The last significant batch of EBB's letters to be published, only appearing in 1929. These 107 letters to her sister Henrietta, covering the period from EBB's marriage to Henrietta's death, add a few interesting titbits of biographical information about the home-life of the Brownings, but there aren't really any earth-shattering revelations. One suspects that part of the reason for the delay was not to embarrass Robert Barrett Browning (d. 1912), who presumably wouldn't have wanted all the world to read about his embroidered velvet trowsers or about the clever things he said when he was four.

There are a few table-rapping revelations: EBB didn't bother sending her sister much in the way of literary news, but she was a bit less guarded in describing her spiritualist experiments to Henrietta then she was with her bluestocking friends. EBB shows herself quite convinced by moving furniture, spiritual limbs and automatic writing (apparently this last was one of Wilson's many talents), but she draws the line at believing in Daniel Dunglass Home, the original of RB's "Sludge the Medium".

An annoyance is that EBB worked on the basis that Henrietta and Arabel shared her letters, so she wrote to them more or less alternately. As the letters to Arabel haven't been published (as far as I know) we only get half the story here. Leonard Huxley's notes fill in the gaps to some extent, but really it doesn't make much sense to read this book without having Kenyon's 1897 Letters of EBB to hand.

Another irritation is that various passages have been cut without explanation by Huxley or by Surtees Cook (Henrietta's widower), who is said to have transcribed the letters in 1875. All that we have is a vague statement in the introduction that "...for instance, many nursery details of immediate interest to a young mother, and to her alone" were excised (actually, that would stand as a good description of much that remained!). So we're left unable to conclude anything from omissions in the letters: we don't, for instance, know whether EBB never mentioned to her sisters that she was expecting, or whether Cook and/or Huxley considered pregnancy an unsuitable subject for publication. A lot of names are also deleted, for no very obvious reason. Frustrating, but not unexpected. ( )