The Brownings’ Correspondence, Volume 14

Volume 14 commences with EBB’s letter to her brother George announcing her marriage and her departure from England. She implores him to understand her motives. The Brownings embark for France on 19 September with EBB’s maid Wilson and the spaniel Flush. They spend a week in Paris from where EBB writes her sister Arabella that all is well. At the end of September they leave for Italy accompanied by Anna Jameson and her niece, arriving in Pisa on 14 October. They take up residence in Collegio di Ferdinando, where EBB suffers her first miscarriage a few months later. In April 1847, the Brownings move to Florence, residing in various apartments. EBB’s letters to her sisters are filled with intimate details of her new life. RB corresponds with Thomas Carlyle, who writes of the Brownings’ marriage: “Certainly if ever there was a union indicated by the finger of Heaven itself, and sanctioned and prescribed by the Eternal Laws under which poor transitory Sons of Adam live, it seemed to me, from all I could hear or know of it, to be this!”