Shaggy Muses: The Dogs Who Inspired Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Edith Wharton, and Emily Brontë

Book by Adams Maureen

Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Flush

“He & I are inseparable companions,and I have vowed him my perpetual society in exchange for his devotion.” -Elizabeth Barrett Browning

On a bitter afternoon in January 1841, a coach stopped outside a small house in the British seaside town of Torquay, bleak and deserted in the off-season. The coachman lifted out a wicker basket, and a young Cocker Spaniel peeked through the thick blankets. The six- month-old puppy sniffed the sea for the first time and wagged his tail excitedly. His dark eyes shone as he pushed his way through the layers of covering, eager to track the enticing scents in the air. The puppy’s determined efforts to free himself from the basket made the man laugh, whereupon the little dog leaped into his arms and began licking his face. The coachman ruffled the dog’s sleek head, muttering, “Miss Mitford is going to miss you, but here we are, and mind your manners.” With the puppy tucked under his arm, the coachman rang the bell. Waiting for the door to open, he shivered in the wind and thought of the green lanes and meadows of home. He wondered how this little spaniel, bred to hunt rabbits and quail, would fare as a companion to a sickly recluse. The puppy’s name was Flush, and he was being delivered to the poet Elizabeth Barrett. That afternoon marked the beginning of one of the most celebrated human-dog relationships in literature.

When Flush arrived in Elizabeth’s life, she was thirty-five and bedridden. As a girl, however, she had been healthy and active. Born in 1806, she was the eldest of twelve children who grew up on an estate called Hope End, consisting of 475 isolated acres on the border between England and Wales. There Mr. Barrett built a Turkish- style house, fondly remembered by Elizabeth as “crowded with minarets & domes, & crowned with metal spires & crescents.” Mrs. Barrett, who was from a large, closely knit family, filled their home with visiting relatives. The Barrett children and their cousins rode horses, climbed haystacks, and played hide-and-seek in the underground passage between the house and the gardens. Elizabeth was usually the leader and often a risk-taker. Neighbors remembered her, with a “pale spiritual face and a profusion of dark curls,” driving her pony carriage at breakneck speed through the steep Herefordshire lanes.

In adolescence, Elizabeth began to suffer symptoms of ill health, primarily backaches, shortness of breath, and lack of appetite. Because the Barretts’ first daughter, Mary, had died when she was only three and a half, Mr. and Mrs. Barrett took Elizabeth’s complaints seriously and consulted numerous doctors, to no avail. Finally, they brought her to the Spa Hotel in Gloucester, where a specialist examined her and decided to treat her as if she had a spinal disease, even though he was unsure of the diagnosis. He recommended that she remain there for months of rest in a spine crib, a hammock strung four feet above the ground. He also prescribed daily doses of laudanum (a mixture of opium and alcohol) for the fifteen- year-old, a common medication at that time.

Looking at Elizabeth’s illness from a contemporary perspective, it seems to have had several causes: a form of scoliosis, a condition in which the spine curves abnormally; tuberculosis; and perhaps an eating disorder. No clear diagnosis emerges from the surviving medical records. In nineteenth-century England, middle-class girls were considered fragile once they started to menstruate, but Elizabeth’s younger sisters Arabel and Henrietta, who had also complained of illnesses when they entered their teens, soon regained good health.

Elizabeth’s infirmities certainly included an emotional component. One of the first times she was seriously ill occurred when her favorite brother, Edward, whom she always called “Bro,” departed for boarding school. She was unhappy about losing her playmate and was also angry and frustrated because she yearned to go to school herself. Because Elizabeth was a girl, this would never be allowed, even though she was scholarly and precocious. Before she was ten, she had read Paradise Lost and the major works of Shakespeare; although she was primarily self-taught, she outdistanced her brothers in Latin and Greek, and she could read French, Italian, and Portuguese.

At the Spa Hotel, lying in her spine crib, Elizabeth read constantly, kept a notebook documenting her symptoms, and wrote poetry. Before her illness, her father had arranged to have fifty copies of her epic poem The Battle of Marathon published. As soon as Elizabeth saw her words in print, she knew she would be a poet: “Literature was the star which in prospect illuminated my future days. . . . It was the spur . . . the aim . . . the very soul of my being.” When the sixteen- year-old returned to Hope End after her time at the spa, she was still suffering from bouts of weakness. Still, she spent the next few years determinedly finishing a poetic essay modeled after Poe and Milton, called An Essay on Mind. One of Elizabeth’s aunts paid to have the essay and other poems published in a two-volume work, which the relatives distributed to all their friends. A classics scholar, Sir Uvedale Price, wrote to congratulate Elizabeth on the book, beginning what would become Elizabeth’s extensive literary correspondence.

Soon Elizabeth’s poems, all with the long descriptive titles so popular at the time, began to appear in literary magazines: The New Monthly Magazine printed “Stanzas, Excited by Some Reflections on the Present State of Greece,” and The Globe and Traveller published “Lines on the Death of Lord Byron.” Even though her poems were unsigned, which was considered proper for a young lady, especially one with a father as conservative as Mr. Barrett, Elizabeth felt she was beginning her vocation as a poet.

Then, in 1828, when Elizabeth was twenty-two, her mother died suddenly. Mary Barrett had been weakened by the birth of her last child but seemed to be regaining strength. In an effort to hasten her recovery, she had gone with her sister to a seaside resort. Within days, the news of her death reached Hope End. Elizabeth was overwhelmed, unable to cry or even to talk about her mother. As the oldest daughter, she would have been expected to take over the care of the younger children and to run the household of the large country estate, but her poor health prevented this. Instead, an aunt assumed Mrs. Barrett’s duties, and Elizabeth was spared the domestic and social obligations that fell to Arabel and Henrietta. As mourning relatives filled the house, Elizabeth remained alone in her room, reading and writing letters and poems. Her role as an invalid was now firmly established.

Four years later, in 1832, Elizabeth experienced another loss when her father sold the family home at Hope End. Mr. Barrett depended for his income on a sugar plantation in Jamaica in the hills overlooking Montego Bay, where he had grown up. His brother Samuel now managed the property, called Cinnamon Hill, and Mr. Barrett regularly sent his sons to help their uncle. However, poor sugar harvests, slave rebellions, and a drawn-out lawsuit had led to such serious financial problems that in order to keep Cinnamon Hill, Mr. Barrett was forced to sell Hope End. Elizabeth was upset at the thought of moving, although, after her mother’s death, Hope End was no longer the happy home it had once been.

The Barretts moved first to the coast at Sidmouth, in the southwest of England. Long walks on the beach improved Elizabeth’s health, but she was bored by the town’s social life, which consisted of dances and cricket matches. She was happier staying in her room: “I live with my books and my writings and my dear family.” Three years later, the family moved from Sidmouth to London. At first, Elizabeth hated the congestion and noise of the city; before long, however, she enjoyed its stimulation, even though she experienced it only vicariously, through books, newspapers, and her family.

When it was Bro’s turn to go to Jamaica to help Uncle Samuel, Elizabeth was filled with anxiety for him. As a distraction, she immersed herself in translating Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound from the Greek. Elizabeth was delighted that a commercial publisher had accepted her translation, along with nineteen poems, but she was not pleased with the ensuing reviews. The Athenaeum, a respected literary weekly, announced, “We advise those who adventure in the hazardous lists of poetic translation to touch anyone rather than Aeschylus; and they may take warning by the author before us.” Yet the audacity of a woman, especially a young one (she was twenty-seven), taking on such a task endeared Elizabeth to many readers. She developed a circle of admirers, mostly older, intellectual men whom she never met in person but to whom she wrote long letters in which she discussed literature, politics, and philosophy.

Although Elizabeth was constructing a rich intellectual life through her poetry and her letters, she remained an adolescent in many ways. Awkward and nervous when facing anything new, she dreaded social encounters. Her cousin John Kenyon, part of London’s literary world, persuaded Elizabeth to meet the popular author Mary Russell Mitford, known to everyone as Miss Mitford. He overcame his cousin’s shyness by introducing the two women at the London Zoo. Elizabeth immediately warmed to Miss Mitford’s friendliness, while the older woman was struck by Elizabeth’s quiet demeanor: “Very pretty, very gentle, very graceful with a look of extreme youth which is in itself a charm.” The two began writing each other several times a week—letters filled with speculation about authors, publishers, and reviewers—and they became dear friends.

In 1838, The Seraphim and Other Poems was published, with “Elizabe...