(If you saw this post in your inbox twice, that's because I accidentally published it Sunday afternoon instead of scheduling to post it on Monday. So I unpublished it, and here it is again. Not sure if that will make it show up in your email twice or what. Sorry about that!)
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| Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) |
Elizabeth Barrett Browning was born in pastoral England to a wealthy family. She enjoyed a happy and carefree childhood with reading books and playing with her eleven siblings. She wrote her first poem when she was four years old; by the time she was ten, she was reading Shakespeare. Her idyllically bookish childhood changed dramatically when she fell ill at the age of 15, possibly due to an injury to her spine. She became a semi-invalid and suffered from neck and spine pain for the rest of her life.
In the 1830s, Elizabeth's father moved the family to London. Her health was still not good, but she began having some of her poetry published in London periodicals. She released her first book, The Seraphim and Other Poems, in 1838. Reviews in both England and America were overwhelmingly positive, and her name became known among literary critics and readers alike.
In 1840, Elizabeth's favorite brother Edward, who was her best friend and favorite companion, drowned. Elizabeth had been shy before, but she seems to have developed crippling social anxiety after Edward died. She refused to make new friends and was afraid of meeting new people. For several years, she barely ever left her room. But she kept writing poetry and released her second collection, Poems by Elizabeth Barrett Barrett (her full maiden name was actually Elizabeth Barrett Moulton-Barrett, but she liked to go by EBB). It was a success too, and her name and work became even more well-known in literary society, even though she wasn't physically or emotionally able to mingle with those people. In fact, Poems made her quite famous!
Elizabeth would have been considered well on her way to being a "spinster" or "old maid" by then because most women married in their early twenties and were considered "too old" to be eligible for marriage by the time they were thirty. She seems to have resigned herself to living the rest of her life as a reclusive, unmarried invalid.
During this time, Elizabeth did gradually make a few friends. One was a famous writer named Mary Russell Mitford, and the other was John Kenyon, who was friends with many poets even though he wasn't a great writer himself. Kenyon was a distant cousin of hers, and he helped her poetry become well-known among his friends even though Elizabeth herself couldn't mingle with society much.
In 1845, Poems was picked up, read, and loved by a young poet named Robert Browning. Elizabeth was familiar with his poetry, and even mentioned him by name in one poem ("Lady Geraldine's Courtship") in her collection. (I find this interesting: she only wrote that poem because Poems was to be printed in two volumes, and her publisher wanted the two volumes to be the same size, but she didn't have quite enough poems to make it work. So she almost didn't mention Robert Browning in those poems at all!)
Robert Browning became an instant fan of Elizabeth's. In fact, he wrote her a fan letter that began, "I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett," and ended with, “I do, as I say, love these books with all my heart—and I love you too.” :-o
Well, Elizabeth wrote back. Robert wrote her again. A flurry of letters passed between them (and the mail in Victorian England was very efficient, so they didn't have to wait days or weeks to get letters the way you might imagine). Robert Browning was six years younger than Elizabeth Barrett, healthy and energetic and not-yet-famous. Within months, John Kenyon arranged for them to meet in person... but secretly! Elizabeth's father was kind of creepily controlling and tried to make all of his children rely on him for financial and emotional support all their lives. Elizabeth was sure her father wouldn't like her having a suitor, and might even forbid her to see Robert again. The two had fallen in love via their letters, and meeting in person cemented their devotion to each other.
During this secret courtship, Elizabeth composed some of her most famous poems. She would later publish many of them in the collection Sonnets from the Portuguese, which is one of the most enduringly popular collections of poetry of all time. They are love poems filled with longing, hope, fear, and wonder. She was an invalid spinster, and he was a healthy and promising younger man -- they didn't seem like a good match to the outside world, and she knew it.
Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning got married in secret on September 12, 1846. Elizabeth continued living at home with her father for the following week, while Robert made arrangements for their honeymoon trip to Europe. Then, Elizabeth simply left home. The Brownings traveled in Europe for a time before settling down in Florence. They would consider Florence their home for the rest of Elizabeth's life. Elizabeth's father disinherited her when he learned of her marriage, and they never reconciled.
In Florence, Elizabeth and Robert both continued to write poetry. Their only child, Robert Wiedemann Barrett Browning (called "Pen"), was born there in 1849. That same year, Elizabeth finally published Sonnets from the Portuguese. She selected that title partly so it would seem like she might have simply translated the poems from another language, as a sort of way to distance herself from the intensely personal nature of most of the poems. But it was also a joke between herself and her husband -- one of Elizabeth's poems from Poems, "Catarina to Camoens," is about a woman named Catarina who makes a deathbed declaration of love for a Portuguese poet named Camoens. Ever since Robert Browning first read that poem of hers, before he even met her, he had thought of Elizabeth as the real Catarina, so he called her "the Portuguese" as a nickname.
Elizabeth's other major work is a long narrative poem in blank verse, Aurora Leigh, which she released in 1857. She was intensely interested in social issues such as slavery, human rights, women's rights, and political freedom. Italian politics became a kind of obsession for her while living in Florence, and she wrote many poems about it.
Although her health improved greatly after she married Robert and moved away from her father's repressive home, Elizabeth was never truly strong. In 1861, when she was only fifty-five years old, she grew continually weaker and died in June following a severe cold. She died in her husband's arms, and he said that she died smiling and happy. Robert and Pen moved back to London after her death. The literary community as a whole mourned her loss, and various literary journals and critics called her the greatest woman poet in the history of English literature!
Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poetry was popular with readers and critics alike while she lived. It was influential among her fellow poets, too -- for instance, her poem "Lady Geraldine's Courtship" was so inspiring to Edgar Allan Poe that he borrowed its meter and rhythm for his poem "The Raven." In a newspaper review, Poe said that "Her sense of Art is pure in itself," and he even dedicated his poetry collection The Raven and Other Poems to her. Her poetry also heavily influenced and inspired Emily Dickinson. We'll study poems by both of them in the coming months.
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