Robert Browning: A Life After Death

When his beloved wife died in 1861, Robert Browning's world changed forever. He left Italy, his home for the last fifteen years (the whole of his married life) and returned to London with his career in tatters and a twelve-year-old son who spoke better Italian than English. Henry James said of Browning that there would be 'no more interesting chapter of his biography than that of his return from his long Italian absence, stricken and lonely...to address himself to a future indefinite and obscure'. Pamela Neville-Sington has taken her cue from the novelist and begins her life of Robert Browning with the death of Elizabeth Barrett Browning.After her death Browning knew he had to break free from Elizabeth's influence to find a way to survive - to live, possibly to love, and to write - without her. He sought to put his marriage behind him, yet the desire to cling to her memory - and to preserve the myth surrounding their life together - was overwhelming. As the story unfolds, we witness Browning's struggle to raise young Pen alone and at the same time to rediscover his poetic inspiration. We also see a lonely man drawn dangerously close to three very different women - the sensitive Julia Wedgwood, the adoring American Katharine Bronson, and the impetuous Louisa, Lady Ashburton.