Elizabeth spent her youth at Hope End near
Great Malvern, England. The Barrett family had amassed a considerable fortune from the Jamaican sugar plantations inherited by her father, Edward Moulton Barrett, who was born there. The Barretts had been associated with Jamaica for generations. As a boy he emigrated to England with his brother and sister (she is the subject of the painting
"Pinkie" in the
Huntington Museum). He and his wife, Mary Graham-Clarke, were parents of twelve children (Elizabeth was the eldest). Elizabeth was educated at home and attended lessons with her brother's tutor and was thus well-educated for a girl of that time.
In her early teens, Elizabeth contracted a lung complaint, possibly
tuberculosis, although the exact nature of her illness has been the subject of speculation. She was subsequently regarded as an invalid by her family. The first poem we have a record of is from the age of six or eight (the manuscript is in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library; the date is in question because the 2 in the date 1812 is written over something else that is scratched out). A long
Homeric poem titled "The Battle of Marathon" was published when she was fourteen, her father underwriting its cost. In 1826 she published her first collection of poems, "An Essay on Mind and Other Poems." Its publication drew the attention of a blind scholar of the
Greek language, Hugh Stuart Boyd, and another Greek scholar, Uvedale Price, with both of whom she maintained a scholarly correspondence. At Boyd's suggestion, she translated
Aeschylus's "
Prometheus Bound" (published in 1833; retranslated in 1850).
The abolition of
slavery, a cause which she supported (see her work
The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point (1849)), considerably reduced Mr. Barrett's means. He sold his estate and moved with his family first to
Sidmouth and afterwards to
London. After the move to London, she continued to write, contributing to various periodicals "The Romaunt of Margaret", "The Romaunt of the Page", "The Poet's Vow", and other pieces, and corresponded with literary figures of the time, including
Mary Russell Mitford. In 1838 appeared
The Seraphim and Other Poems.
The death of her brother, Edward, who drowned in a sailing accident at Torquay in 1840, had a serious effect on her already fragile health; and for several years she rarely left her bedroom. Eventually, however, she regained strength, and meanwhile her fame was growing. The publication in 1843 of "The Cry of the Children" gave it a great impulse, and about the same time she contributed some critical papers in prose to
Richard Henry Horne's A New Spirit of the Age. In 1844 she published two volumes of
Poems, which included "A Drama of Exile", "Vision of Poets", and "Lady Geraldine's Courtship".
In 1845 she met her future husband,
Robert Browning, who had written to her after the publication of her
Poems. Their courtship and marriage, owing to her delicate health and the extraordinary objections made by Mr. Barrett to the marriage of any of his children, were carried out secretly. After a private marriage at
St Marylebone Parish Church, she accompanied her husband to the
Italian Peninsula, which became her home almost continuously until her death.
The union proved a happy one. In her new circumstances Elizabeth's strength greatly increased, and she gave birth to a son, Robert Wiedemann Barrett Browning, called "Pen," at the age of 43. The Brownings settled in
Florence, and there she wrote
Casa Guidi Windows (1851) under the inspiration of the Tuscan struggle for liberty, with which she and her husband were in sympathy. In Florence she became close friend of British-born poets Isabella Blagden and Theodosia Trollope Garrow.
The verse-novel
Aurora Leigh, her most ambitious, and perhaps the most popular of her longer poems, appeared in 1856. It is the story of a woman writer making her way in life, balancing work and love.
Among Browning's best known lyrics is Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) - the 'Portuguese' being her husband's petname for dark-haired Elizabeth. The title also refers to the series of sonnets of the 16th-century Portuguese poet
Luis de Camões; in all these poems she used rhyme schemes typical of the Portuguese sonnets. In 1860 she issued a small volume of political poems titled
Poems before Congress. Her health underwent a change for the worse; she gradually lost strength, and died on
June 29, 1861. She is buried in the
English Cemetery, Florence.
Mrs. Browning was a woman of singular nobility and charm.
Mary Russell Mitford described her as a young woman: "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."
Anne Thackeray Ritchie described her as: "Very small and brown" with big, exotic eyes and an overgenerous mouth.
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