Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861), English poet, political thinker, and feminist. Browning was born at Coxhoe Hall, Durham, and privately educated. In 1826 her An Essay on Mind and Other Poems was published anonymously. Her translation of Prometheus Bound, by the Greek dramatist Aeschylus, appeared in 1833 and was highly regarded. Five years later, in The Seraphim and Other Poems, she expressed Christian sentiments in the form of classical Greek tragedy. She was incapacitated for nearly a decade after 1838 as a result of a childhood spinal injury and lung ailment. She continued writing, however, and in 1844 produced a volume of poems including “The Cry of the Children” and “Lady Geraldine's Courtship,” with an American edition that had an introduction by Edgar Allan Poe. These verses were so highly regarded that in 1850, when William Wordsworth died, Browning was suggested as his successor as poet laureate of England.

In 1845 the poet Robert Browning began to write to Elizabeth to praise her poetry. Their romance, which was immortalized in 1930 in the play The Barretts of Wimpole Street, by Rudolf Besier, was bitterly opposed by her father. In 1846, however, the couple eloped and settled in Florence, Italy, where Elizabeth regained her health and bore a son at age 43. Her Sonnets from the Portuguese, dedicated to her husband and written in secret before her marriage, was published in 1850. Critics generally consider the Sonnets, one of the most widely known collections of love lyrics in English, to be her best work. She expressed her intense sympathy with the struggle for the unification of Italy in the collections of poems Casa Guidi Windows (1848-1851) and Poems Before Congress (1860). Her longest and most ambitious work is the didactic, romantic poem in blank verse Aurora Leigh (1856), in which she defends a woman's right to intellectual freedom and addresses the concerns of the female artist. This work is undergoing a critical reassessment and is newly appreciated.