The lives of the poets from The Dictionary of National Biography ...

valued at £16,744. Sarianna, who became seriously ill soon after the funeral, stayed on at De Vere Gardens
for another year and then went to Venice to live with Pen and Fannie, where Penʹs old nurse, Wilson, and
her husband also came. In April 1891 sixty‐six cases of household effects were shipped to Venice. Pen had a
memorial plaque to his father installed on the Palazzo Rezzonico and contributed to a window
commemorating him in the English church in Venice.
In time Pen and Fannie, who had no children, drifted apart, although they never divorced. Thereafter he and
Sarianna more or less settled in Asolo, where Pen had purchased some property that his father had wished
to buy, and thereon built Pippaʹs Tower in his fatherʹs honour. Sarianna lived with him until 1903. Pen
himself, who had grown obese, sickly, and almost blind, died of a heart attack in 1912 and received a
splendid funeral and burial in Asolo. Ten years later Fannie had his body moved to Florence. She died in
1935.
On six days in May 1913 Penʹs effects—which included his parentsʹ manuscripts, pictures, books, and
furniture—were auctioned at Sothebys in London. There were 1417 lots, described in a 170‐page catalogue.
After Penʹs enormous debts were paid, one‐third of the residue of the sale went to Fannie and two‐thirds to
sixteen Barrett cousins.
Posthumous reputation
By the time of his death Browning was one of the most famous people in the English‐speaking world,
although never as popular as Tennyson—the sales of his works being a fraction of the poet laureateʹs.
Chiefly admired as a philosopher and thinker, Browning became less well regarded in the 1890s, when
moral instruction as the end of art (something Browning had always denied) was regarded as deplorable.
The last public meetings of the London Browning Society were held in the season of 1891–2, although
meetings continued in membersʹ homes for several years and other Browning societies continued in
America. Several critical works over the next ten or so years attacked Browningʹs approach to serious
thought, the most important being George Santayanaʹs ‘The poetry of barbarism’ (1900). Nevertheless, there
were centennial celebrations in 1912, producing a large number of books and two editions (the centenary
and the pocket version of the Florentine) of the poetʹs works that were more or less standard for at least fifty
years. But in the 1920s, when there was a reaction to almost everything Victorian, Browningʹs reputation
suffered almost total collapse, kept alive by only a few poets (notably Hardy, Yeats, Pound, and Frost) and
lovers of Victorian verse. In the 1950s scholarly interest in his work began to revive, and in the early twenty‐
first century Browningʹs centrality in the history of English poetry is largely taken for granted. There are
Browning societies in both Britain and America; there is a Browning Institute in New York; there is the
Browning apartment preserved at the Casa Guidi and open to the public; and there is the Browning shrine
and great repository of his printed works and autographs, the Armstrong Browning Library at Baylor
University in Texas. There are the journals Browning Society Notes, Browning Institute Studies (now
renamed Victorian Literature and Culture), and Studies in Browning and His Circle. Numerous books and
essays have appeared in increasing number since 1965, in addition to John Pettigrewʹs 1981 scholarly edition
of his works.
Clyde de L. Ryals
Sources
The Browningsʹ correspondence, ed. P. Kelley, R. Hudson, and S. Lewis, [14 vols.] (1984–) ∙ J. Maynard,
Browningʹs youth (1977) ∙ W. Hall Griffin and H. C. Griffin, The life of Robert Browning, 3rd edn (1938) ∙ C.
de L. Ryals, The life of Robert Browning (1993) ∙ W. Irvine and P. Honan, The book, the ring, and the poet
(1974) ∙ W. C. DeVane, A Browning handbook, 2nd edn (1975) ∙ A. L. Orr, Life and letters of Robert
Browning, new edn (1908) ∙ A. L. Orr, A handbook to the worlds of Robert Browning, 6th edn (1927) ∙ Robert
Browning: the poems, ed. J. Pettigrew, 2 vols. (1981) ∙ The diary of Alfred Domett (1953) ∙ V. Surtees, The
Ludovisi goddess: the life of Louisa Ashburton (1984) ∙ M. Ward, The tragi‐comedy of Pen Browning (1849–
1912) (1972) ∙ W. S. Peterson, Interrogating the oracle: a history of the Browning Society (1969) ∙ F. G. Kenyon,