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Summary
Summary
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.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
McNeal (The Practice House) chronicles the romance between mid-19th-century poets Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett in her distinctive latest. Elizabeth, fearing a return of the debilitating and undiagnosed illness that has plagued her for over 22 years, has confined herself in her father's London home. There, she receives a letter from Robert, telling her he loves her and her poetry. The pair correspond for five months before she gives him permission to visit her in London. Through Robert's weekly visits, they continue to fall in love, but Elizabeth initially refuses his marriage proposal, worried her father will react poorly, given that Robert had called on her as a friend rather than a suitor. Undeterred, Robert persuades her to marry him in secret. They live in peace even after her father learns of their marriage and disinherits her. McNeal capably evokes her protagonists' poetic sensibilities both with dialogue ("I will conform my life to any imaginable rule that puts us together," Robert says to Elizabeth), and with her own lyrical descriptions ("On the visceral green of the greenest grass fell white blossoms that the wind tumbled and carried like snow"). This insightful novel is a must for devotees of the romantics. Agent: Doug Stewart, Sterling Lord Literistic. (Mar.)
Kirkus Review
The clandestine love affair between Victorian poets Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning is set against a background of slavery and injustice in Jamaica, with implications for the Barrett family, "dirtied by profit from the West Indies." "I do, as I say, love these books with all my heart--and I love you too," the not (yet) successful Browning declares, in 1845 England, in a letter to the invalid Barrett, whom he has never met yet already admires for her work and searching intelligence. Too fragile to be visited during the winter, Barrett prevents Browning from calling for five months, but the couple exchange a frantic correspondence, while their siblings meet socially in a circle that includes proto-feminist and abolitionist Lenore Goss. While spending time in Jamaica, where her family owns a sugar plantation, Goss met one of Barrett's brothers, Sam, who was managing his own family's plantation. Before his death from yellow fever, Sam had taken a Black woman, Mary Ann Hawthorne, as his mistress, and had a child with her, David. Mary Ann and David have recently come to London seeking acknowledgment from the Barrett family and an education for the boy, requests that are denied by the clan's patriarch, a stern, controlling figure who dominates Elizabeth's life and health. Browning, younger and poorer but ardent, wants to marry Barrett and take her abroad for her health, a commitment viewed anxiously by his sister, Sarianna, whose lot is to tend their elderly mother. While the men have freedom, it's the women's predicaments and situations that interest McNeal, switching among them sympathetically until the poets make their escape, marrying secretly and fleeing to Italy. Now the storyline hews more closely to the two central figures and their romantic but precarious journey, while maintaining a sensitive watch on its scattered cast. An eternally satisfying love story is retold, backed by a detailed examination of colonial privilege. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
"Hermitess, invalid, poetess," such is 40-year-old Elizabeth Barrett (nicknamed "Ba"), eldest of a plethora of siblings, who escapes her sickroom through reading Robert Browning's poetry, which mesmerizes her. She publishes a poem alluding to him, and he writes to this woman he has never met, "I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett, and I love you, too." So begins a relationship based upon quality of mind but complicated by the realities of finances, Ba's morphine addiction, and her dictatorial father. The poets' correspondence is extant, along with a mountain of historical documentation, which McNeal mines to convincingly portray an unusual yet beautiful romance. McNeal's imagination conjures the character of David, biracial child of Ba's deceased brother, whom Ba's father refuses to recognize. This adds a social justice plotline exploring the Barretts' financial dependence on their Jamaican sugarcane plantation, the "housekeeper" mistress system some planters employed, and its ramifications for Jamaicans emancipated only a decade prior. This delicately rendered novel offers much that will appeal to fans of the Victorian poets.