Elizabeth Barrett Browning
1806–1861
Biography
Elizabeth Barrett Browning was born in 1806 in County Durham, in north-east England, the eldest of twelve children. She began writing verse as a child. At fifteen she fell ill with severe pain in the head and spine that stayed with her for the rest of her life, so that much of her adult life was spent as an invalid. Her first adult collection of poems appeared in 1838, and her volume of 1844 brought her a wide readership in Britain and America, along with the admiration of the poet Robert Browning. They married in secret in 1846, against her father's wishes, and he cut her off. The couple moved to Italy, and she spent the rest of her life there, mostly in Florence, where she died in 1861.
Her poems were not all private. The Cry of the Children, from 1843, protests against child labour in mines and factories, and her verse helped to press the case for reform. Her best-known book is Sonnets from the Portuguese, published in 1850: a sequence of forty-four sonnets written during her courtship, which turns a private love story into public poetry. The title is said to come from a pet name Robert Browning gave her. In 1856 she published Aurora Leigh, a long novel in blank verse about a woman poet who moves between Italy and England and must make a life as an artist. It was bold in both subject and form. Her work influenced American poets as well, Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Dickinson among them.
Two of her books are on this site. Sonnets from the Portuguese shows the personal and the poetic side by side, using a strict form to say what she felt in plain and tender terms. Aurora Leigh is the larger and more ambitious work, a poem that argues for a woman's right to speak as an artist on serious matters. Together they show why her reputation was revived in the later twentieth century, when scholars and readers began to look again at women writers of the Victorian age.
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Books
Aurora Leigh
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Aurora Leigh, an orphan raised in Italy and England, refuses her cousin Romney's offer of marriage so that she can be a poet, and the novel in blank verse follows her to London and Paris and back to Florence. In nine books it argues about art, women's work and social reform.…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.Sonnets from the Portuguese
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Forty-four sonnets in which Elizabeth Barrett Browning traces her love for Robert Browning, from her first doubt that she can be loved to the full surrender of the last poems. The 'Portuguese' of the title was a private joke, and the sequence became the best known love poetry of…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.