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Did Robert Browning do away with Elizabeth Barrett? Why do his poems so often feature husbands who kill or resent their wives? Elizabeth Lowry looks to his dramatic monologue 'My Last Duchess' for clues

Elizabeth Lowry

Sat 19 Jul 2008 00.00 BST

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It is one of the most famous courtships of the 19th century. Robert Browning, then a struggling young poet, writes a fan letter to the much better-known Elizabeth Barrett, a housebound invalid. He begins a passionate correspondence with her, marries her secretly, against the wishes of her tyrannical father, and elopes with her to Italy. Until Elizabeth's death in 1861 they enjoy a life of married bliss and increasing professional success as expatriate celebrities. After Elizabeth's funeral (there were obituary notices in newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic), her heartbroken widower returns to England to become one of the most lionised and popular poets of his age. It's a touching story of poetic and personal virtue rewarded. Or not?

When Henry James met Browning in the 1870s, he was perplexed and not a little horrified at the apparent difference between Browning's personality and the sophisticated, finely tuned sensibility he'd been led to expect from the poetry. The Robert Browning whom James encountered was loud and cheerful and garrulous; his opinions were clichéd and his health strapping; he ate well, chattered undiscriminatingly and told boring jokes. Where was the subtle dissector of human passion? Where was the shrewd wit? Where, above all, was the suffering and sensitive Browning everyone had come to know about and looked forward to meeting, the Browning of the public romance? Shocked, James put Browning into one of his stories as the bafflingly bluff - or insufficiently "subjective" - writer Clare Vawdrey: "He never talked about himself; and this was a topic on which, though it would have been tremendously worthy of him, he apparently never even reflected."

Had he but known it, James had already put his finger on the answer to the mystery. If Browning was not "subjective" enough, this was entirely deliberate: long experience of having his most intimate feelings made public property had taught him not to refer to his private life if he could help it; if possible, not to reveal anything personal at all. His resistance to exposing his inner self to the public gaze extended to his poetry - throughout his career he made a technical virtue out of never speaking in his own voice on the page. We don't go to Browning for confession, for what Sylvia Plath (who is, poetically, Browning's polar opposite) called "the big strip tease": he is, quite simply, the most unsubjective poet who ever wrote. Forget the Full Monty; Browning doesn't take off so much as his cravat.

Where does the Victorian poet afraid of exposure to the peanut-crunching crowd go to conceal himself? To the dramatic monologue, of course. Tennyson was the forerunner, but Browning perfected the form. His dramatic monologues are masterpieces of irony which depend on the principle of triangulation. A single person, who is not the poet, utters the entire poem in a specific situation and usually at a critical moment, and in doing so may address other people (who don't, however, reply: we know what they say or do only from clues in the discourse of the single speaker). The twist is that, while blithely holding forth in this way, the speaker unwittingly lays bare his or her true character. Browning hides behind the scenes, in cahoots with the reader, inviting us to supply the missing parts of the speaker's one-sided account.

The gold standard of all dramatic monologues is Browning's "My Last Duchess", published in 1842. Set in Renaissance Italy, the poem reflects the Victorian fascination with the period - with its sumptuousness, its dynamism, its unparalleled belief in the human animal. Browning drew on an actual episode in Tuscan history for his donnée, but the interpretation, and the glittering diction, are his own. The scene is the grand staircase of the ducal palace in Ferrara, in northern Italy, in the the mid-1500s. The speaker is the lusty, avaricious Duke of Ferrara, and as the poem opens he is brokering a marriage deal with the envoy of the Count of Tyrol, whose daughter he intends to acquire as his second duchess - Ferrara's "last" duchess, we realise, is dead. Rather like a modern aristocrat planning some calculated PR in Hello! magazine ("To celebrate his engagement to the stunning Barbara, Ferrara welcomes us into his charming home"), the duke offers the silent envoy, and the reader, an access-all-areas tour of the art he has amassed.

Sequestered behind a curtain which only he is allowed to part hangs the jewel of his collection: a portrait of his late wife. By his own account, the young duchess was not only beautiful but girlish, unaffected, tender and spontaneous. She blushed easily, was warmly appreciative of small acts of kindness, and was clearly utterly lacking in vanity. Without ever having laid eyes on the girl, we feel as if we, too, have savoured "the depth and passion of her earnest glance", the "spot of joy" in her cheek, and "the faint half flush" tinting the delicate skin of her throat. Yet it's soon clear that the duchess's very freshness made her irksome to her authoritarian husband: he found her altogether too impulsive, too unpredictable and therefore too threatening - too human, in other words. So he had her killed. But no matter: "There she stands / As if alive." Ferrara in fact prefers the image to the original because the image is inert, and therefore easier to control.

None of this is said in so many words: because the self-satisfied Ferrara utters the whole poem, his loathsomeness and megalomania have to be inferred. They seep out at the edges of what he says; he is unaware of his own repulsiveness. And yet he is perversely vital: we are mesmerised by his fluency. As a whole, the monologue is a profoundly human picture that is simultaneously a celebration of art's power - because art, after all, is a peculiarly human undertaking.

Though the poem was written before his marriage, Browning republished "My Last Duchess" in 1849, three years after his escape to Italy with Elizabeth Barrett, or EBB as she thenceforth signed herself. Their only child, a boy they nicknamed Pen, was born the same year. By then Browning had some experience of the stresses of a mature sexual, as opposed to an epistolary, relationship. He and Elizabeth quarrelled frequently about politics, about her interest in spiritualism, about how to bring up their son. Robert wanted Pen to wear trousers and short hair; Elizabeth preferred him in velvet pantaloons and candle curls. Elizabeth won. Awkwardly, her money supported the entire household: husband, servants, dog, child, clothes, food, pet rabbits, the writing of poetry, holidays abroad in the hot months, and her addiction to laudanum, which she took daily for pains in her spine and chest. She never complained. We all know the temptation to kill our spouse (especially a saintly one). In fact, Browning's poems often feature husbands who kill or resent their wives, or men who do away with their mistresses: along with Ferrara there is the murderous Franceschini in The Ring and the Book; Porphyria's homicidally possessive lover; and an exasperated Andrea del Sarto, who feels that his other half, the high-maintenance Lucrezia, has stopped him from becoming another Leonardo, Raphael or Michelangelo by making him paint commercial trash. It's a curious fact that Browning himself hardly wrote any poetry during the 15 years of his marriage. Did he, one wonders, sometimes have a Ferrara-like urge to rid himself of EBB?

Anthony Burgess plays with the idea in his short story "1889 and the Devil's Mode", in which an elderly and guilt-ridden Browning, now 28 years a widower, is burdened with the desire to confess to having murdered his wife on her deathbed. Burgess imagines it as a mercy killing (his Browning smothered Elizabeth with a pillow because he couldn't bear to witness her final agony). "Of the less conscious motive" - the husbandly motive, one might say - "he had only become aware after the act." In reality Elizabeth Barrett Browning died as a result of a ruptured abscess on her lung, complicated by her longstanding physical frailty. Yet the ultimate cause of death may perhaps not have been a pulmonary haemorrhage, but the excessively large measure of morphine given to her in her final hours to ease her pain. She died, as Browning was careful to point out in the letters he wrote to friends and family immediately after the event, not merely peacefully, but in a state of euphoria. He was in a position to know. It was he who had administered the final dose.

After "My Last Duchess", Browning would go on to write some of the best poems of his career about the theme of artists and their work: "Fra Lippo Lippi", "Andrea del Sarto", "Pictor Ignotus". Yet all the indications are that he lost his faith in art, and poetry, by the end of his life. His last collection, Asolando, was finished during a stay in the hilltop town of Asolo in the Veneto in the autumn of 1889, where he was the guest of an affable American widow called Mrs Bronson (who also happened to be a friend of Henry James). This last work exudes a sense of exhaustion and disappointment, a loss of faith in the creative impulse that had previously sustained him, and an overwhelming awareness of the sterility of art for art's sake. The once-burning bush, he writes, is bare. A flower is just a flower. Yet Browning, as "My Last Duchess" so eloquently shows, always knew that art - the pursuit of pattern - is meaningless unless it is humanised, rooted in the real. When I began to write a novel about a lost Renaissance masterpiece, The Bellini Madonna, it was this apprehension of Browning's, rather than the details of his celebrated marriage, that interested me most. The novel is set partly in Asolo during Browning's stay of 1889 with Mrs Bronson, and Browning wanders in and out of the narrative. He came ready made.

Murderer or no, Robert Browning was tempted to remarry twice. On the first occasion he so insulted his prospective bride, the wealthy and alluring Lady Ashburton, by stressing that the attractiveness of a marriage with her lay chiefly in its advantage to Pen, that she turned him down flat; in Asolo, years later, Mrs Bronson took great care not to understand his hints whenever he tried to move their relationship on to a more intimate footing. Browning continued to wear Elizabeth's wedding ring, displayed on his watch chain, until his death in December 1889. For better or for worse, she remained his first and last duchess.

· Elizabeth Lowry's The Bellini Madonna is published by Quercus.

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My Last Duchess: