Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Titles in Poetry category:

• Aurora Leigh    

  OF writing many books there is no end;
  And I who have written much in prose and verse
  For others' uses, will write now for mine,-
  Will write my story for my better self,
  As when you paint your portrait for a friend,
  Who keeps it in a drawer and looks at it
  Long after he ...

• Sonnets from the Portuguese    

  I thought once how Theocritus had sung
  Of the sweet years, the dear and wished-for years,
  Who each one in a gracious hand appears
  To bear a gift for mortals, old or young:
  And, as I mused it in his antique tongue,
  I saw, in gradual vision through my tears,
  The sweet, sad ...

About the Author

English poet, the wife of Robert Browning, the most respected and successful woman poet of the Victorian period, considered seriously for the laureateship that eventually was awarded to Tennyson in 1850. Elizabeth Browning's greatest work, Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850), is a sequence of love sonnets addresses to her husband. Her vivid intelligence and ethereal physical appearance made a lifelong impression to all of the friends of the Brownings, among them Ruskin, Carlyle, Thackeray, Rossetti, Hawthorne, and many others.

Elizabeth Browning was born in Coxhoe Hall, Durham. Her father was Edward Moulton Barrett, whose wealth was derived from Jamaican plantations. She grew up in the west of England and was largely educated at home by a tutor, quickly learning Latin and Greek and reed and write avidly. At the age of 14 she wrote her first collection of verse, The Battle of Marathon. It was followed by An Essay on Mind (1826), privately printed at her father's expense, and a translation of Prometheus Bound (1833) with other poems, which appeared anonymously. Her first work to gain critical attention was The Seraphim, and Other Poems (1838).

In the early 1820s she injured her spine in a riding accident, and was long an invalid, using morphine for the pains for the rest of her life. In 1932 the Barrett family moved to Sidmouth and in 1835 to London, where she began to contribute several periodicals. In 1838, seriously ill as a result of a broken blood-vessel, she was sent to Torquay. After the death of her brother, who drowned in Torqauy, she developed almost morbid fear of meeting anyone, and devoted herself entirely to literature. When her Poems (1844) appeared, it gained a huge popularity and was praised among others by the American writer Edgar Allan Poe. Elizabeth Browning's name was mentioned six years later in speculations about the successor of Wordsworth as the poet laureate.

At the age of 39 she started a correspondence with the six year younger poet Robert Browning, who knew well her work. Their courtship was kept a close secret from her father, who had forbidden all 12 of his sons and daughters to marry. Next year she ran away from her tyrannical father. In September 1846 she married the Robert Browning in a church near Wimpole Street, and the couple settled a week later in Florence. Casa Guide became their base for the rest of Elizabeth's life, although they visited Rome, Siena, Bagni di Lucca, Paris, and London. Their only child, Robert Wiedemann (known as Penini), was born in 1849.

In her late years Elisabeth Browning developed an interest in spiritualism and Italian independence movement. She became supporter of Italian unity, which she advocated in Casa Guidi Windows (1851). She also opposed slavery in her books The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point (1849) and in the political Poems Before Congress (1860). Her magnum opus, Aurora Leigh (1857), was a novel in blank verse about a woman writer, her childhood and pursuit of a literary career. It also dealt such themes as the poet's mission, social responsibilities, and the position of women. Last Poems (1862), issued posthumously, contained some of her best-known lyrics.

Elizabeth Browning died, romantically, in her husband's arms on June 29, 1861 in Florence. After her death the writer Edward FitzGerald expressed no sorrow in his famous lettter: ''Mrs. Browning's Death is rather a relief to me, I must say: no more Aurora Leighs, thank God! A woman of real genius, I know; but what is the upshot of it all? She and her Sex had better mind the Kitchen and their Children: and perhaps the Poor: except in such things as little Novels, they only devote themselves to what Men do much better, leaving that which Men do worse or not at all.'' Among Browning's best known lyrics is Sonnets from the Portuguese - the 'Portugese' being her husband's petname for dark-haired Elizabeth, but it could refer to the series of sonnets of the 16th-century Portuguese poet Luiz de Camões. It first appeared in a collected edition in 1850. The work includes the sonnet which begins with the well-known line, 'How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.'

Author biographies courtesy of Author's Calendar. Used with permission.