Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Letter From Isolation Approaches Auction Block

At The Guardian, Alison Flood reports that Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning's 1839 letter to her cousin, written while in isolation due to ulcerative tuberculosis, will go to auction at Bonhams on December 17. Flood, noting the relevance of this letter, writes: "As the people of the UK continue to sit out the coronavirus pandemic in their homes, the three-page missive, due to be sold at Bonhams in London next week, sees Barrett describing a period that lasted for weeks on end, as a result of what appears to have been ulcerative tuberculosis." Picking up from there: 

After falling ill, she left London for Torquay’s sea air in August 1838, writing to her cousin and friend John Kenyon about her lonely life on 10 June 1839.

Receiving a visitor, she told Kenyon, “has been a thing forbidden, & indeed for many weeks & months together ... I did not leave my bedroom”. She also wrote of her desperation to return to London, telling Kenyon that “the longing for home will be helped away by nothing I am sure until I can get back again to Wimpole Street ... I believe I never loved my dearest Papa & all of them, until I left them.”

Barrett believed she would soon recover, writing that “with a full knowledge of the peculiar uncertainties of my complaint, I do consider myself, & am convinced by the physician who attends me, hopefully better.” But it would be another two years before she could return home, a period during which two of her brothers died, inspiring her poems De Profundis and Grief.

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography notes that Barrett’s illness lasted more than four years, and saw her suffer from “blood spitting, irregular heart action, loss of voice”, elevated body temperature, fainting and insomnia.

Learn more at The Guardian.