Elizabeth Barrett Moulton-Barrett Browning

March 6, 1806-June 29, 1861

Elizabeth Barrett Browning was the preeminent woman poet of her time, according to her contemporaries.  She was a fervid reader and scholar as a child, studying "Hebrew, German, French, and Italian as well as the major English and Continental writers, including contemporaries, and she enthusiastically read the works of Voltaire, Thomas Paine, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Mary Wollstonecraft" (Taylor).    She began writing poetry early, with the encouragement of her father, who had her youthful poem on the Battle of Marathon privately printed.  

In her teens, Browning became abruptly ill with an unidentified malady (some modern commentators hypothesize tuberculosis of the spine).  From this time on, Browning was to suffer from ill health, particularly from respiratory problems.  After the death of her mother and the sale of her childhood home (necessitated by her family's bad luck with their West Indian sugar plantations) Browning's health deteriorated further, and the family moved, first to Sidmouth and then to London.   A particularly serious attack in 1838 resulted in Browning spending three years recuperating at the coast at Torquay.  In Torquay her favorite brother drowned, for which Browning held herself responsible as she had coaxed him to extend his stay with her.  Browning was devastated, and could not bring herself to speak of the incident for years.  

The doctors in Torquay, like those attending Virginia Woolf and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, ordered her to abandon her reading and writing, but Browning ignored them.  After three years at Torquay, she returned to London, prepared to immure herself in the invalid's lifestyle. 

In spite of her reclusiveness (Browning only intermittently left her house, and indeed spent most of her time reclining), Browning corresponded with many of the literati of her time (Anna Jameson, Mary Russell Mitford, and Harriet Martineau) and met Wordsworth and Walter Savage Landor.  She also continued to work on her own poetry, and published several collections.  These were greeted with acclaim, although the criticisms that were to pursue her for the rest of her life already surfaced; specifically, the sinewy quality of her poetry - its strong images and imperfect rhythms - bothered some reviewers, while others instructed her on where she transgressed the boundaries on what a member of her sex might say.  The upshot of the criticism, nonetheless, was highly laudatory.

In 1844, Browning inadvertantly initiated a relationship with the then-obscure poet Robert Browning by referring to him approvingly in her poem, "Lady Geraldine's Courtship."  Browning wrote an enthusiastic letter to her expressing his appreciation for her poetry in return, and thus the famous epistolary courtship of the Brownings was begun.  574 letters later, Browning agreed to elope with Robert.  Browning's father was a frankly odd individual; while he allowed his daughter to acquire an unusually "masculine" education and actively advanced her writing career, he was fanatically jealous of the privacy of his family life, discouraging visitors and emphatically forbidding any of his children to marry.  No one has fully accounted for this freak of his, but it has been suggested that Barrett was afraid that succeeding generations would provide evidence of his family having a non-white ancestor.  In any event, the Brownings, after a secret marriage service, eloped to Italy, and Browning was never reconciled to her father, who left unopened the countless letters she sent him begging his forgiveness.  Browning never saw her father again.

In Italy, however, her health improved significantly, and she published her two most famous works:  Sonnets from the Portuguese and Aurora Leigh.  Throughout her career, Browning continuously strained against the artificial limits placed on her sex, and these two works give evidence of her rebellion.  The former, a series of love sonnets written during and inspired by her courtship with Robert, (the name refers to a poem of hers, "Catarina to Camoens," in which a woman declares her love for a poet who is denied her) recalls sonnet cycles by other poets, such as Petrarch and Shakespeare, but inverts the usual structure of love relationships in those poems.  Browning tells of courtly love from the woman's perspective, and in the process reinvents the woman's role within the love sonnet.  No longer the remote woman on the pillar, to be adored but never attained, Browning's love is active, sexual, and recuperatory.  This radical aspect of the poems was overlooked by contemporaries, for whom Sonnets from the Portuguese became a sentimental classic.  Browning's radicalism was also overlooked by 20th-century critics, who dismissed them for the same reason that the Victorians adored them - because of their supposed sentimentality.  

Aurora Leigh was even more outspoken in its protest against the gender roles inflicted on women than the Sonnets.  The story of a young woman poet born in Italy but raised in England, the poem-novel has its heroine investigate the institutions of England with the critical eye of an outsider.  Aurora Leigh learns about girls' education in England, relations between the sexes (her lover informs her that it is impossible for a woman to be a great poet), the class structure, and the double standard for sexual morality.  Although the book does close with Aurora Leigh's marriage to the unpalatable Romney, it is marriage more or less on her terms as her lover, like Bronte's Mr. Rochester, is blind and chastened.  The work was briefly very popular and very controversial, but as Browning's place in the Victorian canon of great literature was increasingly consolidated within sentimental literature, those elements of her work that were overtly challenging or "unfeminine" dropped from view.  Thus the poem-novel was lost until feminists exhumed it in the 1970s and 80s.

After Aurora Leigh, Browning's work became increasingly and overtly political, concerning the abolition of slavery, the unification of Italy, and sexual politics.  While critics responded with a negativity that was calibrated to the degree of unfeminine politics present in any given work (never failing to acknowledge the poet's power or potential - if only it were turned to properly womanly  channels), Browning worked on with conviction.  In addition to broadening the range of topics a woman writer could handle, Browning also participated in the feminist tradition of seeking and employing intellectual foremothers.  While she lamented a lack of woman poets to whom she could turn for inspiration (previous English poets having been too restricted and prettified, in her opinion), she used the legacy of strong women intellectuals and writers like George Sand, Germaine de Stael, and Mary Wollstonecraft in her own writing.

Browning's marriage was a happy one, although it only yielded one child (and 4 miscarriages), and she fell in love with Italy.  However, her health deteriorated once again, and in she died in 1861 and was buried in Florence.  

Drawn from:

Beverly Taylor, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 199: Victorian Women Poets. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Edited by William B. Thesing, University of South Carolina. The Gale Group, 1999. pp. 79-99.

Browning E-Texts:

Aurora Leigh - http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/barrett/aurora/aurora.html

"The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point," gopher://dept.english.upenn.edu/00/Courses/Curran202/Barrett/slave

To Geoge Sand:  a Desire http://www.inform.umd.edu/EdRes/Topic/WomensStudies/ReadingRoom/Poetry/BarrettBrowning/Poemsof1844/to-george-sand-a-desire

To George Sand:  A Recognition http://www.inform.umd.edu/EdRes/Topic/WomensStudies/ReadingRoom/Poetry/BarrettBrowning/Poemsof1844/to-george-sand-a-recognition

Sonnets From the Portuguese:  http://www.inform.umd.edu/EdRes/Topic/WomensStudies/ReadingRoom/Poetry/BarrettBrowning/SonnetsFromThePortuguese/ or  Project Gutenberg Site:  ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext99/snprg10.txt 

WRITINGS BY THE AUTHOR:

BOOKS

• The Battle of Marathon: A Poem (London: W. Lindsell, 1820).
• An Essay on Mind, with Other Poems, anonymous (London: Duncan, 1826).
• Prometheus Bound, Translated from the Greek of Aeschylus; and Miscellaneous Poems, anonymous (London: A. J. Valpy, 1833; Boston: J. H. Francis / New York: C. S. Francis, 1851).
• The Seraphim and Other Poems (London: Saunders & Otley, 1838).
• Poems, 2 volumes (London: Moxon, 1844); republished as A Drama of Exile: And Other Poems, 2 volumes (New York: Langley, 1845).
• Poems: New Edition, 2 volumes (London: Chapman & Hall, 1850); republished as The Poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (New York: C. S. Francis / Boston: J. H. Francis, 1850).
• Casa Guidi Windows: A Poem (London: Chapman & Hall, 1851).
• Poems: Third Edition, 2 volumes (London: Chapman & Hall, 1853).
• Two Poems, by Browning and Robert Browning (London: Chapman & Hall, 1854).
• Poems: Fourth Edition, 3 volumes (London: Chapman & Hall, 1856).
• Aurora Leigh (London: Chapman & Hall, 1857; New York & Boston: C. S. Francis, 1857; revised, London: Chapman & Hall, 1859).
• Poems before Congress (London: Chapman & Hall, 1860); republished as Napoleon III in Italy, and Other Poems (New York: C. S. Francis, 1860).
• Last Poems (London: Chapman & Hall, 1862; New York: Miller, 1862).
• The Greek Christian Poets and the English Poets (London: Chapman & Hall, 1863); republished as Essays on the Greek Christian Poets and the English Poets (New York: Miller, 1863).
• Psyche Apocalypté: A Lyrical Drama, by Browning and Richard Hengist Horne (London & Aylesbury, U.K.: Privately printed, 1876).
• New Poems by Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, edited by Frederic G. Kenyon (London: Smith, Elder, 1914; New York: Macmillan, 1915).
• The Poet's Enchiridion, edited by H. Buxton Forman (Boston: Bibliophile Society, 1914).
• Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Hitherto Unpublished Poems and Stories, with an Inedited Autobiography, edited by Forman, 2 volumes (Boston: Bibliophile Society, 1914).
• Diary by E. B. B.: The Unpublished Diary of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1831-1832, edited by Philip Kelley and Ronald Hudson (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1969).
• Editions and Collections: The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 6 volumes (London: Smith, Elder, 1889-1890).
• The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, edited by Frederic G. Kenyon (London: Smith, Elder, 1897).
• The Complete Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Cambridge Edition, edited by Harriet Waters Preston (Boston & New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1900).
• The Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, edited by Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke, 6 volumes (New York: Crowell, 1900).
• Casa Guidi Windows, edited by Julia Markus (New York: Browning Institute, 1977).
• Aurora Leigh, edited by Margaret Reynolds (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1992).

OTHER

• "Queen Annelida and False Arcite" and "The Complaint of Annelida to False Arcite," in The Poems of Geoffrey Chaucer, Modernized (London: Whittaker, 1841), pp. 237-257.
• Richard Hengist Horne, ed., A New Spirit of the Age, includes anonymous contributions by Browning, 2 volumes (London: Smith, Elder, 1844).
• "The Daughters of Pandarus," two versions, from The Odyssey, by Homer, translated by Browning, in Memoirs and Essays Illustrative of Art, Literature, and Social Morals, edited by Anna Jameson (London: Bentley, 1846), pp. 137-138.

LETTERS

• Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, edited by Frederic G. Kenyon, 2 volumes (London & New York: Macmillan, 1898).
• Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Letters to Her Sister, 1846-1859, edited by Leonard Huxley (London: John Murray, 1929).
• Twenty-two Unpublished Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning Addressed to Henrietta and Arabella Moulton-Barrett (New York: United Feature Syndicate, 1935).
• Letters from Elizabeth Barrett to B. R. Haydon, edited by Martha Hale Shackford (New York: Oxford University Press, 1939).
• Elizabeth Barrett to Mr. Boyd: Unpublished Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Hugh Stuart Boyd, edited by Barbara P. McCarthy (London: John Murray, 1955; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955).
• Letters of the Brownings to George Barrett, edited by Paul Landis and Ronald E. Freeman (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1958).
• Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, 1845-1846, 2 volumes, edited by Elvan Kintner (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 1969).
• Invisible Friends: The Correspondence of Elizabeth Barrett Barrett and Benjamin Robert Haydon, 1842-1845, edited by Willard Bissell Pope (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972).
• Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Letters to Mrs. David Ogilvy 1849-1861, edited by Peter N. Heydon and Philip Kelley (New York: Quadrangle/New York Times and the Browning Institute, 1973).
• The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Mary Russell Mitford, 1836-1854, edited by Meredith B. Raymond and Mary Rose Sullivan (Waco, Tex.: Armstrong Browning Library of Baylor University, 1983).
• The Brownings' Correspondence, 13 volumes to date, edited by Philip Kelley, Ronald Hudson, and Scott Lewis, (Winfield, Kans.: Wedgestone Press, 1984- ).