1. Squire's review was actually of Hood's, Thurman edition of The Letters of Robert Browning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1933)Google Scholar, and was published in the Sunday Times on 24 09 1933, p. 8.Google ScholarHunt's, letter appeared on 8 10, p. 14.Google Scholar

2. See Secor, Marie, “Violet Hunt, Novelist: A Reintroduction,” English Literature in Transition, 19, No. 1 (1976), 25–34.Google Scholar

3. From Hunt's, Violet 1889 diary, 13 12Google Scholar I am grateful to Cornell University Library for permission to quote from the Hunt papers in their Ford Collection. Unless otherwise indicated, all the manuscript material quoted is from the Hunt papers at Cornell.

4. DeVane, William C. and Knickerbocker, Kenneth L., eds., New Letters of Robert Browning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950), pp. 172–73.Google Scholar In this same letter Browning also praises Hunt's, Alfred “Harlech, from Llandecwyn”Google Scholar and “Stickle Tarn, Langdale Pikes.”

5. Hunt, Violet, “Alfred William Hunt, R.W.S.,” Old Water-Colour Society's Club Annual, 2(1925), 30.Google Scholar

6. The letter from Browning, Sarianna to Hunt, Margaret, dated 2 04 1878Google Scholar, is in the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection in the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundation. I am grateful for permission to quote from it.

7. New Letters, pp. 244–45.Google Scholar

8. Quoted by permission of the Carl H. Pforzheimer Library.

9. Browning, to Hunt, Margaret, 22 03 1873Google Scholar (New Letters, pp. 212–13).Google Scholar Unable to obtain a copy of the book, DeVane and Knickerbocker wrongly supposed it most likely that Browning's response had to do with Margaret Hunt's use of quotations from (rather than dedication to) him.

10. Browning, to Hunt, Margaret, 4 06 1878Google Scholar (New Letters, pp. 246–47).Google Scholar

11. Violet neatly typed (or had typed) these conversations on separate sheets of paper, and only these copies remain (listed as “Conversations with Browning” in the Cornell collection). What follows is an ordered selection, only slightly edited to correct spelling and the more troublesome errors in punctuation.

12. “Mr. Lehmann began, in 1879, two oil portraits of Browning. One of them was finished without delay; the other was held over till 1885, and then completed, but it should be understood as representing the poet's appearance in 1879 rather than in 1885,” according to Rossetti, William, in “Portraits of Robert Browning–III,” Magazine of Art, 12 (03 1890), p. 261.Google ScholarLehmann, himself, however, in An Artist's Reminiscences (London: Smith, Elder, 1894), p. 223n.Google Scholar, said that he painted Browning's second portrait and presented it to the National Gallery in 1883. Wilson, Grace Elizabeth, in Robert Browning's Portraits (Waco, Tex.: Armstrong Browning Library, 1943), p. 140Google Scholar, notes this discrepency between the two dates for the second portrait, but accepts the 1879 date for the first. She thus ignores Griffin, W. Hall and Minchin, Harry C., who in The Life of Robert Browning (London: Methuen, 1910), p. 255Google Scholar, said that Lehmann painted Browning's portrait in the spring of 1875. The photograph of the picture Margaret Hunt brought Browning, dated 1875 and signed and dated “‘76’” by Browning, verifies Griffin and Minchin's claim. The photograph, now in the Margaret Hunt papers at Cornell, is almost identical with the second portrait in the National Gallery, indicating that Rossetti was right to claim that the later picture represents the way the poet looked in his sittings for the earlier one. The first portrait itself now hangs in the McLean Foyer of Meditation of the Armstrong Browning Library.

13. Taplin, Gardner B., The Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), p. 76.Google Scholar

14. Letters, p. 352Google Scholar; Griffin, , p. 239.Google Scholar

15. New Letters, p. 396.Google Scholar

16. Ibid., p. 174.

17. Ibid., p. 170–71.

18. Ibid., pp. 174–75.

19. See Honan, Park, “Browning's Testimony on his Essay on Shelley in ‘Shepherd v. Francis,’” English Language Notes, 2 (09 1964), 27–31.Google Scholar

20. Taplin, , p. 48.Google Scholar

21. “Browning's Testimony,” p. 29n.Google Scholar

22. MrsOrr, Sutherland, Life and Letters of Robert Browning, rev. by Kenyon, Frederic G. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1908). p. 121.Google Scholar

23. Phelps, William Lyon, “Notes on Browning's ‘Pauline,’” Modern Language Notes, 47 (05 1932), 295–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24. Orr, , p. 82.Google Scholar

25. Griffin, , p. 77.Google Scholar

26. Miller, Betty, “‘This Happy Evening,’” Twentieth Century, 154 (07 1953), 57.Google Scholar

27. Irvine, William and Honan, Park, The Book, the Ring, and the Poet (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974), p. 129.Google Scholar See letters from Browning, to Grosart, in Hood (p. 166)Google Scholar and to Lee, in Orr (p. 123).Google Scholar

28. Mrs. Orr quotes Wordsworth as saying: “So Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett have gone off together! Well, I hope they may understand each other — nobody else could!” (p. 140).

29. All the Hunts believed this. See Violet's portrait of her father as Henry Radmall in her autobiographical novels, Their Lives (London: Stanley Paul, 1918)Google Scholar and Their Hearts (London: Stanley Paul, 1921).Google Scholar

30. See Ward, Maisie, Robert Browning and His World: Two Robert Brownings? New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969), ch. 16.Google Scholar

31. The reference to the wife in Holland probably refers to the story Furnivall had heard of an attachment between Pen and a Dinant innkeeper's daughter. Miller, Betty (Robert Browning: A Portrait [London: John Murray, 1952], p. 265)Google Scholar calls attention to “a cryptic entry in the diary of Michael Field to the effect that ‘the story of the Belgian wife is the story of a fellow art-student grafted maliciously onto Pen.’”

32. McAleer, Edward C., ed., Learned Lady: Letters from Robert Browning to Mrs. Thomas Fitzgerald, 1876–1889 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966), p. 22.Google Scholar

33. Duckworth, F. R., Browning: Background and Conflict (London: Ernest Benn, 1931), p. 78.Google Scholar Duckworth adds: “But others who also knew both the poet and his interpreter declare that on his side, at any rate, there was never anything ‘tender.’”

34. Burne-Jones, Georgiana, Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones (London: Macmillan, 1904), p. 203.Google Scholar

35. The muffled figure would have been Pen's wife. See the account of “The Burial of Mr. Browning,” Pall Mall Gazette, 31 12 1889, p. 4Google Scholar, rpt. in Browning Institute Studies, 3 (1975), 119–30.Google Scholar

36. Violet's mistake; the poem is Barrett, Elizabeth's (“What would we give to our beloved?”).Google Scholar

37. A large box of notes and the unfinished MS are at Cornell.

38. Hunt, Violet, The Wife of Rossetti (New York: Dutton, 1932), p. xx.Google Scholar

39. Hunt thus overturns the myth of the lower-class girl discovered and recreated by the noble artist. (The Hollywood producer who makes a star out of the girl in the drugstore is the American variation.) The assumption Violet attacked can be found in our own day in Fowles's, JohnThe French Lieutenant's Woman (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969), pp. 450–51Google Scholar, where Sarah Woodruff says of life as model for the Pre-Raphaelite artist: “I have varied and congenial work — work so pleasant that I no longer think of it as such. I am admitted to the daily conversation of genius. Such men have their faults…. [but] the persons I have met here have let me see a community of honourable endeavour, of noble purpose…. I say that most humbly, I have no genius myself, I have no more than the capacity to aid genius in very small and humble ways.”

40. Wife of Rossetti, p. xxiii.Google Scholar

41. The best sources for these relationships are Hunt, Violet, The Flurried Years (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1926)Google Scholar; Mizener, Arthur, The Saddest Story: A Biography of Ford Madox Ford (New York: World, 1971)Google Scholar; Edel, Leon, Henry James: The Master (New York: Lippincott, 1972).Google Scholar

42. Flurried Years, p. 62.Google Scholar