Elizabeth Barrett Browning was born on 6 March, 1806, at Coxhoe Hall, Durham, and privately educated.
She was an invalid 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".
Shortly thereafter the poet Robert Browning began to write to Elizabeth to praise her poetry. Their romance, which was immortalised in 1930 in the play The Barretts of Wimpole Street, by Rudolf Besier, was bitterly opposed by her father. Her wealthy father had made it clear that none of his eleven children would be allowed to marry, on pain of banishment. The reasons for this were dark and unspoken, perhaps literally: some believe that Barrett's grandfather, one of the biggest landholders in the West Indes, had not only passed along his fortune made on rum and sugar but some mixed blood, and that Barrett's father felt so shamed by this, and so fearful of dark-skinned grandchildren, that he would do anything to prevent it. But Elizabeth, now in middle-age, must have long-regarded this tyranny as irrelevant. Tuberculosis or something like it had dominated her life since the age of fourteen; most of her adult years had been spent as a house-bound, often bed-ridden, invalid, and she could not at this point be expecting marriage, let alone children.
But nor could she have expected Robert Browning. Over twenty months, five hundred and seventy-five letters passed between them. Elizabeth Barrett Browning would later describe her physical improvement over these months as a resurrection, a shedding of the "graveclothes" in which she had allowed her illness and morbidity to dress her. Her family must have felt so too on that day in January, 1846 when she suddenly appeared downstairs: she had hardly been out of her room in six years, and even then only when carried. (Go here for a page dedicated to love story ofThe Brownings)
Eight months later, after she and Browning had eloped to Florence, the men in the family would virtually rebury her: her brothers refused to communicate for years; her father refused forever, returning her letters unopened, rejecting her son, and cutting her from his will. One of the last poems she wrote as Elizabeth Barrett was the sonnet to Browning in which she asks, "How do I love thee?" and then counts the ways; the first poem written in her miracle, second life as Elizabeth Barrett Browning was called "The Runaway Slave."
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 and Poems Before Congress. Her longest and most ambitious work is the didactic, romantic poem in blank verse Aurora Leigh.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning died in Florence on 29 June, 1861.
~Today in Literature
