Elizabeth Barrett Browning

OF writing many books there is no end;
And I who have written much in prose and verse
For others' uses, will write now for mine,–
Will write my story for my better self,
As when you paint your portrait for a friend,
Who keeps it in a drawer and looks at it
Long after he has ceased to love you, just
To hold together what he was and is.
(Browning, AL, http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/barrett/aurora/aurora.html#1)

These opening lines of Aurora Leigh bring to mind the Victorian necrophilia that we have been discussing in connexion with Tennyson and Robert Browning. In Memoriam and The Ring and the Book are both sort of mourning artifacts, or transitional objects, to use Melanie Klein’s terminology…what seems macabre about this but is probably healthy, is, as Barrett Browning points out, that the object continues to be a source of pleasure (pleasure which can be sort of thanatic or masochistic) even after the cessation of love.