Elizabeth Barrett Browning was an English poet of the Victorian era, popular in Britain and the United States during her lifetime.
Background
Elizabeth Barrett Moulton-Barrett was born on March 6, 1806, in Coxhoe Hall, between the villages of Coxhoe and Kelloe in County Durham, England to Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett and Mary Graham Clarke. She was the eldest out of the 12 children the couple had. Fondly she was called “Ba.” The Barrett family had resided in Jamaica for a large number of years, where they were owners of sugar plantations and were dependent on slave labor. Elizabeth’s father opted to raise his family in England, while his fortune was rising in Jamaica. In 1809, she was baptized at Kelloe Parish Church. In late 1809 only, her father purchased Hope End, which was a 500-acre estate near the Malvern Hills in Ledbury, Herefordshire.
Education
Elizabeth received her education at home and attended lessons with the tutor of her brother.
Career
Elizabeth was a precocious reader, and she began writing poetry at an early age. In 1819 her father had printed 50 copies of her epic "The Battle of Marathon," which she later referred to as "Pope's Homer done over again, or rather undone." In 1826 she published anonymously An Essay on Mind, with Other Poems, an attempt, as she later noted, to survey history, science, metaphysics, and poetry from classical Greece to the Victorian day in 88 pages. Elizabeth's youthful happiness was not to last. In 1821 she began to suffer from a nervous disorder which was to cause headaches, weakness, and fainting spells for the rest of her life.
Barrett continued her poetic career in 1833 with the anonymous publication of Prometheus Bound: Translated from the Greek of Aeschylus, and Miscellaneous Poems. Two years later, the Barretts moved to London and in 1838 settled permanently at 50 Wimpole Street. In the same year Elizabeth published her first book under her own name, The Seraphim and Other Poems. Though these poems are often filled with heavy-handed pathos and moralizing, the critics hailed her as a new poet of "extraordinary ability." In 1838 Barrett became seriously ill. Two years later her favorite brother, Edward, drowned, and this shock seriously aggravated her poor health. For the next 5 years she remained in her room and saw no one except her family and a few close friends.
In 1844, however, the publication of Poems secured her fame. Such poems as "The Dead Pan" and "Lady Geraldine's Courtship" seem strident and sentimental to modern readers, but they were very popular with Victorian readers and won high praise from critics in England and the United States. But the most significant result of Poems was the beginning of Barrett's relationship with the poet Robert Browning. Attracted by her praise of his poetry, Browning wrote to her on January 10, 1845, and thus began England's most famous literary love affair. Barrett's illness had led her to feel "completely dead to hope of any kind." Her progress out of this despair to hope and finally joy can be traced in her letters to Browning and in her Sonnets from the Portuguese, written during their courtship and expressing her love for him.
In 1850 Browning issued a revised edition of Poems containing the Sonnets from the Portuguese, which her husband had urged her to publish. Modern readers usually find these sonnets her best work. But Victorian readers much preferred her Aurora Leigh, a long poem in blank verse published in 1856. The major interest of Browning's later years was the Italian struggle for unity and independence. Both Casa Guidi Windows (1851) and Poems before Congress (1860) attempted to win sympathy for the Italian cause. On June 29, 1861, she died quietly in her husband's arms, with a "smile on her face."
Achievements
Elizabeth Barrett Browning was among the most eminent English poets of the Victorian era. Her works were immensely famous in England as well as in United States. Browning contributed greatly to the English poetry of the nineteenth century through her works. She mainly enjoyed the reputation of being a great writer of love poems like “Sonnets from the Portuguese” and “Aurora Leigh.”
Through Elizabeth's pen, she was passionately outspoken on issues of social injustice like slavery, child labor, and oppression of women, and later in life expressed her political opinions of the struggle in Italy with Austria.
Views
Quotations:
"How do I love thee? Let me count the ways."
"Earth's crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God: But only he who sees takes off his shoes."
"I love you for the part of me that you bring out."
"You were made perfectly to be loved - and surely I have loved you, in the idea of you, my whole life long."
"The little cares that fretted me, I lost them yesterday Among the fields above the sea, Among the winds at play."
"Why, what is to live? Not to eat and drink and breathe, - but to feel the life in you down all the fibres of being, passionately and joyfully."
"You're something between a dream and a miracle."
"All actual heroes are essential men, And all men possible heroes."
Connections
Because Elizabeth's father had forbidden any of his children to marry, she and Robert Browning were secretly married on September 12, 1846 at St. Marylebone Parish Church. On March 9, 1849, she gave birth to a son, Robert Wiedeman Barrett Browning. The couple had a harmonious relationship and was respected in the society.
