One of the nineteenth-century Florentine Inglese--a label used for all English speakers--Isabella Blagden has gained more fame as a good friend of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning than as a nineteenth-century poet and novelist. This fame results partly from Edward C. McAleer's 1951 collection of the letters Blagden received from the Brownings, the bulk of them written as part of an arranged monthly exchange with Robert Browning during the decade following his wife's death in 1861. The intimacy of McAleer's title, Dearest Isa: Robert Browning's Letters to Isabella Blagden, hints at Blagden's reputation of great charm and her importance among the British expatriates in Italy.

The simplicity of Blagden's grave on the Piazzale Donatello in Florence befits the obscurity of her birth. A wreath of sculpted flowers rests on an unadorned crucifix on the top of an otherwise plain slab. Whereas the inscriptions on the tombs of other English...