Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Elizabeth Barrett Moulton-Barrett was born on March 6, 1806, at Coxhoe Hall in County Durham, the eldest of twelve children of Edward Barrett Moulton-Barrett and Mary Graham-Clarke ^[1]. The family fortune came largely from sugar plantations in Jamaica worked by enslaved labourers, a fact that troubled Elizabeth deeply in adulthood and shaped her later opposition to slavery ^[2]. In 1809 the Barretts moved to Hope End, an estate near the Malvern Hills in Herefordshire, where Elizabeth spent a childhood she later remembered with great affection.

She was a startlingly early reader. By her own account she was reading novels at six, studying Greek in her early teens, and writing verse almost as soon as she could hold a pen ^[1]. Her father privately printed her juvenile epic The Battle of Marathon in 1820, when she was fourteen. Unusually for a girl of her era, she shared lessons with her brother Edward and pursued Latin, Greek, and later Hebrew with a seriousness that impressed the scholars she corresponded with ^[3].

At about fifteen she began to suffer from an illness that doctors of the day could not confidently diagnose. It brought intense head and spinal pain and left her dependent on opiates for much of her life ^[1]. The condition, combined with a lung complaint that developed in her twenties, turned her into a semi-invalid and set the pattern of a life lived largely indoors, surrounded by books.

Anyone asking who was Elizabeth Barrett Browning in the 1830s would have received the answer: a reclusive but rising poet. Financial losses in Jamaica forced the sale of Hope End in 1832, and after a period in Sidmouth the family settled in 1838 at 50 Wimpole Street in London, the address forever associated with her name ^[2]. That same year The Seraphim and Other Poems appeared, the first collection published under her own name, and reviewers began to treat her as a serious literary figure ^[3].

Grief soon shadowed the success. In 1838 her health sent her to Torquay for sea air, and in 1840 her favourite brother Edward, whom she called Bro, drowned in a sailing accident there. She held herself responsible, since he had stayed on the coast partly to be near her, and the loss darkened her poetry and her spirits for years ^[1]. She returned to Wimpole Street in 1841 and rarely left her room, yet her literary output only grew.

Her two-volume Poems of 1844 changed everything. The collection, which included A Drama of Exile and the popular ballad Lady Geraldine's Courtship, was widely praised in Britain and America and established her as one of the leading poets writing in English ^[3]. Her campaigning poem The Cry of the Children, published in Blackwood's Magazine in 1843 after a parliamentary report on child labour in mines and factories, showed that her verse could also drive public debate ^[4].

A single line in Lady Geraldine's Courtship, praising the poetry of Robert Browning, prompted one of the most famous correspondences in English letters. In January 1845 Browning wrote to her: he admired her poems, and he admired her. Over the following twenty months they exchanged nearly six hundred letters and, from May 1845, met regularly in her Wimpole Street room ^[5].

Her father had forbidden all of his children to marry, for reasons he never explained, so the couple wed in secret at St Marylebone Parish Church on September 12, 1846. A week later Elizabeth slipped out of the house with her maid and her spaniel Flush and left for the Continent with her new husband ^[1]. Edward Moulton-Barrett never forgave her. He disinherited her, returned her letters unopened, and refused to see her when she later visited London ^[2].

The marriage itself, by every surviving account, was a happy one. During the courtship she had written a sequence of forty-four love sonnets that she showed Robert only after their marriage. Published in 1850 under the deliberately misleading title Sonnets from the Portuguese, the sequence contains the line "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways," among the best known openings in English poetry ^[3].

Any honest list of Elizabeth Barrett Browning achievements begins with Aurora Leigh, the nine-book verse novel she published in 1856. Its heroine, an orphaned poet, fights for a woman's right to an independent intellectual and professional life, and the poem tackles poverty, sexual exploitation, and the condition of women with a directness that startled Victorian readers. It sold rapidly, went through many editions, and drew admiration from John Ruskin, who ranked it among the great poems of the age ^[3].

Her reputation in her lifetime is easy to underestimate now. When William Wordsworth died in 1850, her name was seriously proposed in the Athenaeum for the post of Poet Laureate, though the honour went to Alfred Tennyson ^[2]. American readers were especially devoted, and Emily Dickinson kept a framed portrait of her in her bedroom, one measure of the influence she exerted on women poets who followed ^[6].

She also put her fame to political use. The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point, written for a Boston abolitionist annual in 1848, gave voice to an enslaved woman with a bluntness rare in polite verse, a pointed act for the daughter of a plantation-owning family ^[4]. Casa Guidi Windows (1851) and Poems before Congress (1860) argued the cause of Italian unification so fervently that some English critics accused her of abandoning her own country. She did not retreat an inch.

The Brownings settled in Florence in 1847, taking rooms in the Palazzo Guidi near the Pitti Palace, an apartment they called Casa Guidi and kept for the rest of Elizabeth's life ^[7]. The warm climate improved her health remarkably. She walked, travelled, and in March 1849, at the age of forty-three, gave birth to her only child, Robert Wiedeman Barrett Browning, known all his life as Pen ^[1].

Florence gave her more than health. The city was alive with the politics of the Risorgimento, and from her windows she watched demonstrations for Tuscan liberty that she turned directly into Casa Guidi Windows. She followed the fortunes of Cavour and Napoleon III with an intensity that surprised visitors who expected a fragile English invalid rather than a sharp political observer ^[7].

In her final decade she also grew interested in spiritualism, attending seances and defending mediums in letters, an enthusiasm Robert did not share and which caused one of the few recorded strains in the marriage ^[2]. The couple wintered in Rome and Siena at times, and Elizabeth made two brief return visits to England, but Italy remained home.

Her health, always precarious, declined sharply after 1859. The death of her sister Henrietta in 1860 and the death in June 1861 of Count Cavour, the statesman on whom she had pinned her hopes for a united Italy, both hit her hard ^[7]. A severe cold that spring settled on her weakened lungs.

She died in Robert's arms at Casa Guidi in the early hours of June 29, 1861, aged fifty-five. Asked how she felt, her last word, by his account, was "beautiful" ^[1]. She was buried in the English Cemetery in Florence, where her tomb, designed by Frederic, Lord Leighton, still draws visitors. Shops along the street closed on the day of her funeral, and the city later placed a memorial tablet on Casa Guidi thanking the poet who had made her verse a golden ring between Italy and England ^[7].

Robert Browning left Florence with their twelve-year-old son soon afterward and never returned to the city. His later masterpieces, including The Ring and the Book, were written in a long widowhood shaped by her memory ^[5].

For decades after her death the romance threatened to swallow the poetry. Rudolf Besier's 1930 play The Barretts of Wimpole Street, twice filmed by MGM, fixed in the public mind the image of the invalid daughter rescued from a tyrannical father, and her literary standing dwindled to a handful of anthology sonnets ^[2]. Basic Elizabeth Barrett Browning facts, such as her one-time candidacy for the laureateship, faded from general knowledge.

Feminist scholarship reversed the neglect. From the 1970s onward critics restored Aurora Leigh to the centre of her achievement, and writers from Virginia Woolf, who had earlier devoted a playful biography to the poet's dog Flush, to modern academic biographers re-examined the full range of her work ^[6]. Her influence on Emily Dickinson and on the tradition of politically engaged women's poetry is now standard literary history.

Any Elizabeth Barrett Browning biography written today presents a tougher and more interesting figure than the legend allowed: a self-taught classicist, an abolitionist who confronted the source of her own family's wealth, a poet of international politics, and one half of the most famous literary marriage in English. Casa Guidi in Florence is preserved and open to visitors, and her letters, numbering in the thousands, remain among the great correspondences of the nineteenth century ^[7].