The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, 1845-1846: Volume 1, January 1845 To March 1846; Volume 2 March 1846 To September 1846 (Belknap Press)

This is the 1969 edition, edited by Elvan Kintner. It contains over 15 illustrations including a frontispiece in Volume one of Robert Browning and a frontispiece in Volume two of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. It contains a 24 page introduction by Elvan Kintner, as well as an epilogue. There is an eight page biographical appendix along with a bibliography and index. This edition of the Barrett – Browning letters began in connection with the preparation of a doctoral dissertation. A preliminary version of the undertaking was accepted in 1953 by the faculty of the graduate school of Yale University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a PhD degree. The author has tried to augment that study so as to produce in addition of the letters that would make them genuinely available both to scholars into interested readers in general. Here we have not only both sides of the correspondence but contained within it, in the words of the two lovers themselves, both of them poets, one of the few love stories from real life that can compete in plot interest with the art of the fictioner. This story itself has been re-told many times, such as in Virginia Wolf. The inherent interest is only partly that it is so unlike routine human experience; it lies rather infected Browning and Miss Barrett reenact an arch typical myth.