Page:Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Ingram, 5th ed.).djvu/171

Rh the tone intensely modern." Whether Miss Mitford had seen or heard any passages from the poem so as to know what the tone was, or whether she derived her impression from what the poetess had said, is unknown; but at any rate she was kept advised as to its progress, and in July, 1851, wrote to the same Mr. Fields, saying Mrs. Browning asked her to inquire if he would like to bring out the new poem. The publisher, with a lack of acumen not unparalleled in his profession, let the opportunity slip, and the work was secured by a New York rival. A few months later Miss Mitford, after telling a correspondent that Mrs. Browning's poem, which has been three years in hand, and of which four thousand lines are already written, has never been seen, not a word of it, by its authoress's husband: "A strange reserve!" she exclaims.

During the years the work was in progress it seems to have been written at odd moments, and when her maternal cares were called for the manuscript was laid down, or if a visitor came it was thrust away out of sight. It was not until March 1856 that Mrs. Browning let her husband see any of the work, and then she placed the first six books of it in his hands. The remaining three books were written much more rapidly than the others, and the whole work was completed and transcribed in 1856 in London, in the house of Mrs. Browning's friend and kinsman, John Kenyon, to whom the book was dedicated as a "sign of esteem, gratitude, and affection."

With as much of the manuscript of Aurora Leigh as was ready the Brownings left Italy for England, and at Marseilles, so Mrs. Ritchie tells us, "by some oversight the box was lost in which the manuscript had been packed. In this same box were also carefully