Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett - The Courtship Correspondence 1845-1846

Ed. Daniel Karlin. Clarendon Press, 1989.

The Barrett family lived in Wimpole Street near the park, and a visit accompanied by her sister Arabel was a welcome treat for the semi-invalid Elizabeth. Her father's disapproval meant that the courtship had to be conducted in secret.

In a letter of 29th May 1846 she wrote to Robert:

Dearest, I committed a felony for your sake today - so never doubt that I love you. We went to the Botanical Gardens, where it is unlawful to gather flowers, and I was determined to gather this for you, and the gardeners were here and there...they seemed everywhere... but I stooped down and gathered it - Is it felony, or burglary on green leaves - or what is the name of the crime? Would the people give me up to the police I wonder? Transie de peur [overcome with fear], I was... listening to Arabel's declaration that all gathering of flowers in those gardens is highly improper, and I made her finish her discourse, standing between me and the gardeners...to prove that I was the better for it.

How pretty those gardens are, by the way! We went to the summerhouse and sate there, and then on, to the empty seats where the band sit on your high days. What I enjoy most to see, is the green under the green...where the grass stretches under trees. That is something unspeakable to me, in the beauty of it. And to stand under a tree and feel the green shadow of the tree! I never knew before the difference of the sensation of a green shadow and brown one - I seemed to feel that green shadow through and through me, till it went out at the soles of my feet and mixed with the other green below

Earlier, on 11th May, she had written:

'Look what is inside of this letter - look! I gathered it for you today while I was walking in the Regent's Park. Are you surprised? Arabel and Flush [her dog] and I were in the carriage - and the sun was shining with that green light through the trees, as if he carried down with him the very essence of the leaves, to the ground...and I wished so much to walk through a half-open gate along a shaded path, that we stopped the carriage and got out and walked, and I put both my feet on the grass...which was the strangest feeling!...and gathered this laburnum for you. It hung quite high up on the tree, the little blossom did, and Arabel said that certainly I could not reach it - but you see! It is a too generous return for all your flowers: or, to speak seriously, a proof that I thought of you and wished for you - which was natural to do, for I never enjoyed any of my excursions as I did today's - the standing under the trees and on the grass, was so delightful. It was like a bit of that Dreamland which is your special dominion...And all those strange people (flitting) moving about like phantoms of life - how wonderful it looked to me!...'

Fortunately for other visitors these acts of vandalism ceased a few months later when the couple married and fled to Italy.

In The Great Folk of Old Marylebone (1904) Margaret Baillie-Saunders says that after receiving a number of letters from Robert urging marriage and elopement, Elizabeth drove to the park accompanied by her sister Arabel, 'alighted and walked on the grass and leaned against a tree, and looked long at the leaves and the sky, thinking. Then she went home and wrote off "Yes!"'

A.D. Webster (The Regent's Park and Primrose Hill, 1911) adds that 'Mrs. Baillie-Saunders told me that the tree was one of those growing in the park near York Gate, though the particular specimen is not known'. See the Forster entry for a fictional account of these excursions (Lady's Maid), and the Woolf entry for a fictional account of what the dog thought of them (Flush).

See the Forster entry for a fictional account of these excursions (Lady's Maid), and the Woolf entry for a fictional account of what the dog thought of them (Flush).