The Swan’s Nest
In the 1840s, Elizabeth Barrett, well-known as a poet but confined by poor health to her family’s home in London’s Wimpole Street, makes an admiring gesture toward the talented, but less successful poet, Robert Browning; she includes his name in one of her published poems. Soon the poets are corresponding—and falling in love. Meanwhile, beautiful, wealthy, and reform-minded Lenore Goss is on a mission: to force the Barrett family to acknowledge their young relation David, the product of a relationship between one of the Barrett sons and a Black woman on the family estate in Jamaica.
I thoroughly enjoyed the Barrett-Browning courtship. We see not only the growing love between the two poets, but its effect on their respective families, particularly Robert’s devoted sister Sarianna and Elizabeth’s tyrannical father. Even Flush, Elizabeth’s dog, has some memorable moments. The subplot involving the fictional Lenore and the fictional David, in contrast, was less successful; having begun promisingly, it faded away, leaving Lenore to pop up occasionally when neither the lovers (nor the reader) wanted her on the scene. That quibble aside, this was a moving, well-written novel and a fitting tribute to the power of love and poetry.
