Written by Nancy Moser
How Do I Love Thee? is another biographical novel by Nancy Moser. This novel’s subject is the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning. She lived in England in the early part of the 19th century, a famous poet of her day and once a contender to become Poet Laureate (it went to Alfred Tennyson instead). But her personal life did not mirror the success of her poetry.
How Do I Love Thee? is, of course, the name of Elizabeth Browning’s most famous, most loved poem. Ironically, it was not written with the intent of ever publishing it. The poem was part of a series she wrote as a private diary of her love affair with Robert Browning. Upon their marriage they fled the country – an extraordinary necessity, with peculiar reason.
Elizabeth Barrett began corresponding with Robert Browning when she was thirty-eight. To that point, her life had been ruled by two things: her bad health and her father. She took daily doses of opium and at one point of her life was an invalid, hardly able to move across her room. For this – and for other reasons – she lived as a recluse, hardly leaving her house and even her room.
Her father was a formidable man. He drew his family close, binding them together and ruling them with a strong hand. Of his twelve children, eleven reached adulthood – three daughters and eight sons. He forbade all of them from marrying. During his lifetime only three of his children married or left home; he disinherited them.
This book is a romance, but even more it is a story of overcoming. It is a story of breaking free – of bonds within and bonds without, breaking free of fear and the past and the tight hold of possessive love. Elizabeth Browning was led by love not only into marriage but into the world. Reading the book, it seemed like a kind of prison break. How Do I Love Thee? is a historical romance that holds appeal within its genre and beyond it.
Hey! I thought of writing a story about the poetic Brownings only a few weeks ago! Why are none of my great ideas original?
Sounds like a great book. These reviews are splendid.