Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett (1806–61), eldest child of Edward Moulton Barrett. She was largely self-educated at home and became deeply versed in the classics and in prosodic theory. In 1838 she became seriously ill as a result of a broken blood-vessel and was sent to Torquay, where two years later her eldest brother Edward was drowned, to her lifelong grief. She returned to London, still an invalid, in 1841. In 1845 Robert Browning began a correspondence with her which led to their meeting and to an engagement, necessarily secret since the tyrannical Mr Barrett forbade his adult sons and daughters to marry. In Sept. 1846 Browning and Elizabeth Barrett were secretly married and left for Italy. Florence became their base for the rest of Mrs Browning's life. Their only child, Robert Wiedemann, was born in 1849.

The Seraphim, and Other Poems (1838) was her first work to gain critical and public attention. Her next set of Poems (1844) was so highly regarded that she was widely canvassed as Wordsworth's successor as poet laureate. Throughout her married life her poetic reputation stood higher than Browning's in general contemporary opinion, though her progressive social ideas and her audacious prosodic experiments—perhaps the most appealing aspects of her work to many 20th-cent. readers—were considered alarming by readers in her own day. Her Sonnets from the Portuguese first appeared in a collected edition of her poems in 1850; Casa Guidi Windows, on the theme of Italian liberation, in 1851; and her magnum opus, Aurora Leigh, in 1857. The stridently political Poems Before Congress (1860) injured her popularity. Last Poems, issued posthumously in 1862, contained some of her best-known lyrics. Since her death many volumes of her spirited and engaging letters, including her exchange of love letters with Browning and her correspondence with such friends as M. R. Mitford and Haydon, have been published.