When I was ill at Tynemouth, a correspondence grew up between the then bed-ridden Elizabeth Barrett and myself; and a very intimate correspondence it became. In one of the later letters, in telling me how much better she was, and how grievously disappointed at being prevented going to Italy, she wrote of going out, of basking in the open sunshine, of doing this and that; “in short,” said she, finally, “there is no saying what foolish thing I may do.” The “foolish thing,” evidently in view in this passage, was marrying Robert Browning, and a truly wise act did the “foolish thing” turn out to be.
Harriet Martineau: ‘Autobiography.’ Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1877.
It was more like a fairy tale than anything in real life I have ever known, to read, one morning, in the papers, of her marriage with the author of ‘Paracelsus,’ and to learn, in the course of the day, that not only was she married, but that she was absolutely on her way to Italy. The energy and resolution implied were amazing on the part of one who had long, as her own poems tell us, resigned herself to lie down and die.
Henry F. Chorley: ‘Autobiography, Memoir, and Letters.’
Hawthorne’s first impression of Mrs. Browning, in 1856.
She is a small, delicate woman, with ringlets of dark hair, a pleasant, intelligent, and sensitive face, and a low, agreeable voice. She looks youthful and comely, and is very gentle and lady-like.... She is of that quickly appreciative and responsive order of women, with whom I can talk more freely than with any man; and she has, besides, her own originality, wherewith to help on conversation, though, I should say, not of a loquacious tendency. We ... talked of Miss Bacon; and I developed something of that lady’s theory respecting Shakespeare, greatly to the horror of Mrs. Browning.... On the whole, I like her the better for loving the man Shakespeare with a personal love. We talked, too, of Margaret Fuller, who spent her last night in Italy with the Brownings.... I like her very much.
Nathaniel Hawthorne: ‘Passages from the English Note-Books.’ Boston: James R. Osgood & Co., 1873.