The Swan's Nest

by Laura McNeal

Genres: Marriage & Divorce; Historical Fiction; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

A tender and engrossing historical novel about the unlikely love affair between two great 19th-century poets, Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett.


On a bleak January day in 1845, a poet who had been confined to her room for four years by recurrent illness received a letter from a writer she secretly idolized but had never seen. “I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett,” Robert Browning wrote, “and I love you too.”
 
Elizabeth Barrett was ecstatic. She was famous for her poetry but completely cut off from the kind of international travel that Browning used to fuel his obscure, unsuccessful, innovative poems, one of which was written from a murderer’s point of view. They began an affectionate correspondence, but Elizabeth kept delaying a visit. What would happen when he saw her in person? What was Robert really like? Could she persuade her father and brothers that he was honorable, even though she had never met his family? And what would happen if she gave in to Robert’s wild proposal that they go to Italy and see if the sun could cure her?
 
McNeal brilliantly tells the story of how Robert and Elizabeth fell in love with each other’s words and shocked her conservative, close-knit family and the literary world. Sensitively and lyrically written, as rich as the lovers' own poetry, The Swan's Nest will sweep up readers in the triumphant story of two people forced to choose between a safe, stable life and the love they felt for each other.

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 304

Sample

SHE WAS STUCK when she wrote it. Stuck in her third-floor room, which was stuck in the narrow, crowded house, which was stuck on Wimpole Street, which was stuck in the fog.

It had been twenty-two years since she could run or walk outside without fear of the sickness returning. They said it was good she was a genius. She could bring the world into her mind, and couldn’t she write whatever she could read? It’s a disease of the spine, the doctor said. It’s your heart, the doctor said. It’s your bowels, it’s what you eat, it’s what you don’t eat, it’s what you do, it’s what you don’t do, it’s the air, it’s the heat, it’s the cold, it’s the writing—stop writing! In Sidmouth, she was better, then worse. In Torquay, she was better, then worse. In London, there were no purifying gusts of sea air, no wide views, only smoke and the fumes from the pulverized manure of passing horses. She stayed in and turned into what they called her: poetess, hermitess, invalid, Miss Barrett.

But Mr. Browning went places. France, Italy, Belgium, Russia. His poems took you into other minds: a Spanish monk’s, a murderer’s, an Italian duke’s, a French boy’s. He knew, somehow, their thoughts and diction, and yet people didn’t understand what he was doing. They complained that he was obscure and difficult. His poems weren’t difficult at all. They were mesmerizing.

She wanted to light something on fire and hold the torch over Browning’s head. Not in a review but somewhere better, more subtle, so she put his name in the mouth of her lovesick narrator, who was also, as it happened, a poet. “Or from Browning,” said her poet, “some ‘Pomegranate,’ which, / If cut deep down the middle, / Shows a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity.”

It felt, when she did it, like a riddle she had written just for him. Browning would know why she had chosen a pomegranate, and why she had compared the color to the blood of a human heart.

But maybe he didn’t read her work. August passed without a word. September, October, November, December. The darkness of fall, with its long nights, became the darkness of winter. She tucked Mr. Browning’s silence into the space where you put things you did not think about, and she began to translate Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound again.

WHEN ROBERT CAME back from Italy and learned Miss Barrett had done him a favor, and the favor was in a book a friend had sent to his sister, who had not mentioned it, he was shocked. He was also annoyed.

“I wasn’t rude about it,” Sarianna said. “I wrote to Mr. Kenyon right away and thanked him.”

Sarianna thought at first she knew right where she’d put the gift, but it actually took her a long time to find where she’d stuffed it—two whole volumes, called simply Poems, by Miss Barrett.

“Did you read them?”

“I was busy, and then I forgot.”

“If you had mentioned it I could have at least sent her a line,” Robert said.

“Why would I write to you in Italy about such a thing? To tell you how nicely Moxon was binding other people’s poems?”

He couldn’t deny it hurt a little to see all that leather and gilding for Miss Barrett while his new poems, Bells and Pomegranates, came out in cheap pamphlets. Clearly, it wasn’t that poetry wasn’t selling.

He already liked her. That far-off place you could reach only in lyric was the place she inhabited, and from there she seemed to be speaking—was he mad, or was it Kenyon’s suggestion?—directly to him.

When beneath the palace lattice,

You ride slow as you have done,

And you see a face there—that is

Not the old familiar one—

Perhaps Miss Barrett had seen him below her window that day when he and Kenyon were walking by and Kenyon stopped to ask if he could introduce Robert to her. After five minutes Kenyon came back out of the house to say Miss Barrett was too ill. Robert had no reason to think it was a lie, but poets were probably always stopping by Miss Barrett’s house, hoping to meet her, asking for introductions or mentions or reviews.

He went poem to poem in search of what Kenyon said was there. He wouldn’t ordinarily confuse the narrator with the author—that was a mistake people made with his own poems, and he chided them for it. But when Catarina said “Come, O lover, Close and cover,” he looked for the message that might be for him alone, and when a little girl named Ellie stood alone in the reeds, he looked again, thinking Ellie = Elizabeth.

And then he found it.

Browning.

In the poem, a servant was reading aloud to the woman he loved, and the poems he chose, among Petrarch’s and Wordsworth’s, were Browning’s. Miss Barrett had read not only his new poems but Sordello, which no one seemed to like or understand. The allusion was deft and unmistakable.

He touched the words on the page. Held it closer to the lamp. Closed the book, opened it again. It was after midnight, but the page didn’t change. The words were still there, saying the same thing he thought they said.

All this time—almost half a year—she had heard nothing from him. She had sent him a message in the cleverest, most flattering way, and he had said nothing in return. She must have thought he didn’t care.

The clock said ten after one, but he must write to her at once and undo the harm.

I love your verses with all my heart, Dear Miss Barrett, he began.

so into me it has gone, and part of me it has become, this great living poetry of yours, not a flower of which but took root and grew.

… In addressing myself to you—your own self, and for the first time, my feeling rises altogether. I do, as I say, love these books with all my heart—and I love you, too.

He closed the book, put out the light, and stayed awake, eyes open, wide open, in the dark.

THERE WAS NOTHING in the first post for him that morning. He went out riding York in the cold, pushing the horse to go farther, the better to use up time. When he came back, his mother was walking tree to tree, as she liked to do, nursing this branch and that.

“You ought to go inside,” he said. “How long have you been out here?”

She fingered the bark of a tree that had broken in half. “Your sister is out of sorts,” she said. “Rinny is ashamed of her dress.”

She must mean for the party tonight at Mr. Talfourd’s. “Why?” Any letters? he wanted to ask.

There was no wind, and the clouds held either rain or snow. His parents had been thrilled at first to think of Sarianna meeting Dickens—it was why they’d said she could go with Robbie to the party—but then his mother had begun to worry about the others Rinny would meet, what worldly ideas and material extravagance she would encounter. Now his mother would also worry about the weather.

She leaned on her walking stick and turned her eyes on him, the right lid palsied, the left one its clear blue self. She tried to smile and dab at the weeping eye at the same time. “The second post has come. Did you see Miss Barrett wrote back to you?” she asked.

The bark of the nearest pear tree glistened under ice as he touched one of the branches, making the ice melt under his thumb.

“She must have been pleased with what you said. Might she be at the party?”

“No.” If Miss Barrett were well, he could ask her to dance and tell her again how sorry he was for the lapse of time. “She doesn’t go out.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t think she can walk.”

They were close enough to the house to see Sarianna take a bowl from the warming shelf and with a frown, study what was inside. By the time he and his mother came in, she was rinsing mud off potatoes.

“How was York?” Sarianna asked.

“Spooked by everything.”

Sarianna wanted to ride York, too, as long as they were keeping him for Uncle Reuben, but York was too young and unpredictable.

There it was on the table, his name written by Miss Barrett’s hand. He took it up and slipped it into his pocket.

“Miss Barrett didn’t waste any time, did she?” Sarianna said. “Go on. Open it.”

“I don’t want to be late.”

“You’re not going to read it?”

“I’ll read it, but we need to hurry. The weather will slow us down.”

“Perhaps you should stay home,” their mother said. “It’s too cold.”

“I’ll not make any dangerous friends,” Sarianna said. “You don’t give me credit.”

It was too dark on the stairs to read the words, but there were lines all over the front, on the back, on the next page, on the back of that one. He went to his room and lit the lamp.

Such a letter, she said, from such a hand. She did not blame him for the long silence. He had not wounded her pride. She was inviting him to write again. In fact, to write to her, if he would, and talk about such faults as rise to the surface in her poems. Such faults as rise. As if he could find any fault in her Catarina or her Ellie.

How strangely formal she was, and yet generous. I will say that while I live to follow this divine art of poetry, in proportion to my love for it and my devotion to it, I must be a devout admirer and student of your works. This is in my heart to say to you—and I say it.

He dressed for the party without being the same self: the broken-down, the humiliated. The one who wrote a horribly obtuse poem that his father paid to print and that no one bought and Tennyson mocked. Miss Barrett was his admirer and student. Miss Barrett, his admirer and student. Ha!

“Off we go,” he said to Rinny. His mother was fiddling with the back of her wool wrap and Rinny inched her gloves on. The right index finger had a hole, so she ripped them off again, went in search of others. The letter was in his pocket, heating him like a brick in a cold bed. As soon as he could, he would steal away from the party and write Miss Barrett an equally formal and yet generous reply. He would relish, adore, cherish—

“I do wish you’d stay home,” their mother said.

His sister’s teeth were clenched, her lips pale. Her old excitement was gone and he didn’t know why.

“Nonsense,” he said. “You mustn’t worry so much. I’ll take care of her every moment.”

“I hope it stops snowing.”

“It will,” Robert said. “Don’t worry. Come, Rinny. Let’s meet the great man.”

ELIZABETH WAS GLAD she’d written back to Mr. Browning so quickly. It was the best way—to write as soon as you heard from someone. Otherwise, the letter became a chore.

“We’re off,” Henrietta said, dressed for a party.

“But it’s snowing,” Elizabeth said. “George came in all melted.”

“Not anymore. Guess who’ll be at Talfourd’s.”

“The adoring Mr. H.?”

“I certainly hope not. I never want to see him again.”

Elizabeth said she was glad to hear it, and she smiled brightly in expectation, waiting for news of who would be at Talfourd’s.

Henrietta said the name carefully, almost as if she wished to take back the news. “Dickens.”

The armor of contentment would cease to feel light and natural if not worn at all times, and it was such a bore to ruin everyone’s good time with your envy. “Ah!” Elizabeth said. “How thrilling!”

“I mean to give that man Browning a word, as well.”

“What kind of word? Don’t.”

“I must.”

“Addles, I have written him. Don’t. He’ll think I’m showing his letters everywhere.”

“Everywhere? To your sister?”

“Don’t accuse him of anything. Don’t speak to him.”

“I will only attempt to discover what kind of game he thinks this is.”

“He would never play any sort of game.”

“Then I will find that out.” Henrietta blew a kiss and went through the door.

“Addles!” Elizabeth called, but Henrietta shouted, “George is waiting!” and went clattering down the stairs, leaving the room with the noise, loud at first, then loudly quiet, of everyone else going about their business. Something invisible ticked. It ticked and time passed but it held her inside it and made her think what to do with it. She had written Mr. Browning a nice, light blanket, pressing down here and there on errant sparks, words, like love, that could be misunderstood, and now Henrietta was running, as Henrietta always did, with her hands on fire. “I saw your letter, Mr. Browning, to my sister.”

If Elizabeth were not always in this room—avoiding coughs, avoiding strain, the year before, the year to come, the year unending—if she were well, and she were at the party, what would Mr. Browning say to her? She could speak to him herself. She knew what he looked like because he was one of the five poets whose pictures she had cut from A New Spirit of the Age and had Henrietta arrange on the Wall of Esteem, as she called it. It would be embarrassing in every way if Mr. Browning found out he was on her bedroom wall. He would misunderstand. He was simply a colleague, a reminder that she was not alone in her aloneness. “I admire you,” she could think as she considered him among the other writers on the Wall of Esteem. “I admire you, and I admire you, Miss Martineau, and you, Mr. Wordsworth, and you, Mr. Carlyle, and you, Mr. Tennyson.”

And I admire you, Miss Barrett, Mr. Browning might say, if they met at the party, though what his letter had said was I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett and I love you, too. Words like that from a man who wrote lines that felt not hammered into shape but born alive. She’d had to read his letter again. And again. To be sure. To feel afresh the amazement. She could read it again tonight, if she wanted, or read the lines she loved most in his poem Sordello. It was ten thousand times better to read Mr. Browning and write Mr. Browning than to be a woman in a body, in a dress, in a hot, crowded, noisy room. At a dinner party, you never stopped thinking about your face or the face of the person you were talking to. Horrifying impediments: faces.

The door downstairs banged shut, and Henrietta’s voice carried in the cold as she and George climbed into the carriage, and then the wheels took them. The vision of Henrietta accosting Mr. Browning filled all the space around her. What if Henrietta said, “Mr. Browning! I have seen your face on my sister’s wall.”

Elizabeth took a blank page, inked her pen, and wrote a note to Henrietta.

Tell him nothing. Please, Addles. Tell him nothing. I beg you.

Yr. dearest

Ba

She rang the bell; her dog raised his head, and Elizabeth said he might as well put it back down because there was nothing left on the tray. Flush put his head back on his paw, disappointed, but Wilson appeared.

“Shall I take the tray, Miss?”

Up went Flush’s head.

“I need this message to go to Henrietta.”

“Now, Miss?”

“Yes. Could Billy take it?”

“He’s gone home.”

She could not send Wilson, and she could not ask Mrs. Orme to do it, nor her sister Arabel.

“Perhaps Miss Arabel,” Wilson said.

Arabel would have to hire a hack and bear the cost of going there, if she could leave the house without their father noticing, which was unlikely at this hour.

“Or Mr. Alfred,” Wilson said. “He’s downstairs with Miss Arabel.”

To her brother she could not bear to say why the message was so important.

“Never mind,” Elizabeth said, “it doesn’t matter.”

“Are you sure, Miss?”

She nodded, unsure.

“I’ll be back with tea soon.”

The room ticked.

THE SNOWFLAKES FELL in smaller and smaller pieces, as if the sky were a box that contained only crumbs. The bits settled on Robert’s face and gloves, and when they reached the pasture, an owl sat watching them from the dead elm. Robert pointed to it without a word. They stayed quiet, staring back at it, until it lifted its great self and flew away.

“Will Mr. Kenyon be there?” she asked.

“I expect so,” Robert said.

“Does he know you wrote Miss Barrett about the poem?”

“No.”

“You ought to tell him.”

“She will tell him if he wants to know.”

“I don’t want him to think it’s my fault it took you so long.”

“He won’t think that. It wasn’t your fault at all. I was in Italy.”

“What did you write to her?” Sarianna asked.

“How much I admire her poems.”

“Do you? Even the romances and romaunts?”

“Yes.”

“It isn’t what you do or want to do, though.”

“Yes, it is. In its essence. I was completely caught up in them.”

“I’m so glad.”

“Can I tell you, Rinny,” he said. “I wish I could write her back this minute.”

“We can go back home.”

“No, no. I just wanted you to know how happy I feel. I’ll write her later. It will be a wonderful party.”

They passed the stable where York slept, the deep black circle of the pond, the cobnut tree. There were no other walkers, not even when they neared the station, where the steam engine was already belching clouds of smoke, and the doors to the cars were open, and a man in uniform stood beside a brass pole.

“Sit here,” Robert said, giving her the side by the window so she could watch the countryside brick up into bridges and tunnels and tall houses and lighted taverns.

“This is better than I thought,” she said. “It’s clean in here.”

“Yes, it is, I suppose.”

When the train got up to speed, she smiled like a little girl and held on to the armrest.

“Do you like it?” he asked.

“Very much. I’m never walking anywhere again.” She stared attentively out the window for a while, trying to see where they were, but she saw nothing she recognized in the dark.

“When will you go back, do you think?” Sarianna asked. “To Italy, I mean.”

“When I have the means. If I have them.”

“Would you settle there? Forever?”

“If I could. I would still visit you.”

“How much money would it take?”

“Not much. It’s much cheaper there.”

“If the new poems sold?”

“Ha.” The first time he’d seen Bells and Pomegranates on cheap paper, as if they were some reporter’s account of a murder in Cheapside, he knew his light was fizzling out already, or had been a phantom light in his own head, merely the reflection, in the mirror of his delusion, of the great writers’ fires.

“We want you to stay home,” Sarianna was saying. “Mother, especially. So don’t write anything hugely profitable and move to Italy.”

“You have my word. I will avoid profit like the plague.”

THE TALFOURDS’ HOUSE was ablaze. It was, by far, Henrietta’s favorite house on Russell Square, and the Talfourds were her favorite hosts. “Is that Mr. Browning?” she asked her brother. “With Mr. Chorley?”

“Yes,” George said, and George waved to Mr. Kenyon, who was making his way across the room with two cups of punch.

“I want to tell Mr. Browning that I read his poem.”

George laughed. “Sordomello? The whole thing? I don’t believe you.”

“Not that one.” Perhaps she ought not to have mentioned it. George, of all people, must not hear about Mr. Browning’s love letter. “George,” she said, seeing someone else now, “is that Miss Goss?” It had been a long time, but Lenore Goss’s face was the same, or perhaps it was the posture that was the same. Insouciantly erect, proudly displaying her turquoise dress. She saw Henrietta, lifted her glass, and began to walk with annoying self-possession in their direction.

“How good to see you both,” Miss Goss said. “How long has it been?”

“An eternity,” Henrietta said. “I haven’t seen you since you came to Hope End. George was in dresses then, I think.”

“I was not,” George said.

“How old were you?”

“Nine, I think we calculated,” Miss Goss said to George.

“Then you have met each other already in town?”

“Oh, yes,” Miss Goss said. “We know all the same people.”

Henrietta tried not to let her eyes flit from Lenore’s face to her necklace to her gown, appraising elements, noticing how expensive and fashionable each gem and ribbon was, how fine and unblemished was her skin. “Where are you living now?”

“Here on the square,” Miss Goss said.

“It must be lovely to have a park.”

“It is,” Miss Goss said.

Henrietta tried to read George’s manner, which was not the stiff cheer of everyday George. There was a meaningful suppression, and it was answered by something in Miss Goss, who suppressed herself, too. Henrietta was about to ask another question when Mrs. Talfourd burst into their circle.

“Hetty!” Mrs. Talfourd said. “Alice wants you to practice with her before dinner.”

Henrietta, Lenore, and George turned to watch the Talfourds’ wolfhound place his paws on Alice’s hips and receive an oyster. Every man in the room, it seemed at that moment, was staring at Alice, and Henrietta felt a pang as she remembered her first party and thinking that she was about to be chosen and wed and made terribly happy forevermore. Parties were different at sixteen.

“She is uncommonly pretty, Rachel,” Henrietta said.

“Luckily, she doesn’t know it yet. Before Alice sweeps you away to the library, could you—” Mrs. Talfourd paused, pulling Henrietta away as she apologized to George and Lenore. “Where did she go, now? Robert Browning has brought his sister, and I think she’s hardly been anywhere at all, though she must be at least thirty. I hope she hasn’t hidden herself somewhere. If you could be so good as to draw her out a little.”

Henrietta studied the clusters of guests half-shouting at one another in the drawing room, and at the same time she tried to watch George and Miss Goss, who were walking away together. Mrs. Talfourd said, “Here we are,” and smiled her broad, unaffected smile. The young woman Mrs. Talfourd presented to Henrietta wore a plain, high-cut dress adorned only with a sagging gold pin. Her brown hair was loose and curly, and her expression had settled somewhere between frightened and brave. It was her eyebrows, Henrietta decided, that one would emphasize in a portrait, and that little squint of her eyes that said she didn’t care what you thought. If only Henrietta could shade them just right, the viewer would see Miss Browning was a little handsome.

Henrietta gave Miss Browning her warmest smile. “I suppose we both must go about being introduced as ‘the poet’s sister.’”

“I have not much occasion,” Miss Browning said. She kept touching the little gold bird pinned to her bodice. Her dress had been mended—neatly—at the place near the armhole where you could never disguise a patching no matter how clever your maid was with a needle. Her dress was too high at the throat, and too plain. And her hair was parted in the wrong place.

“I’ve just read one of your brother’s poems,” Henrietta said, hoping they would not get into a deep discussion of it. She had asked Ba to tell her what it meant so she would not say anything silly.

“And I, your sister’s,” Miss Browning said. “I was just telling Robbie how I adore Lady Geraldine’s Courtship.”

“I adore it, too,” Henrietta said. “It’s so romantic and it ends happily.”

They were at a loss then.

“This is a lovely home,” Miss Browning said.

“Isn’t it?” Henrietta said. “It’s my favorite in all of London.”

The crowds around them surged and parted, shouted and kissed, and Henrietta asked Miss Browning where her brother was.

“There,” Miss Browning said. “In the yellow gloves.”

His upper body was of normal or possibly abnormal length and his legs were a little too short. If she were sketching him, she might lie about that a little, unless she thought him foolish, and then she would let his legs be what they were. Mr. Browning used his hands and arms as he talked, and he laughed a lot, and the people around him laughed, too, with evident ease, as if they were in no hurry to get away. His teeth—she caught him mid-smile—were nicely straight, so that was a relief. His beard was less prissy in person than it had seemed in the portrait Ba had. It was a little untamed, which was how Henrietta liked beards. Also, his nose was not as large as it appeared in profile, and she very, very much liked his eyes, which were blue. His clothes were neat and smart. Why, she wondered, did his sister not look smart, too?

“Did you come by coach?” Henrietta asked Miss Browning.

“The train.”

“Really! Was it far?”

“Not very. From Deptford.”

Henrietta had no idea where Deptford was. “Is the air better?” she asked.

“Oh, yes. We have a little land in Hatcham.”

“What do you grow?”

“Pears and apples.”

“We lived in the country when we were growing up,” Henrietta said. “We all miss it terribly, especially now, when the city is so gruesome. Though I confess I found the society meager. Is it just the two of you?”

“My brother, our parents, and I. . .