By Crystal Veronie, Ph.D.

In our contemporary world, literary arts such as poetry are often imagined as wildly separate from the modes of discourse in fields of science and medicine–-what C. P. Snow famously ridiculed as “two cultures” in his Rede lecture in 1959; yet, in mid-nineteenth-century Britain, this division of literary and medical discourse was only beginning to show with the advent of separate scientific and medical publications, such as The Lancet, a general medical journal which surgeon, coroner, and politician Thomas Wakley (1795-1862) began in 1823. Rather than a separation of thought leaders in science and medicine from those dedicated to arts and letters, nineteenth-century Britain was a confluence of intellectual engagement between famous poets such as the Romantic poet and metaphysician Samuel Taylor Coleridge and chemist Sir Humphry Davy, who collaborated together with Thomas Beddoes’s Pneumatic Institution to explore the physiological effects and health benefits of nitrous oxide.

My own research concerns the historical absence of women writer’s contributions to medical discourse in nineteenth-century Britain–even as their own bodies became increasingly the subjects of medical study. In Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science, renowned professor of history and women’s studies Londa Schiebinger asserts that questions regarding women’s perspectives on “body politics” in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries cannot be answered due to the dearth of women’s contributions to anatomical studies and other scientific and medical publications.^[1] The reasons for women’s withdrawal from public scientific discourse in the eighteenth-century are multitudinous, but what is clear is that by the time of the passage of the  Medical Reform Act of 1858 in Britain, a piece of legislation that established an all-male board to regulate medical practice, women’s own authority in women’s health care rapidly declined.^[2] New regulation for midwifery effectively prevented the continuance of women’s practice as independent professionals in the medical field.

In spite of prevailing social attitudes about women’s involvement in public discourse and professions in the nineteenth century, women writers were not silent on topics of interest to men of science and medicine; they wrote extensively about popular scientific and medical topics in their fiction, poetry, correspondence, and personal writing. It is to learn more about the perspectives of poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning on issues of women’s health, social concerns, and the rise of medical regulation that I entered the Belew Scholars’ Room as a Visiting Scholar to research the remarkable archival collections held at the Armstrong Browning Library and Museum at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. In addition to a considerable collection of correspondence, manuscripts, and fair copies, the Armstrong Browning Library has assembled an astounding collection, the Browning Library, from the personal libraries of Barrett Browning and her equally-famous poet-husband Robert Browning. A celebrated poet at a young age, Barrett Browning enjoyed great success during her lifetime. Her most popular work in the Victorian period, a book-length poem titled Aurora Leigh, continues to delight readers. Although her collection Sonnets from the Portuguese holds higher esteem with modern readers, Aurora Leigh debuted to nearly instant acclaim. William Edmonstoune Aytoune’s review in Blackwood’s Magazine praised Barrett Browning’s bravery: “Mrs Browning takes the field like Britomart or Joan of Arc” for her insistence on authentic literary criticism without “forbearance” in regard to her “sex,” before the reviewer sets about to provide a multi-page review that compares her poetic descriptions to the magnificent strokes of painter J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851).^[3] (see fig. 1)

The goals of my research project “Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Revisions of Aurora Leigh and the Medical Reform Act of 1858” are two-fold: 1) to enrich my current research on Aurora Leigh with broader context by researching the Browning Library Collection and 2) to examine revisions that Barrett Browning made to her poem Aurora Leigh during the period between its initial publication in 1856 and Barrett Browning’s death on June 29, 1861. While I have yet to locate any specific reference to the Medical Reform Act of 1858 in Barrett Browning’s writing, the time I spent with the Brownings’ Library collection greatly enhanced and contextualized the fourth chapter of my monograph project, “Resistive Embodiment and Bodily Autonomy in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh,” as well as the broader monograph project which examines works by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Sara Coleridge, and Olive Schreiner. The Brownings avidly read the works of Mary Shelley and her poet husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Barrett Browning had connections to the Wordsworth-Coleridge circle.

Since my research considers women’s writing against the arc of the rise of empirical medicine in the nineteenth-century, I was eager to examine texts that inform medical perspectives in the Brownings’ library. During my month with the Browning Library, I reviewed several texts in the collection that signal Barrett Browning’s interest in medical texts. Robert Browning’s contributions to their library included several works from his father, including a first edition copy of Charles Bell’s 1806 Essays on the Anatomy of Expression in Painting., Abbe Pernetti’s Philosophical Letters Upon Physiognomies. To which are added Dissertations on the Inequality of Souls, Philanthropy, and Misfortunes. (1751), and other interesting texts related to the development of scientific thought. Additionally, a French medical text in the collection, Antonin Bossu’s Anatomie Descriptive Du Corps Humain D’anatomie Des Formes: Suivie d’un Précis includes an inscription on the cover: “Robert Browning / Paris, June 16, ‘56.” The Brownings had wintered over in Paris in 1855, and they returned to Florence in June 1856, just months before the publication of Aurora Leigh. The inscription suggests that Robert Browning acquired the anatomy text prior to their return to their beloved Casa Guidi in Florence (see fig. 2 and fig. 3).

Barrett Browning’s own interest in medicine arises in her correspondence related to her own health and that of family members, but it also appears in correspondence related to the controversy surrounding mesmerism. Barrett Browning corresponded with author Harriet Martineau and received letters privately endorsing mesmerism. Along with the pseudoscience of phrenology, mesmerism or animal magnetism gained enough popularity in England to support the creation of a society of men of science dedicated to its study. A rising physician, John Elliotson (1791-1868) started the society and edited a journal, The Zoist, which circulated stories about its healing effects.  Separated from Barrett Browning socially by only a few degrees, Elliotson’s name appears repeatedly in correspondence between Barrett Browning and her friends and acquaintances.

One letter from Barrett Browning to author Mary Russell Mitford (November 20, [1844]) reveals Barrett Browning’s own concern about the broad application of mesmeric experiments. Barrett Browning writes to Mitford, “You see, enough is not known of the agency & the manner of its acting, to use it with judgement. Every application is a new leap in the dark.” A little further in the same letter, Barrett Browning explains that “I think it too early to make use of this power as an accredited means of restoration from disease—& that the right philosophy wd be to accumulate more facts ..in opposition to the shams ..more undeniable facts, as facts, .. &, so, to begin to classify principles, & bring about the induction of Science, instead of Mystery.” Even though Barrett Browning takes this position on mesmerism’s benefit for the general public, she also expresses belief in the author Harriet Martineau’s testimony of cure and dismay at the way that Martineau’s medical practitioners have turned on her because of her public acknowledgement of her results (see letter from EBB to Mary Russell Mitford, Thursday, Dec. 5, 1844). Thus, Barrett Browning’s correspondence evidences a hesitancy to anticipate positive results for the practice of mesmerism broadly applied to public health. Instead, she argues for more rigor in the practice of medicine, caution in disregard for the differences between individual physiologies, and ethical treatment for patients who counter medical authority.

In addition to specific medical manuals, my research in the Browning Library uncovered unexpected connections between Barrett Browning’s writing and that of other respected poets. For example, Barrett Browning’s copy of James Russell Lowell’s Poems (1844), a presentation copy of the second edition sent to her by Lowell himself, includes numerous annotations in Barrett Browning’s hand that provide greater nuance to my readings of Aurora Leigh. In Lowell’s “A Legend of Brittany,” Barrett Browning has annotated in the margins near the lines:

Not far from Margaret’s cottage dwelt a knight

Of the proud Templars, a sworn celebate,

Whose heart in secret fed upon the light

And dew of her ripe beauty, through the grate. (Part I, Stanza XVI).

The hidden quality of the knight’s love shares similarities with Barrett Browning’s poem “Lord Walter’s Wife,” a poem that also explores a man’s secret desires as a kind of corruption that tempts him to break with his own sense of moral duty.

A little later in Part II, stanza II of Lowell’s “A Legend of Brittany,” Barrett Browning marks a vertical line next to a passage that contrasts high and low elements:

Yet let us think, that, as there’s naught above

The all-embracing atmosphere of Art,

So also there is naught that falls below

Her generous reach, though grimed with guilt and woe.

Similar to Lowell’s use of high and low, Barrett Browning employs the contrast of high and low in the exchange of gazes between the young Romney Leigh and Aurora in Book I of Aurora Leigh:

We came so close, we saw our differences

Too intimately. Always Romney Leigh

Was looking for the worms, I for the gods.

A godlike nature his; the gods look down,

Incurious of themselves; and certainly

’Tis well I should remember, how, those days,

I was a worm too, and he looked at me. (lines 500-556)

The passage in Lowell’s poem places “Art” at the highest reaches of the “atmosphere” but also insists that even that which is “grimed with guilt and woe” remains within its purview. Barrett Browning’s passage, by contrast, correlates Romney’s masculine objectivity with god-like heights, while it correlates Aurora’s femininity with the earthly and material—for how much more gross and corporeal a motif could she choose than the worm’s body and its frequent associations with the grave and mortal decay.

According to the edition of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language in the Browning Library, the primary meaning of the word “worm” in English is to refer to “a small harmless serpent that lives in the earth.” Other meanings of the term, however, include “poisonous serpent” and parasitic organisms, as well as references to silkworms and those worms associated with graves (see fig. 4 and 5).

In turning from the Browning Library collection to the revisions made to Aurora Leigh, I am drawn to descriptions of the “unseen” and invisible. In my transcription of the Armstrong Browning Library’s fair copy fragment of the first edition of Aurora Leigh, a draft of Book I, lines 9-28 and 204-207 (D0051), I notice the phrase, “hid with God” (line 204) repeated in the published first edition of the poem.

Moreover, my interest was piqued by the striking alteration to lines 204-207. In this fair copy, these lines emphasize the child’s confrontation with death:

For nine full years our lives were hid with God

Among his mountains. I was twelve years old

And suddenly these vague, unfeatured days

Grew clear with death. Suddenly woke up… (Barrett Browning,

fair copy manuscript of first edition of Aurora Leigh)

In contrast, the same line numbers in the first published edition of Aurora Leigh differ significantly:

So, nine full years, our days were hid with God

Among his mountains.      I was just thirteen,

Still growing like the plants from unseen roots

In tongue-tied Springs, — and suddenly awoke … (Barrett Browning,

Aurora Leigh, Chapman and Hall, 1857)

The shift between the lines in the fair copy and the lines in the first published edition is one from an emphasis upon the clarity of death that brings a sudden awareness of one’s mortality to a sense of childhood innocence lost–and an awakening into an adult consciousness more reflective of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience.

The subtle revisions from the fair copy to the first edition emphasize the quality of her father’s touch. In the fair copy, lines 19-20, “My father’s slow hand when she had left us both, / Stroke out my childish curls across his knee” and then, lines 24-27, “… O father’s hand, / Stroke the poor hair down, stroke it heavily, / And draw the child’s head closer to thy knees,” recall the child’s memory of the deceased father–the force of his heavy hand and knee–whose insistent and repetitious touch leaves its mark on the child’s memory. So too, in the 1859 fourth edition of Aurora Leigh does the paternal aunt’s gaze, which Aurora describes her eyes as “two gray-steel naked-bladed” instruments of violence (Book I, line 327). Under her aunt’s surveillance, Aurora likens herself to one who has been shipwrecked, her body “…thrown / Like seaweed on the rocks…” (Book I, lines 379-380). In a parallel to her father’s forceful stroking of her hair in the previous scene, Aurora describes her aunt’s visual scrutiny as a “prick” that seeks to:

To prick me to a pattern with her pin

Fibre from fibre, delicate leaf from leaf,

And dry out from my drowned anatomy

The last sea salt left in me. (Book I, lines 381-384).

The richness of these passages, and the doubling of paternal surveillance from the father to the aunt, also echo similar parallels in Barrett Browning’s own life between an autocratic father and family and friends intent on shaping her—not to mention the connection between the shipwreck metaphor and her own loss of her favorite brother “Bro” at sea in Torquay. It leaves me with much to contemplate in the coming weeks and months as I revise my monograph chapter.

In her exploration of conceptions of inner lives—private thoughts and feelings, of her characters, Barrett Browning conducts her own kind of anatomical discoveries. The influence of changes in medicine play out in subtle degrees in Aurora Leigh’s preoccupation with bodily autonomy, the soul, and the relationship of the mind to the body.

Since spending time with the Browning Library Collection, Barrett Browning’s correspondence, personal writing, and the various revisions that she made to Aurora Leigh and her other works, I feel my research project becoming more rooted, growing in Barrett Browning’s words, “from unseen roots” (Aurora Leigh, first edition, Book I, line 206). I am incredibly grateful for the 2024-2025 fellowship I received, which made possible the month I spent in residence as a Visiting Scholar at the Armstrong Browning Library, and for the incredible support I received from librarians Jennifer Borderud and Laura French, as well as the gracious staff, including Christi Klempnauer, Vanessa Long, and Rachael Bates. I am also deeply moved by the collegiality extended from the Margarett Root Brown Chair in Robert Browning and Victorian Studies Dr. Kristen Pond. I am also ever indebted to the generosity of donors who have made and continue to sustain the archival collections at the Armstrong Browning Library.

^[1] Britomart is a reference to the female knight in Book III of Edmund Spenser’s epic poem The Fairie Queene, a text also in the Browning Library Collection.

^[2] Schiebinger, Nature’s Body (Boston: Beacon Press): p. 201.

^[3] Wakley announces the passage of the Medical Reform Act (here called “The Medical Practitioner Act” in The Lancet on Saturday, August 7, 1858; Schiebinger asserts that “…this was a period when women’s agency in health matters was being challenged more generally. For hundreds of years, midwives had held a monopoly on the entire field of women’s health care. Beginning in the seventeenth century and increasing in the eighteenth century, Schiebinger explains, “university-trained [male] obstetricians had taken over the more scientific (and lucrative) parts of birthing” (Nature’s Body, 141).

Works Cited

Aytoun, William Edmonstoune. “Elizabeth Barrett Browning—Aurora Leigh.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, vol. 81, no. 495 (January 1857), pp. 23-41. Meynell Collection, Armstrong Browning Library, Baylor University.

Barrett Browning, Elizabeth. Aurora Leigh. First edition. Chapman and Hall. 1857. Browning Library Collection, Armstrong Browning Library, Baylor University.

———. Aurora Leigh. Manuscript Draft of I, 9–28 and 204–207, on a page numbered 7. Browning Collections, Armstrong Browning Library, Baylor University, D0051.

———. Aurora Leigh. 1859. Fourth, revised edition. Edited by Kerry McSweeney. Oxford UP, 1998, 2008.

———. Letter from EBB to Mary Russell Mitford. Letter 1764, November 20, [1844]. The Brownings’ Correspondence. Vol. 9. Edited by Philip Kelley, Edward Hagan, and Linda M. Lewis. June 1844 – December 1844. Letters 1618 – 1798. Wedgestone Press, 1991, pp. 234-238.

———. Letter from EBB to Mary Russell Mitford. Letter 1779, Thursday, Dec. 5 1844, Brownings’ Correspondence, vol. 9. Edited by Philip Kelley, Edward Hagan, and Linda M. Lewis. June 1844 – December 1844. Letters 1618 – 1798. Wedgestone Press, 1991, pp. 234-235.

Bossu, Antonin. Anatomie Descriptive Du Corps Humain D’anatomie Des Formes: Suivie d’un Précis

Paris: Au Comptoir des Imprimeurs-Unis, Lacroix-Comon, Éditeur, Quai Malaquais, 15. Browning Library Collection, Armstrong Browning Library, Baylor University.

Johnson, Samuel. “Worms.” A Dictionary of the English Language: In Which the Words Are Deduced from Their Originals, Illustrated in Their Different Signification by Examples from the Best Writers. To Which are Prefixed, a History of the Language, and an English Grammar. Vol. II. London: John Jarvis, 1786, n.p. Browning Library Collection, Armstrong Browning Library, Baylor University.

Lowell, James Russell. Poems. 2nd edition. Cambridge: John Owen, 1844. Browning Library Collection, Armstrong Browning Library, Baylor University.

“The Medical Practitioner Act.” The Lancet, Saturday, 7 Aug. 1858. The Lancet, vol. 2, London: J. Onwyn, pp. 149-150. HathiTrust. Princeton University. Accessed 15 July 2024, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101074830579&seq=153&q1=%22medical+reform%22.