Laura McNeal
The Swan’s Nest by Laura McNeal is a historical novel based on the clandestine love affair between Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning.
The novel opens in 1845 when Robert Browning sends a letter to Elizabeth declaring his love for her and for her work. Because she is an invalid, Elizabeth seldom receives visitors and is too fragile to leave home, especially during the cold winter months. The two poets begin a frenzied correspondence which lasts several months before they are able to meet face-to-face. Their subsequent meetings and correspondences cement their mutual love, respect, and admiration for one another’s creative output. Robert proposes marriage and offers to take Elizabeth to Pisa where the climate is more suitable for her health. She hesitates because she knows her father will object to her marrying a poet with insufficient means to support her. Eventually, Elizabeth accepts Robert’s proposal and the two marry in secret, after which they escape to France and then to Italy. Elizabeth is subsequently disowned by her father. The novel concludes with the two lovers in Italy on route to their final destination.
To write the novel, McNeal performed extensive research on the two poets, their backgrounds, their correspondences, their love affair, and their journey from England to France and Italy. In prose that is compelling and persuasive, she captures the tender love and mutual admiration the pair feel for one another. Browning emerges as a devoted lover and husband, passionate about his wife, and totally committed to her well-being. Elizabeth emerges as equally devoted to him. But she is also plagued with guilt about losing her father’s trust in her and abandoning her siblings to his autocratic mindset.
McNeal weaves threads of England’s legacy of slavery and exploitation in the novel. The Barretts profited from the indigenous labor on their sugar plantation in Jamaica. Sam, one of Elizabeth’s brothers, fathered a child with Mary Ann Hawthorne, a formerly enslaved Jamaican woman. After Sam’s death of a tropical fever, Mary Ann brings their son to England, requesting his grandfather provide an education for the boy. But her request is rebuffed by the Barrett patriarch and she returns to Jamaica. McNeal also highlights the difficulties encountered by the females in the Barrett and Browning families whose lives, choices, and movements are circumscribed by social and patriarchal precepts that are designed to keep them cloistered, weak, and dependent.
McNeal tells a beautiful love story of two kindred spirits who share an enduring passion for one another and who mutually admire and support one another’s work. Her language is lyrical; her narrative, compelling; her execution, accomplished; and her characters, authentic and drawn with sensitivity. A love story for the ages, lovingly rendered.