of any kind, is due to editorial excisions. This is not the case.
The number of passages that have been removed for fear of hurting the
feelings of persons still living is almost infinitesimal; and in
these the cause of offence is always something inherent in the facts
recorded, not in the spirit in which they are mentioned. No person had
less animosity than Mrs. Browning; it seems as though she could hardly
bring herself to speak harshly of anyone. The omissions that have been
made are almost wholly of passages containing little or nothing of
interest, or repetitions of what has been said elsewhere; and
they have been made with the object of diminishing the bulk and
concentrating the interest of the collection, never with the purpose
of modifying the representation of the writer's character.

The task of arranging the letters has been more arduous owing to Mrs.
Browning's unfortunate habit of prefixing no date's, or incomplete
ones, to her letters. Many of them are dated merely by the day of the
week or month, and can only be assigned to their proper place in the
series on internal evidence. In some cases, however, the envelopes
have been preserved, and the date is then often provided by the
postmarks. These supply fixed points by which the others can be
tested; and ultimately all have fallen into line in chronological
order, and with at least approximate dates to each letter.

The correspondence, thus arranged in chronological order, forms an
almost continuous record of Mrs. Browning's life, from the early
days in Herefordshire to her death in Italy in 1861; but in order to
complete the record, it has been thought well to add connecting links
of narrative, which should serve to bind the whole together into the
unity of a biography. It is a chronicle, rather than a biography in
the artistic sense of the term; a chronicle of the events of a life in