Elizabeth Barrett Browning (March 6, 1806 – June 29, 1861) was one of the most prominent poets of the Victorian era. Her poetry was widely popular in both England and the United States during her lifetime. Browning published many poems in her lifetime, and many more were published by her husband after her death.
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Elizabeth Barrett Browning biography
Elizabeth Barrett Moulton-Barrett was born on March 6, 1806, in Coxhoe Hall, between the villages of Coxhoe and Kelloe in County Durham, England. Her parents were Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett and Mary Graham-Clarke; she was the eldest of their 12 children (eight boys and four girls). All the children survived except for one girl, who died at the age of four when Elizabeth was eight. All the children in her family had nicknames: Elizabeth's was `Ba`. The Barrett family, who were part Creole, had lived for centuries in Jamaica, where they owned sugar plantations and relied on slave labour. Elizabeth's father chose to raise his family in England while his fortune grew in Jamaica. The Graham-Clarke family wealth was as great as the Barrett family wealth.
Elizabeth was baptized in 1809 at Kelloe Parish Church, though she had already been baptized by a family friend in the first week after she was born.
Later that year, after the fifth child, Henrietta, was born, Edward bought Hope End, a 500-acre (2.0 km2) estate near the Malvern Hills in Ledbury, Herefordshire. Elizabeth had "a large room to herself, with stained glass in the window, and she loved the garden where she tended white roses in a special arbour by the south wall" Her time at Hope End would inspire her in later life to write Aurora Leigh.
Elizabeth was educated at home and attended lessons with her brother's tutor. This gave her a good education for a girl of that time, and she is said to have read passages from Paradise Lost and a number of Shakespearean plays, among other works, before the age of ten. During the Hope End period, she was "a shy, intensely studious, precocious child, yet cheerful, affectionate and lovable". Her intellectual fascination with the classics and metaphysics was balanced by a religious obsession which she later described as "not the deep persuasion of the mild Christian but the wild visions of an enthusiast."
The Barretts attended services at the nearest Dissenting chapel, and Edward was active in Bible and Missionary societies. Elizabeth was very close to her siblings while playing the maternal role. She had great respect for her father: she claimed that life was no fun without him, and her mother agreed, probably because they did not fully understand what the business really was that kept him when his trips got longer and longer.
Her first known poem was written at the age of six or eight. The manuscript is currently in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library; the exact date is controversial because the "2" in the date 1812 is written over something else that is scratched out. By the age of twelve she had written an "epic" poem consisting of four books of rhyming couplets. When she was 14, her father paid for the publication of a long Homeric poem entitled The Battle of Marathon. Barrett later referred to this as "Pope's Homer done over again, or rather undone." By the age of twenty, she had read the principal Greek and Latin authors and Dante's Inferno in their original languages. She learnt Hebrew and read the Old Testament from beginning to end. Essays of the mind was published in 1826, also at her father’s expense.
It was then (at age 20) that Elizabeth began to battle with a lifelong illness, which the medical science of the time was unable to diagnose. She began to take morphine for the pain and eventually became addicted to the drug. This illness caused her to be frail and weak. Her illness meant that Browning composed her poems primarily in her home.
Mary Russell Mitford described the young Elizabeth as having "a slight, delicate figure, with a shower of dark curls falling on each side of a most expressive face; large, tender eyes, richly fringed by dark eyelashes, and a smile like a sunbeam." Anne Thackeray Ritchie described her as being "very small and brown" with big, exotic eyes and an overgenerous mouth.
Sidmouth, Devonshire, and London
On June 30, 1824, one of the leading newspapers in London, the Globe and Traveler, printed her Stanzas on the Death of Lord Byron. In the same year a lawsuit about her father's property estate in Jamaica had been decided in favor of their cousin, causing the start of their financial reversal.
In 1826 she published her first collection of poems, An Essay on Mind and Other Poems. This is a didactic poem with Homer; Latin and Greek are manifested within these poems. Its publication drew the attention of a blind scholar of the Greek language, Hugh Stuart Boyd, and that of another Greek scholar, Uvedale Price. She maintained a scholarly correspondence with both men until her death. Among other neighbors, pleasant but of no intellectual interest, was Mrs. James Martin from Colwall, with whom she kept up a correspondence, which gives an account of her life.
At Boyd's suggestion, she translated Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound (published in 1833; retranslated in 1850). During their friendship Barrett absorbed a lot of Greek literature, including Homer, Pindar and Aristophanes. From 1822 onwards, Elizabeth's interests tended more and more to the scholarly and literary. In 1825 she published The Rose and Zephyr, her first published work.
In 1828, Elizabeth’s mother died. She is buried at the Parish Church of St Michael and All Angels in Ledbury, next to her daughter Mary. The death of her mother hit her hard, which, Boyd says in his letters, for a time took away from her the power of thinking. The abolition of slavery in the early 1830s reduced Mr. Barrett's finances. His financial losses in the early 1830s forced him to sell Hope End, and although the family were never poor, the place was seized and put up for sale to please creditors. The investment that had given them revenue in Jamaica was also stopped with the abolition of slavery. In 1831 Elizabeth received news that her grandmother Moulton had died. She had been like a second mother to Elizabeth and the other children, and subsequently Elizabeth became ill for weeks.
The family moved three times between 1832 and 1837, first to a white Georgian building in Sidmouth, Devonshire, where they remained for three years. Later they moved on to Gloucester Place London. While living there she wrote for several magazines, and in 1825 her first published work, The Rose and Zephyr, was published in the Literary Gazette.
Wimpole Street
They finally settled at 50 Wimpole Street, a place she had visited as a child. John Kenyon, a distant cousin, introduced her to celebrities of the literary world, including William Wordsworth, Mary Russell Mitford, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Alfred Lord Tennyson and Thomas Carlyle.
Elizabeth continued to write, contributing The Romaunt of Margaret, The Romaunt of the Page, The Poet's Vow, and other pieces to various periodicals. She corresponded with literary figures of the time, including Mary Russell Mitford. She and Mary became close friends, Mary helping her to further her literary ambition. In 1838 The Seraphim and Other Poems appeared as the first volume of Elizabeth's mature poetry to appear under her own name.
Torquay
In 1838, at her physician's insistence, Elizabeth moved from London to Torquay, on the Devonshire coast. Her brother Edward, one of her closest relatives, went along with her. Her father, Mr. Barrett, disapproved of Edward's going to Torquay but did not hinder his visit. The subsequent drowning of her brother Edward, in a sailing accident at Torquay in 1840, had a serious effect on her already fragile health; when they found his body after a couple of days, she had no strength for tears or words. They returned to Wimpole Street.
Return to Wimpole Street
By the time of her return to Wimpole Street, she had become an invalid and a recluse, spending most of the next five years in her bedroom, seeing few people other than her immediate family. One of those she did see was her friend John Kenyon, a wealthy and convivial friend of the arts. She felt responsible for her brother's death because it was she who wanted him to be there with her. During this time she allegedly developed an addiction to opium. She got comfort from her golden-haired cocker spaniel named “Flush”, which had been given to Elizabeth as a gift.
She continued to write poetry, including The Cry of the Children, published in 1842. This poem condemned child labour and helped bring about child labour reforms. At about the same time, she contributed some critical prose pieces to Richard Henry Horne's A New Spirit of the Age. She also wrote The First Day’s Exile from Eden. In 1844 she published two volumes of Poems, which included A Drama of Exile, A Vision of Poets, and Lady Geraldine's Courtship. “Since she was not burdened with any domestic duties expected of her sisters, Elizabeth could now devote herself entirely to the life of the mind, cultivating an enormous correspondence, reading widely”
Meeting Robert Browning and works of this time
Her 1844 Poems made her one of the most popular writers in the land at the time and inspired Robert Browning to write to her, telling her how much he loved her poems. Kenyon arranged for Browning to meet Elizabeth in May 1845, and so began one of the most famous courtships in literature.
Elizabeth had produced a large amount of work and had been writing long before Robert Browning had ever published a word. However, he had a great influence on her writing, as did she on his; it is observable that Elizabeth’s poetry matured after meeting Robert. Two of Barrett’s most famous pieces were produced after she met Browning: Sonnets from the Portuguese and Aurora Leigh.
Some critics, however, point to him as an undermining influence: "Until her relationship with Robert Browning began in 1845, Barrett’s willingness to engage in public discourse about social issues and about aesthetic issues in poetry, which had been so strong in her youth, gradually diminished, as did her physical health. As an intellectual presence and a physical being, she was becoming a shadow of herself".
Among Elizabeth's best known lyrics are Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) the "Portuguese" being her husband's pet name for her. The title also refers to the series of sonnets of the 16th-century Portuguese poet Luis de Camões; in all these poems she used rhyme schemes typical of the Portuguese sonnets.
The verse-novel Aurora Leigh, her most ambitious and perhaps the most popular of her longer poems, appeared in 1856. It is the story of a woman writer making her way in life, balancing work and love. The writings depicted in this novel are all based on similar, personal experiences that Elizabeth suffered through herself. The North American Review praised Elizabeth’s poem in these words: “ Mrs. Browning’s poems are, in all respects, the utterance of a woman of a woman of great learning, rich experience, and powerful genius, uniting to her woman’s nature the strength which is sometimes thought peculiar to a man.”
Robert Browning
The courtship and marriage between Robert Browning and Elizabeth were carried out secretly. Six years his elder and an invalid, she could not believe that the vigorous and worldly Browning really loved her as much as he professed to, and her doubts are expressed in the Sonnets from the Portuguese, which she wrote over the next two years. Love conquered all, however, and after a private marriage at St. Marylebone Parish Church, Browning imitated his hero Shelley by spiriting his beloved off to Italy in August 1846, which became her home almost continuously until her death. Elizabeth's loyal nurse, Wilson, who witnessed the marriage at the church, accompanied the couple to Italy and became at service to them.
Mr. Barrett disinherited Elizabeth, as he did each of his children who married: “The Mrs. Browning of popular imagination was a sweet, innocent young woman who suffered endless cruelties at the hands of a tyrannical papa but who nonetheless had the good fortune to fall in love with a dashing and handsome poet named Robert Browning. She finally escaped the dungeon of Wimpole Street, eloped to Italy, and lived happily ever after.”
As Elizabeth had inherited some money of her own, the couple were reasonably comfortable in Italy, and their relationship together was content. The Brownings were well respected in Italy, and they would be asked for autographs or stopped by people because of their celebrity. Elizabeth grew stronger and in 1849, at the age of 43, she gave birth to a son, Robert Wiedemann Barrett Browning, whom they called Pen. Their son later married but had no legitimate children, so there are apparently no direct descendants of the two famous poets. However, it is rumoured that the areas around Florence are peopled with his descendants.
“Several Browning critics have suggested that the poet decided that he was an “objective poet” and then sought out a “subjective poet” in the hope that dialogue with her would enable him to be more successful.”
At her husband's insistence, the second edition of Elizabeth’s Poems included her love sonnets; these increased her popularity and high critical regard so that she cemented her position as favourite Victorian poetess. Upon William Wordsworth's death in 1850, she was a serious contender to become Poet Laureate, but the position went to Tennyson.
Later illness and death
At the death of an old friend, G.B. Hunter, and then of her father, her health faded again, centering around deteriorating lung function. She was moved from Florence to Siena and to their summer home, The Villa Alberti.
In 1860 she issued a small volume of political poems titled Poems before Congress. These poems related to political issues for the Italians, “most of which were written to express her sympathy with the Italian cause after the outbreak of fighting in 1859”. She dedicated this book to her husband.
Her last piece of work was A Musical Instrument, published in July 1862. She had also reprinted Last Poem, which became one of her best-known works.
In 1860 they returned to Rome, only to find that Elizabeth’s sister Henrietta had died, news which made Elizabeth weak and depressed. She became gradually weaker and died on June 29, 1861. She was buried in the English Cemetery of Florence. “On Monday July 1 the shops in the section of the city around Casa Guidi were closed, while Elizabeth was mourned with unusual demonstrations.”
The nature of her illnesses is still unclear, although medical and literary scholars have speculated that longstanding pulmonary problems, combined with palliatives opiates, contributed to her decline.
Spiritual influence
Much of Elizabeth’s work has religious themes recurring throughout her literature. She had read and studied such famous literary works as Milton's Paradise Lost and Dante's Inferno. Elizabeth says in her writing, "We want the sense of the saturation of Christ's blood upon the souls of our poets, that it may cry through them in answer to the ceaseless wail of the Sphinx of our humanity, expounding agony into renovation. Something of this has been perceived in art when its glory was at the fullest. Something of a yearning after this may be seen among the Greek Christian poets, something which would have been much with a stronger faculty"
She also believed that "Christ's religion is essentially poetry glorified.” She explores the religious aspect in many of her poems, especially in her early work, such as the Sonnets. She was interested in theological debate, had learned Hebrew and read the Hebrew Bible. We find in the poem Aurora Leigh, for example, much religious imagery and allusion to images of the apocalypse.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning poem collections in order
The Battle of Marathon: A Poem - 1820
An Essay on Mind, with Other Poems - 1826
Prometheus Bound, Translated from the Greek of Aeschylus, and Miscellaneous Poems - 1833
The Seraphim, and Other Poems - 1838
Poems (UK) / A Drama of Exile, and other Poems (US) - 1844
Poems ("New Edition", 2 vols.) Revision of 1844 edition adding Sonnets from the Portuguese and others - 1850
Casa Guidi Windows - 1851
Poems (3d ed.). London - 1853
Two Poems: "A Plea for the Ragged Schools of London" (by Elizabeth Barrett Browning) and "The Twins" (by Robert Browning) - 1854
Poems (4th ed.) - 1856
Aurora Leigh - 1856
Poems Before Congress - 1860
Last Poems - 1862
Posthumous
The Greek Christian Poets and the English Poets - 1863
The Earlier Poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1826–1833, ed - 1877
Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning Addressed to Richard Hengist Horne, with comments on contemporaries - 1877
Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning - 1897
Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett 1845–1846 - 1899
New Poems by Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning - 1914
Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Letters to Her Sister, 1846–1859 - 1929
Twenty-Two Unpublished Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning to Henrietta and Arabella Moulton Barrett - 1935
Letters from Elizabeth Barrett to B.R. Haydon, ed. Martha Hale Shackford - 1939
Elizabeth Barrett to Miss Mitford - 1954
Unpublished Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Hugh Stuart Boyd - 1955
Letters of the Brownings to George Barrett - 1958
Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Letters to Mrs. David Ogilvy, 1849–1861 - 1974
The Brownings' Correspondence, ed. Phillip Kelley, Ronald Hudson, and Scott Lewis - 1984
Source and additional information: Elizabeth Barrett Browning