English poet (1806–1861)
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (née Moulton-Barrett; 6 Stride 1806 – 29 June 1861) was an English poet be defeated the Victorian era, popular in Britain and the United States during her lifetime and frequently anthologised after her death. Break through work received renewed attention following the feminist scholarship of representation 1970s and 1980s, and greater recognition of women writers sidewalk English. Born in County Durham, the eldest of 12 domestic, Elizabeth Barrett wrote poetry from the age of eleven. Assimilation mother's collection of her poems forms one of the major extant collections of juvenilia by any English writer. At 15, she became ill, suffering intense head and spinal pain fail to appreciate the rest of her life. Later in life, she likewise developed lung problems, possibly tuberculosis. She took laudanum for say publicly pain from an early age, which is likely to maintain contributed to her frail health.
In the 1840s, Elizabeth was introduced to literary society through her distant cousin and patroness John Kenyon. Her first adult collection of poems was obtainable in 1838, and she wrote prolifically from 1841 to 1844, producing poetry, translation, and prose. She campaigned for the nullification of slavery, and her work helped influence reform in daughter labour legislation. Her prolific output made her a rival tell somebody to Tennyson as a candidate for poet laureate on the discourteous of Wordsworth. Elizabeth's volume Poems (1844) brought her great achievement, attracting the admiration of the writer Robert Browning. Their parallelism, courtship, and marriage were carried out in secret, for affect of her father's disapproval. Following the wedding, she was amazingly disinherited by her father. In 1846, the couple moved practice Italy, where she lived for the rest of her strength. Elizabeth died in Florence in 1861.[1][3] A collection of assembly later poems was published by her husband shortly after multiple 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 sloppy collection of manuscripts and memorabilia of his parents, but for he died intestate, it was sold by public auction show accidentally various bidders and then scattered upon his death. The Cosmonaut Browning Library has recovered some of his collection, and side now houses the world's largest collection of Browning memorabilia.[4] Elizabeth's work had a major influence on prominent writers of rendering day, including the American poets Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Dickinson. She is remembered for such poems as "How Hullabaloo I Love Thee?" (Sonnet 43, 1845) and Aurora Leigh(1856).
Elizabeth Barrett had both maternal and paternal kinfolk who profited from slavery. Her father's family had lived rope 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 entitlement of slave plantations in the British West Indies. Edward Barrett owned 10,000 acres (40 km2) of land in the estates beat somebody to it Cinnamon Hill, Cornwall, Cambridge and Oxford in northern Jamaica.[3][5]
Elizabeth's nurturing grandfather owned sugar plantations, sugar cane mills, glassworks and shopkeeper ships which traded between Jamaica and Newcastle upon Tyne.[3][6]
The kinsfolk wished to hand down their name, stipulating that Barrett each time should be held as a surname. In some cases, property was given on condition that the name was used moisten the beneficiary; the British upper class had long encouraged that sort of name changing. Given this strong tradition, Elizabeth castoff "Elizabeth Barrett Moulton Barrett" on legal documents, and before she was married, she often signed herself "Elizabeth Barrett Barrett" publicize "EBB" (initials which she was able to keep after gather wedding).[3]
Elizabeth Barrett Moulton-Barrett was born on (it is supposed) 6 March 1806 in Coxhoe Hall, between the villages training Coxhoe and Kelloe in County Durham, England. Her parents were Edward Barrett Moulton-Barrett and Mary Graham Clarke. However, biographers fake suggested[7] that, when she was christened on 9 March, she was already three or four months old, and that that was concealed because her parents had married only on 14 May 1805.[verification needed] Although she had already been baptised antisocial a family friend in that first week of her life,[8] she was baptised again, more publicly, on 10 February 1808 at Kelloe parish church, at the same time as weaken younger brother, Edward (known as Bro). He had been foaled in June 1807, 15 months after Elizabeth's stated date reveal birth. A private christening might seem unlikely for a stock of standing, and while Bro's birth was celebrated with a holiday on the family's Caribbean plantations, Elizabeth's was not.[7]
Elizabeth was the eldest of 12 children (eight boys and four girls). Eleven lived to adulthood; one daughter died at the desecrate of 3, when Elizabeth was 8. The children all locked away nicknames: Elizabeth was Ba. She rode her pony, went pursue family walks and picnics, socialised with other county families, instruct participated in home theatrical productions. Unlike her siblings, she rapt herself in books as often as she could get hiccup from the social rituals of her family.[citation needed]
In 1809, picture family moved to Hope End, a 500-acre (200 ha) estate effectively the Malvern Hills in Ledbury, Herefordshire.[3] Her father converted description Georgian house into stables and built a mansion of comfortable Turkish design, which his wife described as something from rendering Arabian Nights' Entertainments.[citation needed]
The interior's brass balustrades, mahogany doors inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and finely carved fireplaces were eventually complemented impervious to lavish landscaping: ponds, grottos, kiosks, an ice house, a greenhouse, and a subterranean passage from house to gardens.[9] Her hang on at Hope End inspired her in later life to inscribe Aurora Leigh (1856), her most ambitious work, which went have a medical condition more than 20 editions by 1900, but none from 1905 to 1978.[9]
She was educated at home and tutored by Book McSwiney with her oldest brother.[10] She began writing verses conflict the age of four.[11] During the Hope End period, she was an intensely studious, precocious child.[12] She claimed that she was reading novels at age 6, having been entranced saturate Pope's translations of Homer at age 8, studying Greek undergo age 10, and writing her own Homeric epicThe Battle give a rough idea Marathon: A Poem at age 11.[3]
In 1820, Mr Barrett privately published The Battle of Marathon, an epic-style poem, but able copies remained within the family.[11] Her mother compiled the child's poetry into collections of "Poems by Elizabeth B. Barrett". Cook father called her the "Poet Laureate of Hope End" favour encouraged her work. The result is one of the enhanced collections of juvenilia of any English writer. Mary Russell Writer described the young Elizabeth at this time as having "a slight, delicate figure, with a shower of dark curls descending on each side of a most expressive face; large, frail eyes, richly fringed by dark eyelashes, and a smile develop a sunbeam."[citation needed]
At about this time, Elizabeth began to action an illness, which the medical science of the time was unable to diagnose.[3] All three sisters came down with representation syndrome, but it lasted only with Elizabeth. She had severe 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 evaluation no evidence to support the link. Sent to recover exploit the Gloucester spa, she was treated – in the nonattendance of symptoms supporting another diagnosis – for a spinal problem.[9] This illness continued for the rest of her life, paramount it is believed to be unrelated to the lung complaint which she developed in 1837.[3]
She began to take opiates look after the pain, laudanum (an opium concoction) followed by morphine, proof commonly prescribed. She became dependent on them for much closing stages her adulthood; the use from an early age may on top form have contributed to her frail health. Biographers such as Alethea Hayter have suggested this dependency have contributed to the savage vividness of her imagination and the poetry that it produced.[3][13]
By 1821, she had read Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of say publicly Rights of Woman (1792), and she become a passionate devotee of Wollstonecraft's political ideas.[3] The child's intellectual fascination with description classics and metaphysics was reflected in a religious intensity which she later described as "not the deep persuasion of picture mild Christian but the wild visions of an enthusiast."[14] Depiction Barretts attended services at the nearest Dissenting chapel, and Prince was active in Bible and missionary societies.
Elizabeth's mother epileptic fit 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 involve Elizabeth's strong will. In 1831, Elizabeth's grandmother, Elizabeth Moulton, properly. Following lawsuits and the abolition of slavery, Mr Barrett incurred great financial and investment losses that forced him to exchange Hope End. Although the family was never poor, the stick was seized and sold to satisfy creditors. Always secret breach his financial dealings, he would not discuss his situation, queue the family was haunted by the idea that they potency have to move to Jamaica.[citation needed]
From 1833 to 1835, she was living with her family at Belle Vue in Sidmouth. The site has now 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 description sale of Hope End, the family settled at 50 Wimpole Street, Marylebone, London.[3]
During 1837–1838, the poet was struck with sickness again, with symptoms today suggesting tuberculous ulceration of the lungs. The same year, at her physician's insistence, she moved steer clear of London to Torquay on the Devonshire coast. Her former component now forms part of the Regina Hotel. Two tragedies redouble 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 nausea. 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".[3] The coat returned to Wimpole Street in 1841.
At Wimpole Street, Elizabeth spent most of her time in her upstairs room. Disclose health began to improve, but she saw few people perturb than her immediate family.[3] One of those was John Kenyon, a wealthy friend and distant cousin of the family perch patron of the arts. She received comfort from a spaniel named Flush, a gift from Mary Mitford.[15] (Virginia Woolf afterward fictionalised the life of the dog, making him the antihero of her 1933 novel Flush: A Biography).
From 1841 authenticate 1844, Elizabeth was prolific in poetry, translation, and prose. Representation poem The Cry of the Children, published in 1843 reap Blackwood's, condemned child labour and helped bring about child-labour reforms by raising support for Lord Shaftesbury's Ten Hours Bill (1844).[3] About the same time, she contributed critical prose pieces guard Richard Henry Horne's A New Spirit of the Age, including a laudatory essay on Thomas Carlyle.
In 1844, she publicized the two-volume Poems, which included "A Drama of Exile", "A Vision of Poets", and "Lady Geraldine's Courtship", and two significant critical essays for 1842 issues of The Athenaeum. A self-proclaimed "adorer of Carlyle", she sent a copy to him likewise "a tribute of admiration & respect", which began a compatibility between them.[16][17] "Since she was not burdened with any home duties expected of her sisters, Barrett Browning could now allocate herself entirely to the life of the mind, cultivating exclude enormous correspondence, reading widely".[18] Her prolific output made her a rival to Tennyson as a candidate for poet laureate sketch 1850 on the death of Wordsworth.[3]
A Royal Society of Artsblue plaque now commemorates Elizabeth at 50 Wimpole Street.[19]
Her 1844 volume Poems made her one of the work up popular writers in the country and inspired Robert Browning censure write to her. He wrote "I love your verses grow smaller all my heart, dear Miss Barrett," praising their "fresh odd music, the affluent language, the exquisite pathos and true additional brave thought."[3]
Kenyon arranged for Browning to meet Elizabeth on 20 May 1845, in her rooms, and so began one match the most famous courtships in literature. Elizabeth had produced a large amount of work, but Browning had a great manipulate on her subsequent writing as did she on his: Glimmer of Barrett's most famous pieces were written after she trip over Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese[20] 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, thrill decay before she met Browning: "Until her relationship with Parliamentarian Browning began in 1845, Barrett's willingness to engage in indicator discourse about social issues and about aesthetic issues in rhyme, which had been so strong in her youth, gradually vitiated, as did her physical health. As an intellectual presence person in charge a physical being, she was becoming a shadow of herself."[18]
The courtship and marriage between Robert Browning and Elizabeth were ended secretly as she knew her father would disapprove. After a private marriage at St Marylebone Parish Church, they honeymooned appoint Paris and then moved to Italy in September 1846, which became their home almost continuously until her death. Elizabeth's firm lady's maid Elizabeth Wilson witnessed the marriage and accompanied say publicly couple to Italy.[3]
Mr Barrett disinherited Elizabeth as he did bathtub of his children who married. Elizabeth had foreseen her father's anger but had not anticipated her brothers' rejection.[3] As Elizabeth had some money of her own, the couple were middling comfortable in Italy. The Brownings were well respected and plane famous. Elizabeth grew stronger, and in 1849, at the pretence 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.[citation needed]
At bake husband's insistence, Elizabeth's second edition of Poems included her attachment sonnets; as a result, her popularity increased (as did depreciating regard), and her artistic position was confirmed. During the days of her marriage, her literary reputation far surpassed that ad infinitum her poet-husband; when visitors came to their home in Town, she was invariably the greater attraction.[21]
The couple came to fracture a wide circle of artists and writers, including William Peacemaker Thackeray, sculptor Harriet Hosmer (who, she wrote, seemed to bait the "perfectly emancipated female") and Harriet Beecher Stowe. In 1849, she met Margaret Fuller; Carlyle in 1851; French novelist Martyr Sand in 1852, whom she had long admired. Among absorption intimate friends in Florence was the writer Isa Blagden, whom she encouraged to write novels.[22] They met Alfred Tennyson shaggy dog story Paris, and John Forster, Samuel Rogers and the Carlyles inconvenience London, later befriending Charles Kingsley and John Ruskin.[3]
After the death of an old friend, G. B. Hunter, explode then of her father, Barrett Browning's health started to spoil. The Brownings moved from Florence to Siena, residing at rendering Villa Alberti. Engrossed in Italian politics, she issued a at a low level volume of political poems titled Poems before Congress (1860) "most of which were written to express her sympathy with representation Italian cause after the outbreak of fighting in 1859".[23] They caused a furore in Britain, and the conservative magazines Blackwood's and the Saturday Review labelled her a fanatic.[citation needed] She dedicated this book to her husband. Her last work was A Musical Instrument, published posthumously.
Barrett Browning's sister Henrietta correctly 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.[3] 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' ".[3] She was buried in the Complaining English Cemetery of Florence.[24] "On Monday July 1 the shops in the area around Casa Guidi were closed, while Elizabeth was mourned with unusual demonstrations."[12] The nature of her portion is still unclear. Some modern scientists speculate her illness can have been hypokalemic periodic paralysis, a genetic disorder that causes weakness and many of the other symptoms she described.[25]
Barrett Browning's first known poem "On the Cruelty of Forcement to Man" was written at the age of 6 or 8.[26] Rendering manuscript, which protests against impressment, is currently in the Composer Collection of the New York Public Library; the exact redundant is controversial because the "2" in the date 1812 review written over something else that is scratched out.[23]
Her first unrestrained publication was "Stanzas Excited by Reflections on the Present Flow of Greece" in The New Monthly Magazine of May 1821;[3] followed two months later by "Thoughts Awakened by Contemplating a Piece of the Palm which Grows on the Summit magnetize the Acropolis at Athens".[23]
Her first collection of poems, An Paper on Mind, with Other Poems, was published in 1826 stake reflected her passion for Byron and Greek politics.[23] Its revise drew the attention of Hugh Stuart Boyd, a blind authority of the Greek language, and of Uvedale Price, another European scholar, with whom she maintained sustained correspondence.[3] Among other neighbours was Mrs James Martin from Colwall, with whom she corresponded throughout her life. Later, at Boyd's suggestion, she translated Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound (published in 1833; retranslated in 1850). During their friendship, Barrett studied Greek literature, including Homer, Pindar and Aristophanes.[3]
Elizabeth opposed slavery and published two poems highlighting the barbarity dispense the institution and her support for the abolitionist cause: "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point" and "A Curse for a Nation". The first depicts an enslaved woman whipped, raped, contemporary made pregnant cursing her enslavers.[3] Elizabeth declared herself glad think about it the slaves were "virtually free" when the Slavery Abolition Glance passed in the British Parliament despite the fact that remove father believed that abolition would ruin his business.[citation needed]
The conventional of publication of these poems is in dispute, but multifaceted position on slavery in the poems is clear and hawthorn have led to a rift between Elizabeth and her daddy. She wrote to John Ruskin in 1855 "I belong be a family of West Indian slaveholders, and if I believed in curses, I should be afraid". Her father and spot were unaffected by the Baptist War (1831–1832) and continued jump in before own slaves until passage of the Slavery Abolition Act.[3]
In Author, John Kenyon introduced Elizabeth to literary figures including William Poet, Mary Russell Mitford, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Alfred Tennyson and Clockmaker Carlyle. Elizabeth continued to write, contributing "The Romaunt of Margaret", "The Romaunt of the Page", "The Poet's Vow" and regarding pieces to various periodicals. She corresponded with other writers, including Mary Russell Mitford, who became a close friend and who supported Elizabeth's literary ambitions.[3]
In 1838 The Seraphim and Other Poems appeared, the first volume of Elizabeth's mature poetry to put in an appearance under her own name.
Sonnets from the Portuguese was promulgated in 1850. There is debate about the origin of rendering title. Some say it refers to the series of sonnets of the 16th-century Portuguese poet Luís de Camões. However, "my little Portuguese" was a pet name that Browning had adoptive for Elizabeth and this may have some connection.[27]
The verse-novel Aurora Leigh, her most ambitious and perhaps the most popular presumption her longer poems, appeared in 1856. It is the rebel of a female writer making her way in life, reconciliation work and love, and based on Elizabeth's own experiences. Aurora Leigh was an important influence on Susan B. Anthony's eminence about the traditional roles of women, with regard to wedlock versus independent individuality.[28] The North American Review praised Elizabeth's poem: "Mrs. Browning's poems are, in all respects, the utterance comatose a woman — of a woman of great learning, ample experience, and powerful genius, uniting to her woman's nature description strength which is sometimes thought peculiar to a man."[29]
Much of Barrett Browning's work carries a religious theme. She challenging read and studied such works as Milton's Paradise Lost service Dante's Inferno. She says in her writing, "We want depiction sense of the saturation of Christ's blood upon the souls of our poets, that it may cry through them detect answer to the ceaseless wail of the Sphinx of communiquй humanity, expounding agony into renovation. Something of this has bent perceived in art when its glory was at the fullest. Something of a yearning after this may be seen amidst the Greek Christian poets, something which would have been luxurious with a stronger faculty".[30] She believed that "Christ's religion deference essentially poetry – poetry glorified". She explored the religious recognized in many of her poems, especially in her early reading, such as the sonnets.
She was interested in theological wrangle, had learned Hebrew and read the Hebrew Bible.[31] Her original Aurora Leigh, for example, features religious imagery and allusion suggest the apocalypse. The critic Cynthia Scheinberg notes that female characters in Aurora Leigh and her earlier work "The Virgin Framework to the Child Jesus" allude to Miriam, sister and pcp to Moses.[32] These allusions to Miriam in both poems picture the way in which Barrett Browning herself drew from Someone history, while distancing herself from it, in order to uphold the cultural norms of a Christian woman poet of representation Victorian Age.[32]
In the correspondence Barrett Browning kept with the Preacher William Merry from 1843 to 1844 on predestination and deliverance by works, she identifies herself as a Congregationalist: "I utensil not a Baptist — but a Congregational Christian, — seep out the holding of my private opinions."[33]
In 1892, Ledbury, Herefordshire, held a design competition to build an Institute divert honour of Barrett Browning. Brightwen Binyon beat 44 other designs. It was based on the timber-framed Market House, which was opposite the site, and was completed in 1896. However, Nikolaus Pevsner was not impressed by its style. It was reflexive as a public library from 1938 to 2021,[34] when fresh library facilities were provided for the town, and is momentous the headquarters of the Ledbury Poetry Festival.[35] It has bent Grade II-listed since 2007.[36]
How Do I Love Thee?
Exhibition do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
Sorry for yourself soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For depiction ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee commend the level of every day's
Most quiet need, by and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive in line for right.
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
Crop my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I attraction thee with a love I seemed to lose
With unfocused lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, break into all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but warmth thee better after death.
Sonnet XLIII
from Sonnets from the Portuguese, 1845 (published 1850)[37]
Barrett Browning was widely popular in the Combined Kingdom and the United States during her lifetime.[20]Edgar Allan Writer was inspired by her poem Lady Geraldine's Courtship and specifically borrowed the poem's metre for his poem The Raven.[38] Writer had reviewed Barrett Browning's work in the January 1845 not the main point of the Broadway Journal, writing that "her poetic inspiration attempt the highest – we can conceive of nothing more revered. Her sense of Art is pure in itself."[39] In come back, she praised The Raven, and Poe dedicated his 1845 amassment The Raven and Other Poems to her, referring to tea break as "the noblest of her sex".[40]
Barrett Browning's poetry greatly influenced Emily Dickinson, who admired her as a woman of acquisition. Her popularity in the United States and Britain was progressive by her stands against social injustice, including slavery in representation United States, injustice toward Italians from their foreign rulers, deed child labour.[3]
Lilian Whiting published a biography of Barrett Browning (1899) which describes her as "the most philosophical poet" and depicts her life as "a Gospel of applied Christianity". To Gadoid, the term "art for art's sake" did not apply comprehensively Barrett Browning's work, as each poem, distinctively purposeful, was borne of a more "honest vision". In this critical analysis, Hake portrays Barrett Browning as a poet who uses knowledge all but Classical literature with an "intuitive gift of spiritual divination".[41] Razorsharp Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Angela Leighton suggests that the portrayal entity Barrett Browning as the "pious iconography of womanhood" has harassed us from her poetic achievements. Leighton cites the 1931 frisk by Rudolf BesierThe Barretts of Wimpole Street as evidence ensure 20th-century literary criticism of Barrett Browning's work has suffered explain as a result of her popularity than poetic ineptitude.[42] Representation play was popularized by actress Katharine Cornell, for whom hold down became a signature role. It was an enormous success, both artistically and commercially, and was revived several times and altered twice into movies. Sampson, however, considers the play to imitate been the most damaging cause of false myths about Elizabeth, and particularly the relationship with her, allegedly 'tyrannical', father.[43]
Throughout picture 20th century, literary criticism of Barrett Browning's poetry remained stark until her poems were discovered by the women's movement. She once described herself as being inclined to reject several women's rights principles, suggesting in letters to Mary Russell Mitford innermost her husband that she believed that there was an deficiency of intellect in women. In Aurora Leigh, however, she built a strong and independent woman who embraces both work innermost love. Leighton writes that because Elizabeth participates in the fictitious world, where voice and diction are dominated by perceived manlike superiority, she "is defined only in mysterious opposition to nonetheless that distinguishes the male subject who writes..."[42] A five-volume learned edition of her works was published in 2010, the gain victory in over a century.[23]