Behind the Scenes: The Early Diary of Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Abstract

Elizabeth Barrett kept a journal for one year only, 1831–2, the year she was twenty-five. For that year she kept it faithfully, writing up her long entries daily, with hardly any omissions. It was a year that was full of tensions and uncertainties in her life, all of which surface in the pages of her diary to give us a picture of a lonely and frustrated woman. For Elizabeth Barrett’s journal, with its wholehearted immersion in feeling, bears witness to her intensely passionate nature, its daily entries spilling anger, doubt, resentment and bewilderment onto the empty pages. At a time when other women of her age were managing households and bearing children, Elizabeth Barrett had neither lover, husband nor family responsibility to occupy her attention. Her days were spent in solitary reading, in teaching Greek to her small brothers, and in trying to avoid the desultory engagements which were the bedrock of mid-nineteenth century leisured society. Her journal, recording her empty hours, is packed with obsessive dissection of minute events and her own profoundly felt reactions to the trivia of existence.

My diary is not meant to be read by any person except myself: but she deserves to be let behind the scenes.

—Elizabeth Barrett. Diary 1831