BOOK REVIEW : Maid’s Story Part of Browning Lore : LADY’S MAID: A Novel of the Nineteenth Century <i> by Margaret Forster</i> ; Doubleday $19.95, 546 pages

The lady is Elizabeth Barrett Browning; the maid a timid young woman from Newcastle who served her devotedly from 1844 until the poet’s death in 1861. During those 17 years, Elizabeth Wilson outgrew her early shyness to become strong and resourceful, not only coping with her invalid employer’s capricious moods but managing a marriage and family of her own under conditions that would utterly defeat a less resilient woman.

After the author’s distinguished biography of Browning appeared in 1988, Forster found herself haunted by the character and personality of the maid who had played so crucial a role in the poet’s life.

Her research into the Barrett and Browning history had yielded tantalizing clues and hints; enough material to provide the skeleton of a novel. The rest came from Forster’s imagination, and the result is a remarkable book exploring a relationship unique to the 19th Century; an intimate connection between employer and employee that has virtually ceased to exist.

Engaged to dress a woman’s hair, look after her wardrobe, help her dress and accompany her on errands, the lady’s maid inevitably became confidante and companion as well. In ordinary households, these duties were relatively light, and the lady’s maid was envied by other members of the staff. The Barrett and, later, the Browning households, however, were anything but ordinary, and Wilson’s job was far more onerous than most.

Because of Barrett’s chronic illness, Wilson functioned as nurse, and after the frail poet miraculously produced a child, Wilson became his governess as well.

When she went to 50 Wimpole Street, Wilson found her employer virtually bedridden, a ghostly figure who had seldom left her darkened room since the tragic deaths of her brothers.

Although her poetry had already been published to considerable acclaim, Elizabeth Barrett lived as a recluse until she received her first letters from an admiring Robert Browning, a correspondence that soon blossomed into the celebrated romance and the astonishing elopement; an event in which Wilson’s role was second only to the bridegroom’s.

Once established in Italy with the Brownings, Wilson flourished, learning the language, losing her meekness and acquiring a dashing, if temporary, Italian beau.

Eventually she married another Italian, a man also in the Browning’s employ, and bore two children. Although the Brownings figure largely in the novel, the story is essentially Wilson’s and, by extension, a generic saga of Victorian servants and their precarious relationship to those who might profess to be their friends but who continued to be their masters.

After Wilson married and became pregnant, she was sent to England to have the child and was obliged to leave her son with her sister. By then Browning herself was a mother and, despite her protestations of affection for her maid, would not consider another child in the household.

Desperately longing for her own baby, Wilson returned to Florence to care for the poet’s son and for Browning herself, increasingly fragile and demanding. When Wilson had a second son, she was set up as manager of a boardinghouse with no reduction in her duties to the Brownings; permitted only conjugal visits from the husband who still lived at the Casa Guidi, preferring the security of his job to the risks of independence.

Filled with the daily minutiae of these extraordinary exiles, “Lady’s Maid” is enlivened by the author’s wry iconoclasm. In the end, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s image as the brave and gifted sufferer loses some of its luster, and Robert Browning emerges as the more admirable of the two, although perhaps not quite the vibrant and dashing cavalier portrayed elsewhere.

Once having won Elizabeth, he seems to have been somewhat overwhelmed by the responsibilities attached to the prize; responsibilities that Wilson capably and loyally accepted for virtually all her adult life.

Next: Carolyn See reviews “ ‘Walking the Cat’ by Tommy ‘Tip’ Payne” by John Calvin Batchelor (Linden Press).