Elizabeth Barrett Browning
(1806–1861)

Elizabeth Barrett Browning was, during her lifetime, the most famous woman poet in England. When William Wordsworth died in 1850, Barrett Browning was considered one of the leading candidates to succeed him as Poet Laureate. (In the end, that honor went to Alfred, Lord Tennyson.) Browning's long narrative poem Aurora Leigh (1857) was so popular that it helped to support her and her husband Robert Browning, whose poetry was far less well known than hers at the time.

Elizabeth Barrett was born in 1806 in the north of England. The eldest of 12 children, she was educated at home and quickly showed herself to be something of a literary prodigy. By the age of 12, she had completed an epic in four books, set in ancient Greece.

In 1826, Barrett's first volume of poetry, entitled An Essay on Mind, was published anonymously and to little critical notice. It was not until 1838 that she won favorable reviews for another collection of verse, The Seraphim and Other Poems. This time the book was published under Barrett's own name. With the appearance in 1844 of her Poems in two volumes, her popularity was assured.

Barrett's personal development was limited, however, by her fragile health and by her tyrannically possessive father, who forbade any of his children to marry. By 1845, when the Barrett family had been living in London for ten years, Elizabeth seemed destined to live the rest of her days as a cloistered invalid.

Enter Robert Browning, a little known poet six years her junior, whose impulsive fan letter to Barrett began one of the great romances of literary history. "I do as I say, love these books with all my heart—and I love you too," Browning wrote.

Despite the stern disapproval of Barrett's father, Browning continued his courtship. In September 1846, the couple secretly married and eloped to the Continent, settling in Florence, Italy. Their only child, a son nicknamed Pen, was born in 1849.

In Italy, Barrett Browning continued to write poetry. Her sequence of 44 Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850), became some of the most popular love poems in English literature. The sonnets describe the development of her love for Browning; the title was intended to disguise the personal nature of the sonnets by implying that they were translated from another language.

Barrett Browning's second major work from this period is her long novel in verse, Aurora Leigh (1857). A portrait of the development of a woman poet, this is the first work in English by a woman writer in which the heroine is an author.

Barrett Browning died in Florence in 1861 in her husband's arms. Together with Pen, Browning moved back to London. Unable to bear revisiting the blissful setting of his life with Elizabeth, he never returned to Florence again.

"Italy was my university," Robert Browning once remarked. His first visit there in 1838, when he traveled to Venice, may have inspired his early work Sordello, a long narrative poem set in the Middle Ages. In 1846, after the Brownings married and left England, they wintered in the Italian city of Pisa and then settled in Florence, which became their home for the rest of their married life.

This period was a time of great ferment in Italy, where nationalist sentiment led to the unification of Italy as an independent nation in 1861. Elizabeth Barrett Browning enthusiastically supported Italian liberation from Austria. Some literary critics have suggested that Barrett Browning's political activism was an expression of her inner struggle to find her own poetic identity. Robert Browning found inspiration for some of his best dramatic monologues in another aspect of Italian culture: the art of the Italian Renaissance, as exemplified in such fifteenth- and sixteenth-century painters as Andrea del Sarto and Fra Filippo Lippi.

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