Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poetry moved between private feeling and public argument. The sonnets later gathered as Sonnets from the Portuguese gave lasting form to love and vulnerability; poems such as The Cry of the Children and Aurora Leigh addressed child labour, women’s lives and the work of the artist. Born in County Durham, she became a popular poet in Britain and the United States, and her writing continues to be read for its formal ambition as well as its social and political concerns.
A precocious writer in a complicated family
Elizabeth Barrett Moulton-Barrett was born on 6 March 1806 at Coxhoe Hall in County Durham, the eldest of 12 children. Educated at home, she began writing verse as a child. At about 14 she wrote The Battle of Marathon: A Poem, which her father had privately printed in 1820. Her mother gathered her early poems, leaving an unusually substantial record of her work as a young writer.
Her family’s history was tied to wealth from the British West Indies. Both her maternal and paternal families profited from slavery, and her father’s business interests remained connected to Jamaica while he raised his children in England. Barrett Browning later opposed slavery and wrote poems including “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point” and “A Curse for a Nation” in support of abolition. Her own position makes the family connection significant: she wrote against an institution from which her relatives had benefited.
In 1809 the family moved to Hope End, an estate near Ledbury in Herefordshire. Its landscape later informed Aurora Leigh. Financial losses forced her father to sell the estate, and the family eventually settled in London. Barrett Browning’s health had become fragile from adolescence: severe head and spinal pain persisted through her life, and she later developed lung problems. These conditions restricted her activities but did not prevent her from writing poetry, translation and prose.
Poetry, public questions and recognition
Her early publications included An Essay on Mind, with Other Poems (1826), a translation of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound (1833), and The Seraphim, and Other Poems (1838), her first mature collection under her own name. She wrote prolifically in the early 1840s. “The Cry of the Children”, published in 1843, condemned child labour and helped build support for reform. Her 1844 collection Poems brought wider success and established her as a major figure in literary life.
Her work also engaged with slavery and other social questions. Alongside poetry, she wrote criticism and addressed religious and political subjects. After Wordsworth’s death in 1850, her prolific output made her a candidate for poet laureate; Alfred Tennyson received the appointment. Barrett Browning’s reputation already extended beyond Britain: she was widely read in both Britain and the United States during her lifetime.
Robert Browning, the sonnets and Italy
The 1844 Poems impressed Robert Browning, who wrote to tell her how much he admired them. They met in 1845 after the writer and patron John Kenyon introduced them. Their courtship was secret because Barrett Browning expected her father to disapprove. They married at St Marylebone Parish Church in 1846, then moved to Italy that September. Her father disinherited her, as he did his children who married against his wishes.
Sonnets from the Portuguese, published in 1850, contains 44 sonnets, including “How Do I Love Thee?” (Sonnet 43). The poems give intimate expression to love while presenting a speaker with emotional and intellectual agency. The title’s origins are debated: Robert Browning called Elizabeth “my little Portuguese”, and the title may also refer to the Portuguese poet Luís de Camões.
In Italy, Barrett Browning continued to write and engaged with the country’s politics. Casa Guidi Windows (1851) and Poems Before Congress (1860) reflect her interest in Italian affairs. The latter collection, written in sympathy with the Italian cause, drew hostile responses from conservative British publications. In 1849 she gave birth to a son, Robert Wiedeman Barrett Browning, known as Pen.
Aurora Leigh and a woman’s working life
Published in 1856, Aurora Leigh is a verse-novel about a woman writer negotiating work, love and social expectation. Its heroine’s ambition gives the poem a sustained interest in women’s ability to create and shape independent lives. Barrett Browning combined the scale of epic poetry with narrative movement and social observation associated with the Victorian novel.
The poem connects the struggle to become an artist with the conventions and material conditions that constrain women. It has accordingly been read in relation to women’s rights and social reform. The American women’s rights activist Susan B. Anthony drew on the poem, while feminist scholarship in the 1970s and 1980s helped renew critical attention to Barrett Browning after a period of comparatively limited scholarly interest.
Her influence was evident among writers in her own lifetime. Edgar Allan Poe admired her poetry and dedicated The Raven and Other Poems to her; Emily Dickinson also drew inspiration from her work. Barrett Browning was not simply discovered by later readers: she was popular on both sides of the Atlantic while alive. Readers have since returned to her writing for its formal range and its treatment of gender, political responsibility and injustice.
Final thoughts
After her health deteriorated, Barrett Browning and her husband moved from Florence to Siena, then returned to Florence in 1861. She died there on 29 June, aged 55, and was buried in the city’s Protestant English Cemetery. Her husband published a collection of her later poems after her death. A five-volume scholarly edition of her works appeared in 2010, part of a broader renewal of critical attention to her writing.
Her remembrance has a local presence in Ledbury, where an institute in her honour was completed in 1896. It served as the town’s public library from 1938 until 2021 and is now the headquarters of the Ledbury Poetry Festival. That history links a poet whose life connected County Durham, Herefordshire and London with a literary career that reached an international readership.
Why Elizabeth Barrett Browning deserves a place in British Legacy
Elizabeth Barrett Browning deserves a place in British Legacy because she made poetry a means of addressing the conditions of life as well as the intensity of private feeling. “The Cry of the Children” condemned child labour and helped build support for reform. Her anti-slavery poems took a clear position against an institution that had enriched her family. In Aurora Leigh, she gave a woman artist the centre of a long narrative, examining the pressures on women’s work and the possibility of an independent creative life. These achievements show how she used poetic form, character and argument to bring social questions into literature.
Her career also connects British literary history with readers and writers elsewhere. Popular in Britain and the United States during her lifetime, she influenced figures including Poe and Dickinson. Her writing on Italy extended her political concerns beyond Britain, while the sonnets remain a particularly familiar part of a wider body of work that also includes translation, criticism and political poetry. In Ledbury, the institute that bears her name has served the town as a library and now houses the poetry festival’s headquarters. Remembering Barrett Browning means recognising both the emotional force of her love poems and the intelligence with which she addressed labour, slavery, women’s lives and public responsibility.
Sources
Elizabeth Barrett Browning — Wikipedia revision
Adapted in part from Elizabeth Barrett Browning by Wikipedia contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0. Text has been edited and combined with the existing article; this adapted text is shared under the same licence. Contributor history.