Elizabeth Barrett Browning
March 6, 1806 — June 29, 1861 — Durham, England
Elizabeth Barrett Browning was a leading Victorian poet whose Sonnets from the Portuguese — including the immortal "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways" — became among the most beloved love poems in the English language, while her verse novel Aurora Leigh staked a bold claim for women's place in literary culture.
Childhood and Early Promise
Born on March 6, 1806, at Coxhoe Hall in County Durham, Elizabeth Barrett was the eldest of twelve children. Her father, Edward Moulton-Barrett, was a wealthy plantation owner with estates in Jamaica. She was a precocious child who read Homer in the original Greek and wrote her first "epic" at age ten. She studied Greek, Hebrew, and Latin informally while her brothers were educated formally — an injustice she later addressed in her poetry. Her early publication An Essay on Mind, with Other Poems appeared in 1826, attracting attention from scholars including the Greek scholar Hugh Stuart Boyd, who became a close mentor.
Illness, Seclusion, and Robert Browning
A serious spinal injury suffered as a teenager, combined with a chronic lung condition, left Barrett largely confined to her rooms in her father's London house on Wimpole Street for much of her adult life. Yet her literary reputation grew steadily: her 1844 collection Poems received high praise, including from the American poet Edgar Allan Poe. In January 1845, the poet Robert Browning wrote to her after reading it. Their famous correspondence — 573 letters in 20 months — led to a secret courtship and marriage in September 1846, against her domineering father's wishes. The couple fled to Florence, Italy, where Elizabeth thrived, writing some of her greatest work and giving birth to their son Robert Wiedemann Barrett Browning ("Pen") in 1849.
Did You Know?
The title Sonnets from the Portuguese was a private joke between Elizabeth and Robert Browning. Robert called Elizabeth "my little Portuguese" (a term of endearment referencing her darker complexion), and she used the title to disguise her deeply personal love sonnets as translations — she was far too modest to publish them under her own name at first. Robert had to persuade her they were too fine to keep private.
Legacy and Influence
Barrett Browning published Sonnets from the Portuguese in 1850, the sequence of 44 love sonnets now considered a landmark of Victorian literature. Her ambitious verse novel Aurora Leigh (1856) — a feminist exploration of a female poet's development and independence — was called by John Ruskin "the greatest poem in the English language." She was a serious candidate for Poet Laureate of England upon William Wordsworth's death in 1850, a remarkable position for a woman of the era. She died in Florence on June 29, 1861, in Robert's arms. Her collected poetry remains in print and widely read nearly two centuries later.