Auctioneers say 1839 letter to her cousin bemoaning isolation in Torquay, with visitors ‘a thing forbidden’, is very apt reading this year
Almost 200 years ago, the Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett – now best known by her married name of Elizabeth Barrett Browning – was bemoaning the loneliness of self-isolation, in a letter to her cousin that is now up for auction.
As the people of the UK continue to sit out the coronavirus pandemic in their homes, the three-page missive, due to be sold at Bonhams in London next week, sees Barrett describing a period that lasted for weeks on end, as a result of what appears to have been ulcerative tuberculosis. After falling ill, she left London for Torquay’s sea air in August 1838, writing to her cousin and friend John Kenyon about her lonely life on 10 June 1839.
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