Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Mary Russell Mitford, a Friend and English Novelist - 1852

…What still further depressed me during our latter days at Florence was the dreadful event in America – the loss of our poor friend Madame Ossoli, affecting in itself, and also through association with that past,* when the arrowhead of anguish was broken too deeply into my life ever to be quite drawn out…

…Now she is where there is no more grief and ‘no more sea;’ and none of the restless in this world, none of the shipwrecked in heart ever seemed to me to want peace more than she did…

…The work she was preparing upon Italy would probably have been more equal to her faculty than anything previously produced by her pen (her other writings being curiously inferior to the impressions her conversation gave you); indeed, she told me it was the only production to which she had given time and labour…I believe nothing was finished; nor, if finished, could the work have been otherwise than deeply coloured by those blood colours of Socialist views, which would have drawn the wolves on her, with a still more howling enmity, both in England and America. Therefore it was better for her to go.

The Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli has only just been published – the biography that was compiled by Margaret’s American friends, Mr. Emerson, Mr. Clarke, and Mr. Channing. Not to my surprise, the details of her relationship with Mr. Ossoli have been omitted. What else, I wonder, will be construed with time? Those who disliked her during her life seem to dislike her still more now, with her death. Is this what will become of her memory? Will she be known, in the future, as the arrogant, alienated woman who tried to become a man? Arrogant she might have been; and she was alone all her life – but she was a merely woman who wanted to be a woman…


* Robert and Elizabeth Browning first met Fuller in Florence.