Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

(1806-1861)

Elizabeth Barrett, an English poet of the Romantic Movement, was born in 1806 at Coxhoe Hall, Durham, England. The oldest of twelve children, Elizabeth was the first in her family born in England in over two hundred years. For centuries, the Barrett family, who were part Creole, had lived in Jamaica, where they owned sugar plantations and relied on slave labor. Elizabeth's father, Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett, chose to raise his family in England, while his fortune grew in Jamaica. Educated at home, Elizabeth apparently had read passages from Paradise Lost and a number of Shakespearean plays, among other great works, before the age of ten. By her twelfth year she had written her first "epic" poem, which consisted of four books of rhyming couplets. Two years later, Elizabeth developed a lung ailment that plagued her for the rest of her life. Doctors began treating her with morphine, which she would take until her death. While saddling a pony when she was fifteen, Elizabeth also suffered a spinal injury. Despite her ailments, her education continued to flourish. Throughout her teenage years, Elizabeth taught herself Hebrew so that she could read the Old Testament; her interests later turned to Greek studies. Accompanying her appetite for the classics was a passionate enthusiasm for her Christian faith. She became active in the Bible and Missionary Societies of her church.

In 1826 Elizabeth anonymously published her collection An Essay on Mind and Other Poems. Two years later, her mother passed away. The slow abolition of slavery in England and mismanagement of the plantations depleted the Barrett's income, and in 1832, Elizabeth's father sold his rural estate at a public auction. He moved his family to a coastal town and rented cottages for the next three years, before settling permanently in London. While living on the sea coast, Elizabeth published her translation of Prometheus Bound (1833), by the Greek dramatist Aeschylus.

Gaining notoriety for her work in the 1830's, Elizabeth continued to live in her father's London house under his tyrannical rule. He began sending Elizabeth's younger siblings to Jamaica to help with the family's estates. Elizabeth bitterly opposed slavery and did not want her siblings sent away. During this time, she wrote The Seraphim and Other Poems (1838), expressing Christian sentiments in the form of classical Greek tragedy. Due to her weakening disposition she was forced to spend a year at the sea of Torquay accompanied by her brother Edward, whom she referred to as "Bro." He drowned later that year while sailing at Torquay and Elizabeth returned home emotionally broken, becoming an invalid and a recluse. She spent the next five years in her bedroom at her father's home. She continued writing, however, and in 1844 produced a collection entitled simply Poems. This volume gained the attention of poet Robert Browning, whose work Elizabeth had praised in one of her poems, and he wrote her a letter.

Elizabeth and Robert, who was six years her junior, exchanged 574 letters over the next twenty months. Immortalized in 1930 in the play The Barretts of Wimpole Street, by Rudolf Besier (1878-1942), their romance was bitterly opposed by her father, who did not want any of his children to marry. In 1846, the couple eloped and settled in Florence, Italy, where Elizabeth's health improved and she bore a son, Robert Wideman Browning. Her father never spoke to her again. Elizabeth's 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. Admirers have compared her imagery to Shakespeare and her use of the Italian form to Petrarch.

Political and social themes embody Elizabeth's later work. She expressed her intense sympathy for the struggle for the unification of Italy in Casa Guidi Windows (1848-51) and Poems Before Congress (1860). In 1857 Browning published her verse novel Aurora Leigh, which portrays male domination of a woman. In her poetry she also addressed the oppression of the Italians by the Austrians, the child labor mines and mills of England, and slavery, among other social injustices. Although this decreased her popularity, Elizabeth was heard and recognized around Europe.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning died in Florence on June 29, 1861.

A Selected Bibliography

Poetry

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; 1851
The Seraphim and Other Poems, 1838
Poems, 2 volumes, 1844
A Drama of Exile: and other Poems, 2 vols., 1845
Poems: New Edition, 2 vols., includes Sonnets from the Portuguese, 1850
The Poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1850
Casa Guidi Windows: A Poem, 1851
Poems: Third Edition, 2 vols., 1853
Two Poems, with Robert Browning, 1854
Poems: Fourth Edition, 3 vols., 1856
Aurora Leigh, 1857; revised, 1859
Poems before Congress, 1860
Napoleon III in Italy, and Other Poems, 1860
Last Poems, 1862
The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 6 vols., 1889-1890
The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. Frederic G. Kenyon, 1897
The Complete Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Cambridge Edition, ed. Harriet Waters Preston, 1900
The Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, eds. Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke, 6 vols., 1900
New Poems by Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. Frederic G. Kenyon, 1914
Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Hitherto Unpublished Poems and Stories, with an Unedited Autobiography, ed. H. Buxton Forman, 2 vols., 1914

Prose

"Queen Annelida and False Arcite" and "The Complaint of Annelida" to False Arcite," in The Poems of Geoffrey Chaucer, modernized, 1841
A New Spirit of the Age, many anonymous contributions, 2 vols., ed. Richard Hengist Horne, 1844
Two versions of "The Daughters of Pandarus" from the Odyssey tr. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, in Mrs. Anna Jameson, Memoirs and Essays Illustrative of Art, Literature, and Social Morals, 1846
The Greek Christian Poets and the English Poets, 1863
Essays on the Greek Christian Poets and the English Poets, 1863
Psyche Apocalyptè: A Lyrical Drama, with Richard Hengist Horne, 1876
The Poet's Enchiridion, ed. H. Buxton Forman, 1914
Diary by E. B. B.: The Unpublished Diary of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1831-1832, eds. Philip Kelley and Ronald Hudson, 1969

Letters

Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning Addressed to Richard Hengist Horne, ed. S. R. Townshend Mayer, 2 vols., 1877
The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning ed. Frederic G Kenyon, 2 vols., 1897
Letters to Robert Browning and Other Correspondents by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. Thomas J. Wise, 1916
Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Letters to Her Sister, 1846-1859, ed. Leonard Huxley, 1929
Letters from Elizabeth Barrett to B. R. Haydon, ed. Martha Hale Shackford, 1939
Twenty Unpublished Letters of Elizabeth Barrett to Hugh Stuart Boyd, ed. Bennett Weaver, 1950
New Letters from Mrs. Browning to Isa Blagden, ed. Edward C. McAleer, 1951
The Unpublished Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Mary Russell Mitford, ed. Betty Miller, 1954
Unpublished Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Hugh Stuart Boyd, ed. Barbara P. McCarthy, 1955
Letters of the Brownings to George Barrett, edited by Paul Landis, 1958
The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1845-1846, ed. Elvan Kintner, 2 vols., 1969
Invisible Friends: The Correspondence of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Benjamin Robert Haydon, 1842-1845, ed. Willard Bissell Pope, 1972
Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Letters to Mrs. David Ogilvy, 1849-1861, eds. Peter N. Heydon and Philip Kelley, 1973

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