Volume 21, Number 7 · May 2, 1974
Pioneer
By V.S. Pritchett
The Book, the Ring, and the Poet: A Biography of Robert Browning
by William Irvine, by Park Honan
McGraw-Hill, 607 pp., $15.00
In the last twenty-five years the cloak of legend—the cloak of the Red Cross Knight—has been twitched from the shoulders of Robert Browning. His romance no longer hides him; rather, it deepens the complexity of his double character; and his tortuous achievement as a dramatic or novelistic poet becomes more forceful in our eyes. His two new biographers—Park Honan has completed the biographical study cut short by William Irvine's death—are polished writers and they concede a great deal to Betty Miller's arguments of the 1950s, when, looking again at the famous elopement from Wimpole Street, she saw the Perseus-Andromeda situation was reversible: Andromeda also rescued Perseus.[*]
Review, 2165 words
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