‘One of those rare writers who risk themselves adventurously and disinterestedly in an imaginative life’ (Virginia Woolf). Eldest of eleven children of Mary Graham Clarke and Edward Moulton Barrett, whose wealth derived from Jamaican sugar plantations; he encouraged her warmly, publishing her Battle of Marathon in 1820. From childhood suffered from pulmonary troubles (possibly partly psychosomatic), becoming a persistent invalid, reclining in a darkened room. Father was notoriously possessive; her Poems of 1844 brought an admiring letter from Robert Browning (‘I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett’); after a secret courtship, they eloped and married in 1846 (her father never forgave her). Settled in Florence; in 1849 bore a son; in 1851 published Casa Guidi Windows on the Italian Risorgimento, and in 1856 her verse novel, Aurora Leigh, a succès de scandale, a romance on the role of woman and the problems of the poet; in her later years developed spiritualist tastes. At one time she was proposed as Poet Laureate, but her reputation collapsed by the end of the century; a revival seems under way.
The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (London: OUP, 1910); Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader, Second Series (London: Hogarth, 1932); Alethea Hayter, Mrs. Browning. A Poet’s Work and Its Setting (London: Faber; NY: Barnes and Noble, 1963); Peter Dally, Elizabeth Barrett Browning: A Psychological Portrait (London: Macmillan, 1989).