A visit with the Brownings
I fell in love with Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues first, very early,1 and adored Possession in part because A.S. Byatt so clearly loved his poetry too, and put that love into the book. (She ventriloquizes him in the novel under a different name. I did not need—no one who loves Browning would need—anyone to tell me so.) Even now, rereading “Fra Li…