Elizabeth Barrett Browning

In the 1840s, Elizabeth was introduced to literary society through her distant cousin and patron John Kenyon. Her first adult collection of poems was published in 1838, and she wrote prolifically from 1841 to 1844, producing poetry, translation, and prose. She campaigned for the abolition of slavery, and her work helped influence reform in child labour legislation. Her prolific output made her a rival to Tennyson as a candidate for poet laureate on the death of Wordsworth. Elizabeth's volume Poems (1844) brought her great success, attracting the admiration of the writer Robert Browning. Their correspondence, courtship, and marriage were carried out in secret, for fear of her father's disapproval. Following the wedding, she was indeed disinherited by her father. In 1846, the couple moved to Italy, where she lived for the rest of her life. Elizabeth died in Florence in 1861. A collection of her later poems was published by her husband shortly after her death.

They had a son, known as "Pen" (Robert Barrett, 1849–1912). Pen devoted himself to painting until his eyesight began to fail later in life. He also built a large collection of manuscripts and memorabilia of his parents, but because he died intestate, it was sold by public auction to various bidders and then scattered upon his death. The Armstrong Browning Library in Waco, Texas has recovered some of his collection, and it houses the world's largest collection of Browning memorabilia. Elizabeth's work had a major influence on prominent writers of the day, including the American poets Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Dickinson. She is remembered for such poems as "How Do I Love Thee?" (Sonnet 43, 1845) and Aurora Leigh (1856).

Life and career

Family background

Elizabeth Barrett had both maternal and paternal family who profited from slavery. Her father's family had lived in the colony of Jamaica since 1655, though her father chose to raise his family in England, while his business enterprises remained in Jamaica. Their wealth derived primarily from the ownership of slave plantations in the British West Indies. Edward Barrett owned 10,000 acres (40 km²) of land in the estates of Cinnamon Hill, Cornwall, Cambridge, and Oxford in northern Jamaica.

Elizabeth's maternal grandfather owned sugar plantations, sugar cane mills, glassworks and merchant ships, which traded between Jamaica and Newcastle upon Tyne.

The family wished to hand down their name, stipulating that Barrett always should be held as a surname. In some cases, inheritance was given on condition that the name be used by the beneficiary; the British upper class had long encouraged this sort of name changing. Given this strong tradition, Elizabeth used "Elizabeth Barrett Moulton Barrett" on legal documents, and before she was married, she often signed herself "Elizabeth Barrett Barrett" or "EBB" (initials which she was able to keep after her wedding).

Early life

Elizabeth Barrett Moulton-Barrett was born on (it is supposed) 6 March 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. However, biographers have suggested that, when she was christened on 9 March, she was already three or four months old, and that this was concealed because her parents had married only on 14 May 1805. Although she had already been baptised by a family friend in that first week of her life, she was baptised again, more publicly, on 10 February 1808 at Kelloe parish church, at the same time as her younger brother, Edward (known as Bro). He had been born in June 1807, 15 months after Elizabeth's stated date of birth. A private christening might seem unlikely for a family of standing, and while Bro's birth was celebrated with a holiday on the family's Caribbean plantations, Elizabeth's was not.

Elizabeth was the eldest of 12 children (eight boys and four girls). Eleven lived to adulthood; one daughter died at the age of 3, when Elizabeth was 8. The children all had nicknames: Elizabeth was Ba. She rode her pony, went for family walks and picnics, socialised with other county families, and participated in home theatrical productions. Unlike her siblings, she immersed herself in books as often as she could get away from the social rituals of her family.

In 1809, the family moved to Hope End, a 500-acre (200 ha) estate near the Malvern Hills in Ledbury, Herefordshire. Her father converted the Georgian house into stables and built a mansion of opulent Turkish design, which his wife described as something from the Arabian Nights' Entertainments.

The interior's brass balustrades, mahogany doors inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and finely carved fireplaces were eventually complemented by lavish landscaping: ponds, grottos, kiosks, an ice house, a hothouse, and a subterranean passage from house to gardens. Her time at Hope End inspired her in later life to write Aurora Leigh (1856), her most ambitious work, which went through more than 20 editions by 1900, but none from 1905 to 1978.

She was educated at home and tutored by Daniel McSwiney with her oldest brother. She began writing verses at the age of four. During the Hope End period, she was an intensely studious, precocious child. She claimed that she was reading novels at age 6, having been entranced by Pope's translations of Homer at age 8, studying Greek at age 10, and writing her own Homeric epic The Battle of Marathon: A Poem at age 14.

In 1820, Mr Barrett privately published The Battle of Marathon, an epic-style poem, but all copies remained within the family. Her mother compiled the child's poetry into collections of "Poems by Elizabeth B. Barrett". Her father called her the "Poet Laureate of Hope End" and encouraged her work. The result is one of the larger collections of juvenilia of any English writer. Mary Russell Mitford described the young Elizabeth at this time 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."

At about this time, Elizabeth began to battle an illness, which the medical science of the time was unable to diagnose. All three sisters came down with the syndrome, but it lasted only with Elizabeth. She had intense head and spinal pain with loss of mobility. Various biographies link this to a riding accident at the time (she fell while trying to dismount a horse), but there is no evidence to support the link. Sent to recover at the Gloucester spa, she was treated – in the absence of symptoms supporting another diagnosis – for a spinal problem. This illness continued for the rest of her life, and it is believed to be unrelated to the lung disease that she developed in 1837.

She began to take opiates for the pain, laudanum (an opium concoction) followed by morphine, then commonly prescribed. She became dependent on them for much of her adulthood; the use from an early age may well have contributed to her frail health. Biographers such as Alethea Hayter have suggested this dependency contributed to the wild vividness of her imagination and the poetry that it produced.

By 1821, after reading Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), she had become a passionate supporter of Wollstonecraft's political ideas. The child's intellectual fascination with the classics and metaphysics was reflected in a religious intensity that 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's mother died in 1828, and is buried at St Michael's Church, Ledbury, next to her daughter Mary. Sarah Graham-Clarke, Elizabeth's aunt, helped to care for the children, and she had clashes with Elizabeth's strong will. In 1831, Elizabeth's grandmother, Elizabeth Moulton, died. Following lawsuits and the abolition of slavery, Mr Barrett incurred great financial and investment losses that forced him to sell Hope End. Although the family was never poor, the place was seized and sold to satisfy creditors. Always secretive in his financial dealings, he would not discuss his situation, and the family was haunted by the idea that they might have to move to Jamaica.

From 1833 to 1835, she was living with her family at Belle Vue in Sidmouth. The site has been renamed Cedar Shade and redeveloped. A blue plaque at the entrance to the site attests to its previous existence. In 1838, some years after the sale of Hope End, the family settled at 50 Wimpole Street, Marylebone, London.

During 1837–1838, the poet was struck with illness again, with symptoms suggesting tuberculous ulceration of the lungs. The same year, at her physician's insistence, she moved from London to Torquay on the Devonshire coast. Her former home forms part of the Regina Hotel. Two tragedies then struck. In February 1840, her brother Samuel died of a fever in Jamaica, then her favourite brother Edward (Bro) was drowned in a sailing accident in Torquay in July. These events had a serious effect on her already fragile health. She felt guilty as her father had disapproved of Edward's trip to Torquay. She wrote to Mitford, "That was a very near escape from madness, absolute hopeless madness". The family returned to Wimpole Street in 1841.

Success

At Wimpole Street, Elizabeth spent most of her time in her upstairs room. Her health began to improve, but she saw few people other than her immediate family. One of those was John Kenyon, a wealthy friend and distant cousin of the family and patron of the arts. She received comfort from a spaniel named Flush, a gift from Mary Mitford. (Virginia Woolf later fictionalised the life of the dog, making him the protagonist of her 1933 novel Flush: A Biography).

From 1841 to 1844, Elizabeth was prolific in poetry, translation, and prose. The poem The Cry of the Children, published in 1843 in Blackwood's, condemned child labour and helped bring about child-labour reforms by raising support for Lord Shaftesbury's Ten Hours Bill (1844). About the same time, she contributed critical prose pieces to Richard Henry Horne's A New Spirit of the Age, including a laudatory essay on Thomas Carlyle.

In 1844, she published the two-volume Poems, which included "A Drama of Exile", "A Vision of Poets", and "Lady Geraldine's Courtship", and two substantial critical essays for 1842 issues of The Athenaeum. A self-proclaimed "adorer of Carlyle", she sent a copy to him as "a tribute of admiration & respect", which began a correspondence between them. "Since she was not burdened with any domestic duties expected of her sisters, Barrett Browning could now devote herself entirely to the life of the mind, cultivating an enormous correspondence, reading widely". Her prolific output made her a rival to Tennyson as a candidate for poet laureate in 1850 on the death of Wordsworth.

A Royal Society of Arts blue plaque commemorates Elizabeth at 50 Wimpole Street.

Robert Browning and Italy

Her 1844 volume Poems made her one of the more popular writers in the country and inspired Robert Browning to write to her. He wrote "I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett," praising their "fresh strange music, the affluent language, the exquisite pathos and true new brave thought."

Kenyon arranged for Browning to meet Elizabeth on 20 May 1845, in her rooms, and so began one of the most famous courtships in literature. Elizabeth had produced a large amount of work, but Browning had a great influence on her subsequent writing as did she on his: two of Barrett's most famous pieces were written after she met Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese and Aurora Leigh. Robert's Men and Women is also a product of that time.

Some critics state that her activity was, in some ways, in decay before she met Browning: "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."

The courtship and marriage between Robert Browning and Elizabeth were conducted secretly as she knew her father would disapprove. After a private marriage at St Marylebone Parish Church, they honeymooned in Paris and then moved to Italy in September 1846, which became their home almost continuously until her death. Elizabeth's loyal lady's maid Elizabeth Wilson witnessed the marriage and accompanied the couple to Italy.

Mr Barrett disinherited Elizabeth as he did each of his children who married. Elizabeth had foreseen her father's anger but had not anticipated her brothers' rejection. As Elizabeth had some money of her own, the couple were reasonably comfortable in Italy. The Brownings were well respected and even famous. Elizabeth grew stronger, and in 1849, at the age of 43, between four miscarriages, she gave birth to a son, Robert Wiedeman Barrett Browning, whom they called Pen. Their son later married, but had no legitimate children.

At her husband's insistence, Elizabeth's second edition of Poems included her love sonnets; as a result, her popularity increased (as did critical regard), and her artistic position was confirmed. During the years of her marriage, her literary reputation far surpassed that of her poet-husband; when visitors came to their home in Florence, she was invariably the greater attraction.

The couple came to know a wide circle of artists and writers, including William Makepeace Thackeray, sculptor Harriet Hosmer (who, she wrote, seemed to be the "perfectly emancipated female") and Harriet Beecher Stowe. In 1849, she met Margaret Fuller; Carlyle in 1851; French novelist George Sand in 1852, whom she had long admired. Among her intimate friends in Florence was the writer Isa Blagden, whom she encouraged to write novels. They met Alfred Tennyson in Paris, and John Forster, Samuel Rogers and the Carlyles in London, later befriending Charles Kingsley and John Ruskin.

Decline and death

After the death of an old friend, G. B. Hunter, and then of her father, Barrett Browning's health started to deteriorate. The Brownings moved from Florence to Siena, residing at the Villa Alberti. Engrossed in Italian politics, she issued a small volume of political poems titled Poems before Congress (1860) "most of which were written to express her sympathy with the Italian cause after the outbreak of fighting in 1859". They caused a furore in Britain, and the conservative magazines Blackwood's and the Saturday Review labelled her a fanatic. She dedicated this book to her husband. Her last work was A Musical Instrument, published posthumously.

Barrett Browning's sister Henrietta died in November 1860. The couple spent the winter of 1860–1861 in Rome where Barrett Browning's health deteriorated, and they returned to Florence in early June 1861. She became gradually weaker, using morphine to ease her pain. She died on 29 June 1861 in her husband's arms. Browning said that she died "smilingly, happily, and with a face like a girl's...Her last word was...'Beautiful' ". She was buried in the Protestant English Cemetery of Florence. "On Monday July 1 the shops in the area around Casa Guidi were closed, while Elizabeth was mourned with unusual demonstrations." The nature of her illness is still unclear. Some modern scientists speculate her illness may have been hypokalemic periodic paralysis, a genetic disorder that causes weakness and many of the other symptoms she described.