ABSTRACT
The usual difficulties with connecting an author's life and work are compounded in Robert Browning's case because many of his poems are biographies of other people. They are fictionalised, certainly, and partial, and experimental in form; but biographies notwithstanding. Browning was a ferocious preserver of his own and his family's privacy. He was forever burning letters, eradicating marginalia and attacking anyone who threatened to betray his confidence. As Iain Finlayson's book proceeds, his writing becomes plainer and more engaging, and Browning's surviving letters are increasingly allowed to speak for themselves. The speakers think they are in private, but in fact their words have been published for the whole world to read. The real story of Robert Browning's life, just as much as of his poetry, is the story of other people's lives. One way of making sense of Browning's personal impermeability, especially in his later years, has been to assume a contradiction between the social mask and the private man.
