Introduction

Although Benjamin Robert Haydon (1786-1846) and Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) were introduced by letter through their mutual friend Mary Russell Mitford (1787-1855) they did not meet “in the fl esh” at any time during their three-year friendship.3 Despite his “urgings,” Barrett Browning continually refused to “receive” Haydon.4 In his letters, Haydon regularly draws attention to the “invisibility” of his correspondent, calling her “my sweet unseen”5 and “ingenious little, darling invisible.”6 Barrett Browning is Haydon’s “dearest dream,”7 their friendship “a touch beyond the Mortal.”8 Clearly, despite their physical separation, or perhaps because of it, the two construct an intimate relation and feel considerable warmth and affection for each other. In general, the interlocutors of letter, postcard and email technologies are not physically present to one another; yet physical absence is no impediment to communication. According to David Presley, the email correspondent quoted above, this situation promises the opportunity for “souls” to “escape” the biological constraints of gender. His dream is of ideal communication: subjects are able to evaluate one another’s ideas and concepts unfettered by the complications of biological “code.” Biology “masks,” disguises and conceals

the real. Email technology liberates interlocutors from their “chromosomal makeup.”