A short life of the author
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (6 March 1806 – 29 June 1861) was an English poet whose work spanned the transition from Romanticism to the Victorian era and who was, during her lifetime, more famous and more critically esteemed than her husband Robert Browning. She was a serious candidate for Poet Laureate upon Wordsworth’s death in 1850, her verse novel Aurora Leigh (1856) was one of the bestselling long poems of the century, and her Sonnets from the Portuguese — the love sonnets she wrote secretly during her courtship — remain among the most quoted poems in the English language. “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways” is hers.
Early Life and Illness
Barrett was born at Coxhoe Hall, County Durham, the eldest of twelve children in a wealthy family whose fortune derived from Jamaican sugar plantations — a fact that later complicated her moral authority as an opponent of slavery. She was educated largely at home, reading voraciously in Greek, Latin, French, Italian, and Hebrew. She published her first collection, An Essay on Mind, with Other Poems, at twenty, and The Seraphim and Other Poems in 1838.
In her mid-teens she suffered a spinal injury (the precise nature remains debated) that left her a semi-invalid for much of her adult life. After the drowning death of her favourite brother Edward at Torquay in 1840 — he had stayed there to keep her company during her convalescence — she retreated to the family home at 50 Wimpole Street, London, where she lived as a recluse for five years, writing poetry and corresponding extensively, sustained by laudanum for pain.
The Courtship and Elopement
In January 1845, Robert Browning, six years her junior and then far less famous, wrote to her after reading her Poems (1844): “I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett.” Their correspondence — 574 letters in twenty months — is one of the great literary courtships. They married secretly on 12 September 1846 and eloped to Italy, defying her father Edward Moulton-Barrett, whose opposition to his children’s marriages was absolute and pathological. He disinherited her, as he did every child who married, and never spoke to her again.
The Brownings settled in Florence, at Casa Guidi, where Elizabeth’s health dramatically improved. She bore a son, Robert Wiedemann Barrett Browning (“Pen”), in 1849 at age forty-three.
Poems (1844) and Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850)
The two-volume Poems of 1844 made Barrett the most famous living English poet. It included “The Cry of the Children,” a protest poem against child labour in mines and factories that influenced parliamentary debate, and “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship,” the poem that prompted Browning’s initial letter.
Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850), included in a revised edition of her Poems, is a sequence of forty-four Petrarchan sonnets tracing the arc of her love for Browning — from initial disbelief that she could be loved, through fear and self-doubt, to ecstatic acceptance. The title was a fiction: Browning called her “my little Portuguese,” and the pretence that these were translations provided cover for their intensely personal content. Sonnet 43 (“How do I love thee?”) and Sonnet 14 (“If thou must love me”) are among the most anthologised poems in English.
Aurora Leigh (1856)
Barrett Browning’s most ambitious work is a verse novel of over eleven thousand lines in blank verse, telling the story of Aurora Leigh, a woman who insists on becoming a poet despite the social expectations of her class and sex. It encompasses questions of women’s vocation, class exploitation, prostitution, philanthropy, and the relationship between art and social reform.
Aurora Leigh was an immediate bestseller and went through multiple editions. It was praised by George Eliot, John Ruskin, and Algernon Charles Swinburne, and it influenced Emily Dickinson profoundly. Virginia Woolf called it “the first novel in verse… and the only one that still lives.” Its feminist arguments — that a woman’s intellectual vocation is as valid as marriage, that philanthropic condescension is as damaging as neglect — were radical for 1856 and remain striking.
Political Poetry
Barrett Browning was deeply engaged with Italian politics, particularly the Risorgimento — the movement for Italian unification. Casa Guidi Windows (1851) and Poems Before Congress (1860) expressed her passionate support for Italian independence, her admiration for Napoleon III (which alienated many English readers), and her anger at English political indifference to Italian suffering. These political poems were controversial in their time and damaged her reputation with critics who preferred her lyric voice.
She also wrote powerfully against slavery — “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point” (1848) is a dramatic monologue spoken by a slave woman who kills her child rather than let it grow up enslaved — and against child labour.
Death and Legacy
Barrett Browning died in Florence on 29 June 1861, in her husband’s arms. She was buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Florence, and the city of Florence placed a memorial tablet on the wall of Casa Guidi.
Her reputation declined steeply in the early twentieth century, partly because the Modernists had little use for Victorian earnestness, partly because her political poetry was seen as naively idealistic, and partly because she was overshadowed by the critical rehabilitation of Robert Browning. The feminist literary criticism of the 1970s and 1980s restored Aurora Leigh to the canon and recognised Barrett Browning as a major Victorian poet — not merely the author of love sonnets but a writer who grappled seriously with the political and social questions of her era.
Collecting Barrett Browning
First editions of Barrett Browning’s works are highly collectible. Poems (1844, Edward Moxon, two volumes) in original cloth with half-titles brings $800–$2,000. Sonnets from the Portuguese first appeared within the 1850 Poems (Chapman and Hall); the first separate edition (1850, Reading) is extremely rare. Aurora Leigh (1857, Chapman and Hall) in original cloth brings $300–$800. The Browning correspondence is extensively published and collected in manuscript form by the Baylor University Armstrong Browning Library, the world’s largest repository of Browning material.