Letters From Lizzie

Letters from Lizzie

Lizzie allowed herself to be defined by everyone else. Her readers declared her a prodigy when she published four books of poetry before she was twelve years old. By the time she was seventeen, she was the toast of the literary world. Yet her adoring public never saw her. Doctors had declared her an invalid for life after a spinal injury. Years later, her readers would have been shocked to know that England’s greatest female poet was a thirty-nine-year-old recluse who seldom left her bedroom. But a struggling poet had fallen in love with her poetry. The two carried on a romance through some of the most passionate love letters ever written.

When he showed up to visit Lizzie, her Victorian parents were outraged. Her father informed the young man that he wasn’t good enough and showed him the door. But Lizzie escaped her father’s cold house and ran off to Italy with her young poet. In that sunny climate she regained her health and wrote her best poetry. But her angry parents gave her a new definition: ungrateful daughter.

Lizzie wrote them every week for the next decade, begging their forgiveness. After sending more than five hundred unanswered letters, she received a package from her father. She excitedly ripped it open and then burst into tears. In that parcel were all the letters that Lizzie had sent every week for ten years. None had been opened. Her poet husband tried to console his brokenhearted wife, but she never recovered from her parents’ final rejection.

What parent wouldn’t be thrilled to receive from their children the sort of letters written by Elizabeth Barrett with the encouragement of her poet husband, Robert Browning? We can’t help but feel outrage at her parents and sorrow for Lizzie’s heartbreak. But the real tragedy for Elizabeth Barrett was in how she allowed others to define her. Doctors declared her an invalid, so she stayed in bed. Her family decided what was best for her health, so she became a recluse. It was only when her authoritarian father declared that her poet lover wasn’t good enough that Lizzie finally found the courage to escape a world defined by others. Yet having once escaped their narrow boundaries, Lizzie would spend the rest of her days in a world of sadness that she allowed her unforgiving parents to create for her.

Lizzie’s story whispers a warning to all of us: we cannot allow others to define who we are. We live in a fallen world of flawed sinners. By definition the assessment of others, whether positive or negative, is faulty at best and downright wrong at worst. Only the God who created and is recreating us in his image has the right to define who we are. So start living by this credo:

Strong people let God define them. Weak people let others define them.

See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. . . . What we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.

1 John 3:1-2, NIV