Vast New Additions to the Digital Archive of Browning Letters

Wellesley College, the highly rate liberal arts educational institution for women in Massachusetts, has teamed up with Baylor University in Waco, Texas, to produce an online archive of the letters written to and from the English poets Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning.

Two years ago, the archive was established with 573 letters between the two. Now an additional 4,000 letters have been made available in the online archive. The archive now includes 1,050 letters owned an housed at the Margaret Clapp Library at Wellesley College and nearly 2,900 letters owned and housed at the Armstrong Browning Library at Baylor University.

The Browning letters at Wellesley college were purchased in 1929 by president Caroline Hazard. She donated them to the Wellesley College Library. They have remained there ever since and prior to this digital archive project, the letters were available only to scholars who traveled to the Wellesley campus. The letters are at least 168 years old, written between January 1845 and September 1846.

All told, there are now more than 4,500 letters in the Baylor/Wellesley archive that include more than 1.4 million transcribed words. More than 23,000 pages of documents have been digitized.

The archives may be accessed here.