know, in a sense most of the melodrama is delegated to subsidiary secondary characters so to the love interest or to who goes blind and loses his life's work in a fire, or to a young woman whom she has mentored called. Mary and Earl, get it Mary and Earl, who is trafficked into prostitution has an arrangement child and there's lots of very radical writing about. It isn't the woman who's been trafficked who is the sinner. It's the men who use her, and about the offering the child who is a result of that in effect rape. A secure home, even though it's in a one parent family and supporting Mary and supporting the child that's another set of boxes actually. And I also find it very useful for thinking about biography in general, because you know biography always is always putting a frame around the life isn't it I mean it's selective at the first level, simplifying a life or simplifying an intellectual development into a narrative is it's not arbitrary but it's it's not innocent either. Something is going on something is several things are going on and those things that are going on are being supplied by the biographer fairly obviously, and that sense that the biographer should acknowledge their own lack of innocence should acknowledge the frame that a biography is seem to me very important. And I really wanted to think about that in this book because, particularly because, because it is about Browning's life is about so much about the writing of poetry in a way that other writers lies, perhaps have a different emphasis, but that's the key thing about the kind of the graddysad panas and the difficulty of becoming. And because her masterpiece is also about that. There's obviously a reflection going on and I think in any case because Elizabeth was an invalid to use that old fashioned term lived with disability. So much of her becoming was becoming a writer and therefore so much of the mirror, or the frame in which she could see a week and see her emergence as a person is in her writing not just because those are the any traces because they're not. But there's a sort of Elizabeth becomes Elizabeth by dint of her poetry in many ways. So that sense of mirroring seemed to me extremely interesting. And the reason I've called. Sorry. No, go on. Sorry. Well, it's going to say the reason I've called the book two way mirrors because I'm very interested in that idea of biography is portraiture and that sense that, you know, in the portrait the subject looks back out at us, but actually is looking back at the portraitist who is kind of hidden behind those, you know, they don't get seen and implicated. It seems as though the person whose portrait is being shown is involved in a two exchanges looking at us but actually they're not there's something that has been cut off in the same way as two way mirrors which you know I think he used in a few rooms and police stations but they're certainly also used in mental health care units or used to be in the days when I worked in them, where you know the staff sit behind her, what looks to the people in the room like a mirror. People behind it are watching. So there's a kind of interrupted gaze that isn't there isn't a fair exchange of knowledge, just as there isn't between our biographical subjects and us as biographers this because I mean they can't answer back to us. They don't even know we've written the biographies in these in cases of you know dead subjects. That's brilliant. We're going to go to a reading from a Roralee now. I just want everyone who's watching to remember the word radical, which Fiona said earlier because I think one of the things about this is it's a radical book. And you don't want to just nestle it away as a non radical book. It's incredible radical after which there's a question and answers if you haven't already sent a question and do so. The organisers have told me we've got like four or five hours where we can do this. So do send the questions through, but now a reading of a Roralee. From a Roralee book three. They yelled at her as famished hounds at a hair. She heard them yell. She felt her name hiss after her from the hills like shot from guns on on. And now she had cast the voices off with the uplands on. Mad fear was running in her feet and killing the ground. The white roads curled as if she burnt them up. The green fields melted wayside trees fell back to make room for her. Then her head grew vexed trees fields turned on her and ran after her. She heard the quick pants of the hills behind their keen air pricked her neck. She had lost her feet could run no more yet somehow went as fast. The horizon red twixed steeples in the east so sucked her forward forward while her heart kept swelling swelling till it swelled so big it seemed to fill her body. Then it burst and overflowed the world and swamped the light. And now I am dead and safe. Roralee, read by Mark Padmore. And if I hadn't emphasised this enough, read a Roralee, read Fiona's book first and then read a Roralee. It's quite an amazing book. Question and answers. We've got a few questions have come in. Well, gosh, I've just moved to my screen and there's a lot of questions have come in. So let's go with Carol first of all. Fiona, can I ask what was the thinking behind the frames that introduce each chapter? Thank you for that question. Well, I think that biography is, as I've just said, not an innocent art and I am really quite interested in it. I'm really fascinated by people, which is why I'm a biographer, but I don't want to put myself in the book, but I want to look at the book doing itself. And I am really interested in portraiture. I mean, one of the things I found while I was working on Elizabeth Browning was, I had a real difficult to getting started because I was still in love with Mary Shelley. Well, what does that mean? I mean, the kind of, it seems like a very simplistic emotional over investment, but that kind of sense of, you know, and it is in a sense because I didn't know her. I don't know either woman. I've never, I can't meet them. I'm extremely interested in them extremely absorbed by them. I feel, I think about them in a three in as many dimensions as I think about friends of mine. So, you know, emotional and spiritual and moral and whatever, intellectual and physical and, you know, so really what's going on there. And at the heart of Casa Guidi in the reconstructed apartment, which has been brilliantly refurbished, largely by Philip Kelly, the great Browning archivist, with, with much of the original stuff and certainly accurate productions of everything that was there when Elizabeth Browning died there is a great ornate mirror, which was the one that Elizabeth looked at herself in every day. And the straight and indeed it looks out of Casa Guidi windows because it's hanging opposite the long windows. And the strangeness of that the strangeness of there being a mirror in which we can look in which she looked, but we can't see her there is just very. It's something very seductive and I wanted to play with it and I, I guess the short answer to is I just don't want to play biography straight. I love the short answer right at the end. That's brilliantly done. I've just gone back to the screen. There's so many questions. So I advise people to get another glass of wine, maybe a kebab, and we're going to move on to the next question. Jim Robertson says, how much do you think EBB continues to influence poets today? Oh, and I think not enough. But I think that for some women, I think she's a very important presence at the back of your mind. And I'd like to see her move more to the front of our minds. I think in British poetry at the moment, we're not terribly good at reading actually the canon. And I think that I sort of have some sort of alluded to. I think that we aren't terribly good beyond poetry at we in Britain at reading poetry anymore. It's just not our thing. It's not the same as it is on the island of Ireland, for example, or I don't know in Serbia. It's just not seen as interesting, cool, attractive. It's just seen as really problematic, even among the literary chattering classes. And so that means that, in a sense, the canon is a series of names, a kind of mental slide index, I think. And it's not actually a kind of living tradition always. And so it's very hard if someone is pushed out by the gatekeepers as Elizabeth Bat Browning was brutally really in the second half of the 20th century by the kind of the how blooms and so on the Lionel trillings that kind of generation of male critic. How do we bring her back and it's important that we do because maybe, you know, poetry would always be such an under regarded resource. And also because there's just something, some really important woman's work about bringing back the women and making sure that we keep the record turning because if we don't, that's a kind of lie about history, and therefore a lie about where we are now. I'm going to ask a supplementary question, which is against the rules. It's one of the things that's striking about you mentioned self determination before. And that's different isn't it to self expression. And I think one of the interesting things about her is that she determines herself and then users are she studies the Greeks studies poetic forms in order to express herself and that's not just saying what she reckons is it. Yes, and it's not saying what she feels either. I mean she does see even though she sees poetry as a handmade of philosophy, she does see poetry as a form of thinking. And indeed one of the reasons she was took it took her such a long time to tell Robert Browning about the sonics from the Portuguese was that he and she were both very again confessional poetry. And actually he and she would both have much rather it being the case that they were indeed a literary act of translation or somebody else's poems. And there's a whole stuff series of, you know, as it were frames about a literary homage to letters from Portuguese none and so on which are kind of great erotic romantic texts and European texts and so on, and translated if you're a British reader so. So yes, I think she. I think she is a very does there's a thinkiness a kind of not colloquial but a kind of speaking quality in her verse which is very. It's not conversation not colloquial but because she's not using ornate language, and she's using often quite sly or clunky rhymes and she's quite transgressive with this meter it cost us so much to learn from Greek prosody. There's a kind of speaking this a kind of personality, rather than a set of confessed feelings or confessed life that comes through her poetry, and that I think is very very modern. Absolutely. Rosteina has asked, would you say that the very fact she was modern in quotation marks, in the sense of channeling the Victorian zeitgeist as you said, given some of the more sentimental aspects with detrimental reputation after a death. Reaction against Victorianism. That's such an interesting question as and thank you and I think that's absolutely true, because I find it. I find the same resistance is in myself as a reader, the bits that I'm uncomfortable with are the sentimental bits. I think that that, in a sense I think that that's that to that will will turn because I'm, you know, Victorianism. Victoria Anna has had its moving in and out of fashion, you know, even in recent decades, you know the kind of the way that, for example, fusion and kind of high Victorian Gothic architecture kind of came back in. I even paint is that Alma today my suddenly being respected and having exhibitions and so on and so I think that. I think that Victoria Anna is not as disparaged as it was in the 60s and 70s. I think that we've moved away again from it a little bit in terms of sentiment. It's hard for me to tell because at the moment I'm so embedded in romanticism. It feels to me as though our contemporary literary taste and mortar was romantic so we're more, you know, interested in in what they had to say and we're returning to them more and that may well be what's going on. But I don't think that that'll be permanent. You know, I think that, you know, contemporary culture is pretty capable of kind of kitchen sentiment and I for one have certainly looked at lots of baby armadillos and, you know, little goats jumping from haystacks and so on in, you know, in, in lockdown. I mean, you know, online. So, you know, I don't think we're quite. I'm confessing this. The next question comes certainly from the moderator, which sounds like we're in a Philip K. Dick novel. But Fiona mentioned that her biography drawn you are carbon, carbon material, not available previously. Can you tell us more about this? Yeah, well it's not arcane, because it's all available as an absolute wonderful resource, which is the Browning correspondence just Google it and you'll find it and it's. It's incredibly well resourced and has been for decades. It's a decades long project led by Philip Kelly with the Armstrong Browning Armstrong Library at Baylor University, but it's online. It's a whole series of volumes of of the correspondence front of our National Endowment for the Arts, I should say in the States. And it's collating all the primary correspondence that all to and from Robert and Elizabeth and anybody else who wrote directly to and from them but also all the secondary stuff too so you know siblings of Elizabeth writing to each other and and then collating portraits and it's just an incredible resource. And, you know, in the in recent decades that has been bought and brought together and indexed and transcribed and it's, it's available. Doesn't quite go up to the end of Elizabeth's life yet but so because obviously Robert lived quite a long time after Elizabeth died so if you're a Robert Browning scholar, it's, you know you got more, you got to more to wait for your Elizabeth scholar because it goes up to very close to Elizabeth's death now. And the material is all there so that just makes an enormous difference instead of having to kind of contact, you know distant relatives who've maybe got one letter here and something else there. So I mean, you know it's not a matter of having to go and, you know, do that or have somehow, you know, like the Aspen papers you know have I in with the right people you know it's it's simply a matter of doing the basic scholarly work of reading resources now, but it wasn't. And yet 40 is taking us nearly 40 years to now get another biography of Elizabeth Browning and, you know, no, I feel like nobody's using this material I should also say, you know that it was a great disappointment to me that I couldn't get any of the gatekeeper publishing houses to produce a contemporary edition of Elizabeth Browning's poetry to come out at the same time as biography, which you would have thought would be a slight no brainer. There are fabulous comprehensive scholarly editions, but that's not, you know, a good reliable imprint edition, but no. It was kind of reinforcing. No, we don't want to know about it because we don't know about her from a quite a lot of gatekeepers. I've been quite shocked. Yeah, speaking of which, I'm going to ask one more supplementary question before we go to our final audience question. And if I've made this looking at, you know, the recent archival material and looking at that experience. Is there something that surprised you about Elizabeth Browning when he came to her the first time or throughout the experience? I think I was. Well, I think I was surprised how feisty she was. Because, you know, I had absorbed the cultural myth of this kind of, you know, swooning lady on a couch. And although I knew that she was more important than that because I loved her work. I mean, she might have kind of just come to that very easily. I didn't know that it would be a book all about willpower and determination and endurance. And I've really liked that about her. I have a lot of time for people who put in the hard yards and. Do you like her? Do you like Elizabeth Browning? Yeah, I do. Yeah, I do. I like her very much. I find barriers of class and sentiment when I think about her. But I do. I really admire her and I think. I think also, you know, it was very hard finishing this book during the pandemic because there she is. In her throughout her life fighting for breath coughing nearly dying from, you know, chest infections, which at the time when I got commissioned for the book seemed like a kind of safely in the past 19th century thing. And of course now we know it's not. And so in many ways it was very hard to write, but then on the other hand, it was very salutary to be writing at this time and also useful because. You know, you realise that all of her achievement was against the grain of, you know, chronic really severe illness. I mean, one knows that about DH Lawrence, for example. But I didn't really necessarily know it about Elizabeth Browning and the sense of, you know, just how hard it is to work and to write. Well, when, you know, a large proportion of your faculties are kind of thinking, am I about to die? You know, I mean, it must be extraordinary. Fantastic. There's a lot more questions. We're going to have to stop it one more because, you know, the people from the digital library, they've all got their onesies on. They've got their nachos. They're ready for bed. But there's one more question that I'm going to ask you. I think it kind of brings all these things together. You were talking about William Grunowhagan says, how was the runaway slave received at the time of publication? Thank you, Willam, and how nice to hear from you. Well, it was published first in an American abolitionist publication. So it didn't have the sort of clear ringing impact on British public opinion that it would have if it had been published here. But it was taken very seriously. As she was taken seriously in America, I mean, she was taken up by the kind of the Young America movement. Well, actually, it's just its precursor, which is the kind of culture making which is going to produce all sorts of figures like Hawthorne and so on. But in Melville, so, which was therefore kind of young and radical and progressive. So it was, you know, it fitted right in. I think it is interesting that she returns to rape in or orally and in and writes an even greater length in a sense about the subject there. Because there's nothing in her correspondence around that that sort of says, well, I see myself as feminist. I think it just was common sense to her. And I'm, yeah, I'm, I'm excited by that, you know, I think I think that's a kind of great act of courage. And I should also say for them since, you know, in homage to your your work as a translator that towards the end of her life she did quite a lot of poet to poet translation she prepared her poems and other she prepared kind of literal notes for her Italian translator and I think that as we've worked together like that you and I think you'll be amused by that fact. Fantastic. Now I've got three last things on my running sheet. One is remind you to buy the book by the book by the book and then by Aurora Lee. There's the book. Fiona is holding up the book. It's a magnificent book. It's really, really good. As is Aurora Lee. So by both of those and the next month of your life we absolutely fantastic. The next thing my running list says closing remarks remind audience by the book that was the one I did. He just says goodbye which has a kind of melancholy feel to it. Goodbye. Goodbye. And then it says end slide but for all that I'm going to thank Fiona Samson for a writing the biography and for a wonderful nights entertainment. And I hope you enjoyed it and Fiona. Thank you very much. Thank you very much Peter for a great evening and thank you to Mark Padmore but thank you Peter for stepping in and rescuing our event with such consummate grace and ease and I think we're going to end with some Aurora Lee aren't we. So this is this is Elizabeth ours poetica from book five of Aurora Lee. Enjoy everybody. Thank you for a great night from Aurora Lee book five. What form is best for poems. Let me think of forms less and the external trust the spirit as sovereign nature does to make the form for otherwise we only imprisoned spirit and not embody. Inward evermore to outward so in life and so in art which still is life five acts to make a play and why not 15 why not 10 or seven. What matter for the number of the leaves supposing the tree lives and grows. Exact the literal unit ease of time and place when is the essence of passion to ignore both time and place. Absurd. Keep up the fire and leave the generous flames to shape themselves.