Elizabeth Barrett Browning was an industrious letter-writer: Robert published the two thick volumes of the courtship correspondence in 1898, Frederick Kenyon edited a similarly chunky two-volume edition of all the other letters he could get hold of in 1897, and a more modest 350 pages of letters to her sister Henrietta came out in the 1920s. But other little piles of letters continued to turn up throughout the 20th century: those printed here only came up for auction in 1971, when they were acquired by the Browning Institute, who published this book.

The Ogilvys met the Brownings in Florence in 1848. The two families, with babies a few months apart in age, soon became friends, and continued to see each other on and off until Elizabeth's death in 1861. This collection includes 37 of Elizabeth's letters, plus a final letter from Robert written shortly after her death. The editors also reproduce two versions of a short memoir of Elizabeth written by Mrs Ogilvy, and a small selection of her poems that are relevant to the correspondence.

Eliza Ann Harris Dick Ogilvy (she usually signed her poems as "EAHO") was rather different from EBB — fourteen years younger, for a start, and born into one very conventional Scottish army-and-empire family and married into another. She evidently didn't see eye-to-eye with EBB on spiritualism, Napoleon III, Italian politics, or the appropriate way to dress small children, and they are night and day as poets, but all that doesn't seem to have prevented them from liking each other and enjoying the exchange of ideas in their letters.

It's a shame that EAHO's side of the correspondence was lost: she was clearly a witty writer when she wanted to be. Her description of EBB in the memoir is a case in point — "She was just like a King Charles Spaniel, the same large soft brown eyes, the full silky curls falling around her face like a spaniel's ears, the same pathetic wistfulness of expression..." — she goes on to suggest that there must have been a resemblance to Flush when he was younger, but that by the time she met him he was mangy, old and smelly. Her poems, as included here, range from clever light verse to heavy Victorian sentimentality, well over a century past its read-by date.

The letters themselves are engaging and as full of opinions and curiosity as EBB always seems to be: there is a bit of gossip about Florentine friends, a lot of news about the young Pen Browning and his remarkable achievements and occasional ailments, the inevitable tirades in defence of spiritualism and Napoleon III, and the usual problems of travel, accommodation, servants, and the fraught business of getting parcels of books across Europe in pre-Amazon days.

A nice complement to the other collections of letters, probably filling in some gaps (it's so long since I studied them that I've forgotten where the gaps are), and with the editors' helpful notes you could almost read it as a self-contained look into the Brownings' life in the fifties. ( )