Browning, Elizabeth Barrett and Robert

(1806-1889)

   • Elizabeth Barrett, 1806-1861

   The daughter of a despotic father who owed his wealth to plantations in Jamaica, Elizabeth spent her childhood in Worcestershire, but illness struck when she was fifteen and left her an invalid. The family finally settled in Wimpole Street, London. Robert Browning, admiring her poetry, wrote to her; they met and fell in love. When her father refused his consent, they eloped and were married in Italy in 1846. Their only child, Robert, was born in 1849. Elizabeth was a prolific poet and in 1848 she wrote "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point," a protest against slavery in the United States. Her Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) (Portuguese was Robert's pet name for his wife) record her reluctance to marry. Her most ambitious work, Aurora Leigh (1857) is a long blank-verse poem telling the complicated and melodramatic love story of a young girl and a misguided philanthropist. Some of her other poems: "A Child Asleep," "Adequacy," "De Profundis," "The Cry of the Children," "The Exile's Return," "The House of Clouds," "The King's Gift," "The Mediator," "The Young Queen."

   • Robert, 1812-1889

   The son of a Bank of England clerk, his education was mainly his father's library. Browning's elopement with Elizabeth Barrett in 1846 gave rise to the 1943 film The Barretts of Wimpole Street. He was a prolific poet noted for his dramatic monologues and his psychological insight into human nature. He died in Italy and is buried in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey. The Ring and the Book in 1868-1869 is the story of a Roman murder trial in 12 books. His work was noticed by many influential poets, and The Monthly Repository published several of his poems. Between 1841 and 1846 Browning published Bells and Pomegranates, which included "How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix." Other well-known poems are: "The Pied Piper of Hamelin" and "Home Thoughts from Abroad," a poem written possibly in the heat of Italy, and its well-known first line: "Oh, to be in England now that April's there." Some of his other poems: "A Death in the Desert," "Belief and Unbelief," "Epigram on School Days," "Italy of the South," "Lines on Swinburne," "The Boy and the Angel," "The First-Born of Egypt."

   Sources: A Century of Sonnets: The Romantic-Era Revival 1750-1850. Paula R. Feldman and Daniel Robinson, ed. Oxford University Press, 1999. Bread and Roses: An Antholog y of Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Poetry by Women Writers. Diana Scott, ed. Virago Press, 1982. Dictionary of National Biography. Electronic Edition 1.1. Oxford University Press, 1997. Encyclopædia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite DVD, 2006. English Poetry: Author Search. Chadwyck-Healey Ltd., 1995 (http://www.lib. utexas.edu:8080/search/epoetry/author.html). Selected Poems of Robert Browning. Daniel Karlin, ed. Penguin Books, 1989. The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. 11th ed. The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 2005 (http://www.columbiagrangers.org). The Complete Poetical Works of Mrs. Browning (Elizabeth Barrett Browning ). Harriet Waters Preston, ed. Houghton Mifflin, 1900. The Family Book of Verse. Lewis Gannett, ed. Harper & Row, 1961. The National Portrait Gallery (www.npg.org.uk). The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th edition. Margaret Drabble, ed. Oxford University Press, 2000. Westminster Abbey Official Guide (no date).