Edward Moulton Barrett would have been shocked and outraged by this story. So, I suppose, would his poetic daughter, Elizabeth. They were, after all, Victorians, and members of that most staid and shockable Victorian society, the respectable middle class.
And Edward Barrett was certainly respectable. A widower and father of ten children, he was a model of parental devotion. He was especially protective of his invalided daughter, Elizabeth, who had not been out of her room for years. He knelt and prayed with her every night.
And if he insisted that his children obey him in everything, he was only demanding the honor the Scripture said was due a parent. If he forbade them to marry or even to have friends, he was only trying to protect them from the worldliness and evil he saw everywhere. He had only their best interests at heart.
None of which explains why Robert Browning, who had befriended the invalided daughter, wrote her, “You are in what I should wonder at as the veriest slavery,” and “I truly wish that you may never feel what I have to bear in looking on, quite powerless and silent while you are subjected to this treatment.”
“Don’t think too hardly of poor Papa,” Elizabeth wrote Robert, and described her father as “upright and honorable.”
None of which explains why she fled her father’s house, telling no one, not even her sisters, because “whoever helps me, will suffer through me,” and taking her dog Flush with her because she didn’t dare leave him behind.
I may be wrong about her reaction to this story. Her easily embarrassed Victorian soul would have been shocked by the language, of course, but she would have recognized the story. And the characters.
