Read it through once

The tragic news made a deep impression on Miss Mitford’s mind; indeed she never forgot the incident, and when, many years afterwards, she was compiling her _Recollections_ it was she who first gave the story to the world, unconsciously causing untold anguish to her friend, to whom the merest reference to the catastrophe or to Torquay was sufficient to render her prostrate for days. “I have so often been asked what could be the shadow that had passed over that young heart, that, now that time has softened the first agony, it seems to me right that the world should hear the story.” When the book was reviewed in 1852 the Brownings were living in Paris and only became aware of the fact that the “veil had been lifted from the private life” of E. B. B. through the call of a journalist employed on the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ who had been commissioned to write an article on the Brownings and hesitated to quote the incident, without permission, lest it should cause additional pain to Mrs. Browning. The revelation of the tragic episode, so long and so well kept from the world, grieved and shocked Mrs. Browning beyond measure and resulted in her sending a letter of tender reproof to her dear friend who had been so indiscreet. “You cannot understand,” she wrote. “No, you cannot understand, with all your wide sympathy (perhaps, because you are not morbid, and I am), the sort of susceptibility I have on one subject.... And now those dreadful words are going the round of the newspapers, to be verified here, commented on there, gossiped about everywhere; and I, for my part, am frightened to look at a paper as a child in the dark.... I feel it deeply; through tears of pain I feel it; and if, as I dare say you will, you think me very foolish, do not on that account think me ungrateful. Ungrateful I never can be to you, my much loved and kindest friend.”