[Egmond Codfried]

[Elizabeth Barrett Browning and son Pen]



[Robert Browning]

Two of world's greatest lovers - Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning - were descendants of blacks
Ebony, May, 1995 by Monique Burns
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How do I love thee?" Elizabeth Barrett wrote to Robert Browning in her immortal Sonnets From the Portuguese, "Let me count the ways ...."

The ways apparently were not affected by the mixed bloodline of either poet. For, in Dared And Done: The Marriage of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, an absorbing 382-page saga recently released by Alfred A. Knopf, the venerable New York publishing house, author Julia Markus offers convincing evidence that the two 19th-century English poets were part-Black descendants of wealthy Jamaican plantation owners.

This evidence comes from contemporary witnesses, frank acknowledgments by Barrett, and photographs that depict both as dark-skinned. In a letter to her beloved sister Arabel in 1860, Barrett enclosed a black-and-white photograph taken in Rome of herself and their 11-year-old son "Pen," which shows a clear contrast between the dark-skinned mother and fair-haired, blue-eyed child.

The evidence of mixed race in two of the greatest poets in the English language has been a cultural bombshell, sending shock waves through literary circles on two continents. Vincent Petronella, president of Boston's Browning Society, one of the country's largest, and an English professor at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, says: "From this time onward, no biographer can ever reject this scholarship. Something was coming to light in her [Elizabeth Barrett's] father's mind. The issue of mixed blood is as good an explanation as any. Even if you don't accept it as fact, you have to bear it in mind."

According to Markus, a respected Browning scholar and award-winning novelist, there are strong indications that the adamant opposition of Elizabeth's father, Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett, to the marriage of any of his 11 surviving children -- was not merely the dictum of a domestic tyrant but, rather, a deliberate attempt to extinguish the family's mixed bloodline.

The most common reaction to this cultural whodunit, which starts in Colonial Jamaica and segues to England and Italy, has been a kind of shocked silence. Although the book has been hailed by The New York Times and the Boston Globe, other major newspapers and major electronic media have not reviewed it or even mentioned it.

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