The Dramatic Imagination of Robert Browning: A Literary Life (review)

Reviewed by: The Dramatic Imagination of Robert Browning: A Literary Life John Maynard (bio) Richard S. Kennedy and Donald S. Hair. The Dramatic Imagination of Robert Browning: A Literary Life. University of Missouri Press. xvi, 492. US$49.95 There is reason to note well the publication of a new full-length biography of Robert Browning. He continues in this century to be, along with Hopkins and now Christina Rossetti, the Victorian poet who finds most adherents, granted always the magnificence of Tennyson’s canon. And Browning and the Brownings’ biography continues to have a special appeal. Richard S. Kennedy and Donald S. Hair offer an attractive and well-researched life in five hundred pages. Obviously, an Edel-sized biography would give much more detail and take many volumes, and there would be virtue in such a work, as Robert came to know just about everyone of literary or artistic importance during his relatively long life, so his life could cut a cross-section of his times at each stage. This is not what the two authors have attempted. But, especially in the life up through 1855, as prepared by Kennedy before his death, this is a fully researched study that updates a prior major biography, that of William Irvine and Park Honan. (It is a sad fact of mortality, noted by Hair in his gracious introduction, that three attempts at full and authoritative biographies, adding that of W. Hall Griffin and H.C. Minchin to these two, should have required second authors to finish the job.) Kennedy spent many years researching his work; what he has added especially to earlier full studies has been information from the major monuments of Browning scholarship of the later half of the twentieth century, The Brownings’ Correspondence and The Browning Collections, the first still in progress under Philip Kelley and Scott Lewis, the second completed by Kelley and Betty Coley. They have allowed the authors to fill in a great deal of information not previously available, and Hair has had the advantage of work by William Peterson and Michael Meredith on Robert’s connections with F.J. Furnivall and Katharine de Kay Bronson. I see that my own study of Browning’s youth, and a number of other special studies, also aided Kennedy’s work. The authors give us a well-shaped and often quite lively account of Robert’s interesting life. I note as especially attractive to the general reader the accounts of Robert’s attempts to become a dramatist, the stories of his courting of Italy in two earlier trips, before the marriage to Elizabeth and resettlement in Italy brought consummation to his love for that culture and history. The courtship is well shaped to interest us, despite its being such a twice-told tale; Kennedy wisely introduces the reader to aspects of Elizabeth Barrett’s complicated life in order of Robert’s own romance: falling in love, complications, worse complications. Hair’s account is more schematic and brief, but well organized. Hair quotes Dante Gabriel Rossetti marvelling at the discrepancy [End Page 311] between their lives – ‘those two small people’ – and their very large impact on poetry. It is this literary biography, as their title indicates, that especially occupies the authors. One would look in vain for new kinds of biography here, neither thick study of the culture and sociology of the poet, nor deep insight into psychology and motivation, or even a broad view of Robert’s place in the development of ideas of literature. Much information that could contribute to these subjects is made available, but both authors’ focus is on the literary career and poetic achievement. Kennedy, who, pace Pound, would trade the short poems of Dramatic Lyrics for ‘a hundred Sordellos,’ especially focuses on the variety of what he terms monodramas among Robert’s short poems: I doubt his terms will replace the universally used dramatic monologue, but his accounts are rich in appreciation of Robert’s abundant generic playfulness and dramatic inventiveness. Hair, who previously contributed an excellent book on Browning and genre, continues this critical appreciation and adds to it enthusiasm, still too rare, for the abundant Browning beyond The Ring and the Book...

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