End-of-Summer Romance

There are many reasons I love my job -- teaching eager students, talking about books, spending hours in dusty archives finding the perfect Victorian artifacts to add to the project I'm researching. But I have long felt that the very best part of my job is that I get paid to read, even though between the teaching and the grading, the committee meetings and the student advising, there aren't nearly as many days of reading as I would like.

But there are moments, like this morning, when I'm on the couch, drinking a giant cup of good coffee, and deep in the fascination of a new book, that I look up, sigh, and think "I am the luckiest woman alive. I am barefoot, reading, and happy, and this is exactly what I'm supposed to be doing right now. My job description says so."

Indeed, with Son and Daughter at daycare, and today stretching out before me, I am deep in the absolute most romantic love story you could ever imagine: the courtship and marriage of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning. She of "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways..." and he of untold quantities of poems anthologized in the last 150 years. With the perversity of posterity, we remember little about her although she was the independently wealthy, world-famous poet in her own time, while he was slightly younger than she, struggled more, was less well-known.

The excerpts from their letters read like poetry, their clandestine affair like a mystery novel. Her father wouldn't "allow" any of his children to marry, and even though Elizabeth and Robert didn't begin corresponding until she was in her late 30s, she still lived at home, with all of her other unmarried siblings, and succumbed to her father's wishes. They carried on a secret courtship by letter for over four years, during which they wrote nearly 600 letters to each other. He called on her once or twice a week at her house, after they'd been writing letters for more than a year to each other without ever seeing each other -- and at which point they were already in love with each other through words alone.

I'm pretty sure I know how their story ends: they get married, run away to Italy together, and live happily ever after. But that's not the point. The point is the reading itself -- the fabulous biography, drawing so heavily on their own words, paints a picture of an invalid woman slowly regaining health through the inspiration of finally being in love and of a devoted Victorian man who respected his future wife for the tremendous power of her mind long before he loved her or even laid eyes upon her beauty.

You will forgive me for waxing lyrical, I hope, but this romance has me enthralled. It is hard to comprehend just how powerful words can be until one is confronted by a relationship based entirely upon them. Beauty, romance, intrigue . . . poetry, morals, family . . . isolation, longing, travel . . . this story has it all.

I love my job.

Excuse me now, but I need to go and read.

I am the luckiest woman alive.