Elizabeth Barrett Browning

by abdo Wed Apr 06, 2011 3:44 pm

Elizabeth
Barrett Browning

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] An 1871 engraving of an 1859 photograph of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Born	6 March 1806(1806-03-06) [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
Died	29 June 1861(1861-06-29) (aged 55) [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
Occupation	Poet
Nationality	English
Influenced[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] · [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] and [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
(6 March 1806 – 29 June 1861) was one of the most prominent poets of the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]. Her poetry
was widely popular in both England
and the United States
during her lifetime.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
A collection of her last poems was published by her husband, [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.],
shortly after her death.

Early life

Elizabeth Barrett Moulton
Barrett was born on 6 March 1806,
in Coxhoe Hall, between the villages of [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] and [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] in [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], England. Her parents were Edward Barrett Moulton
Barrett and Mary Graham Clarke; Elizabeth
was the eldest of their 12 children (eight boys and four girls). All the
children lived to adulthood except for one girl, who died at the age of four
when Elizabeth
was eight. The children in her family all had nicknames: Elizabeth's was "Ba". The Barrett
family, some of whom were part Creole, had lived for centuries in Jamaica, where
they owned sugar plantations and relied on slave labour. Elizabeth's
father chose to raise his family in England
while his fortune grew in Jamaica.
The Graham Clarke family wealth, also derived in part from slave labour, was
also considerable.

Elizabeth
was baptized in 1809 at Kelloe
Parish Church,
though she had already been baptized by a family friend in the first week after
she was born. Later that year, after the fifth child, Henrietta, was born,
their father bought Hope End, a 500-acre (2.0 km²) estate near
the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] in [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]. Elizabeth had "a
large room to herself, with stained glass in the window, and she loved the
garden where she tended white roses in a special arbour by the south wall"^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
Her time at Hope End would inspire her in later life to write [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]. She was
educated at home and attended lessons with her brother's tutor. This gave her a
good education for a girl of that time; she read passages from [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] and [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] plays, among other works, before
the age of ten. During the Hope End period, she was an intensely studious,
precocious child.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
Her intellectual fascination with the classics and metaphysics was balanced by
a religious intensity which she later described as "not the deep
persuasion of the mild Christian but the wild visions of an enthusiast."^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
The Barretts attended services at the nearest Dissenting chapel, and Edward was
active in Bible and Missionary societies. Elizabeth
was very close to her siblings and had great respect for her father: she
claimed that life was no fun without him, and her mother agreed, probably
because they did not fully understand what the business really was that kept
him when his trips got longer and longer.

Publication

Barrett Browning's first
known poem was written at the age of six or eight, "On the Cruelty of
Forcement to Man." The manuscript is currently in the Berg
Collection of the New York Public
Library; the exact date is controversial because the "2" in the
date 1812 is written over something else that is scratched out. As a present
for her fourteenth birthday her father underwrote the publication of her long
Homeric poem entitled [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] (1820).
Her first independent publication was "Stanzas Excited by Reflections on
the Present State of Greece" in The New Monthly
Magazine of May 1821; this was followed in the same publication two
months later by "Thoughts Awakened by Contemplating a Piece of the Palm
which Grows on the Summit of the Acropolis at Athens."^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}

Her first collection of
poems, An Essay on Mind, with Other Poems, was published in 1826.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
Its publication drew the attention of a blind scholar of the Greek language, [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], and
that of another Greek scholar, Uvedale
Price, with whom she maintained a sustained scholarly correspondence. Among
other neighbours was Mrs. James Martin from Colwall, with whom she also
corresponded throughout her life. Later, at Boyd's suggestion, she translated [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]' [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
(published in 1833; retranslated in 1850). During their friendship Barrett
studied Greek literature, including [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.],
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] and [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].

In 1824, a lawsuit about the
estate in Jamaica
had been decided in favour of their cousin, precipitating the family's
financial decline. At about age 20 Barrett Browning began to battle with a
lifelong illness, which the medical science of the time was unable to diagnose.
She began to take morphine for the pain and eventually became addicted to the drug.
This illness caused her to be frail and weak.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
Mary Russell
Mitford described the young Barrett Browning at this time, as having
"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." [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] described her as
being "very small and brown" with big, exotic eyes and an
overgenerous mouth.

Residences and publications

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Elizabeth
Browning

Hope End, Sidmouth, and London

In 1828, Barrett Browning’s
mother died. She is buried at the Parish Church of St Michael and All Angels in
Ledbury, next to her daughter Mary. In 1831 Barrett Browning's grandmother,
Elizabeth Moulton, died. The family moved three times between 1832 and 1837,
first to a white Georgian building in [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], Devonshire,
where they remained for three years. Later they moved on to Gloucester Place in [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
opposed slavery and published two poems highlighting the barbarity of slavers
and her support for the abolitionist cause. The poems opposing slavery include
"The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point" and "A Curse for a
Nation". The date of publication of these poems is in dispute but her
position on slavery in the poems is clear and may have led to a rift between
Elizabeth and her father.^{[[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]]} Following the
loss of the lawsuit concerning the Jamaican properties, the abolition of
slavery in the early 1830s reduced Mr. Barrett's income. These financial losses
in the early 1830s forced him to sell Hope End, and although the family were
never poor, the place was seized and put up for sale to satisfy creditors. The
investment that had given them revenue in Jamaica also ended with the
abolition of slavery. Some years after the sale of Hope End the family settled
at 50 [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].

In London John Kenyon, a
distant cousin, introduced her to literary figures including [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.],
Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] and [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]. Barrett
Browning continued to write, contributing "The Romaunt of Margaret",
"The Romaunt of the Page", "The Poet's Vow", and other
pieces to various periodicals. She corresponded with other writers, including [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].
She and Mitford became close friends, Mary helping her to further her literary
ambition. In 1838 The Seraphim and Other Poems appeared, the first
volume of Elizabeth's
mature poetry to appear under her own name.

Torquay

In 1838, at her physician's
insistence, Barrett Browning moved from London
to [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], on the Devonshire coast. Her brother Edward, one of her closest
relatives, went along with her. Her father disapproved of Edward's going to
Torquay but did not hinder his visit. His subsequent drowning in a sailing
accident at Torquay in 1840 had a serious effect on her already fragile health;
when they found his body after a couple of days, she had no strength for tears
or words. The family returned to Wimpole
Street.

Return to Wimpole
Street

By the time of her return to Wimpole Street,
Barrett Browning had become an invalid, spending most of her time in her
upstairs room, seeing few people other than her immediate family. One of those
she did see was Kenyon, a wealthy friend of the family and patron of the arts.
She felt responsible for her brother's death because it was she who wanted him
to be there with her. She got comfort from her spaniel named “Flush”, which had
been a gift from Mary Mitford.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
([You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] later
fictionalised the life of the dog, making him the protagonist of her 1933 novel
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]).

Barrett Browning continued to
write poetry, including The Cry of the Children, published in 1842. This
poem condemned child labour and helped bring about child labour reforms. At
about the same time, she contributed some critical prose pieces 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', 'A Vision of Poets', and
'Lady Geraldine's Courtship'. “Since she was not burdened with any domestic
duties expected of her sisters, Elizabeth
could now devote herself entirely to the life of the mind, cultivating an
enormous correspondence, reading widely”.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}

Meeting Robert Browning and works of this time

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Elizabeth
Barrett Browning with her son Pen, 1860

Her 1844 Poems made
her one of the most popular writers in the land at the time and inspired Robert
Browning to write to her, telling her how much he loved her poems. Kenyon
arranged for Robert Browning to meet Elizabeth
in May 1845, and so began one of the most famous courtships in literature. Elizabeth had produced a
large amount of work and had been writing long before Robert Browning had.
However, he had a great influence on her writing, as did she on his: two of
Barrett’s most famous pieces were produced after she met Browning, Sonnets from
the Portuguese and [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]. Robert's
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] is a product of
that time. Some critics, however, point to him as an undermining influence:
"Until her relationship with [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] began
in 1845, Barrett’s willingness to engage in public discourse about social
issues and about aesthetic issues in poetry, which had been so strong in her
youth, gradually diminished, as did her physical health. As an intellectual
presence and a physical being, she was becoming a shadow of herself".^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}

"Portuguese" was a
pet name her husband used. Sonnets from
the Portuguese also refers to the series of sonnets of the 16th-century
Portuguese poet Luís
de Camões; in all these poems she used rhyme schemes typical of the
Portuguese sonnets. The verse-novel [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], 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.
The writings depicted in this novel are based on similar, personal experiences
that Elizabeth
suffered through herself. The [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
praised Elizabeth’s poem in these words: “Mrs. Browning’s poems are, in all
respects, the utterance of a woman—of a woman of great learning, rich
experience, and powerful genius, uniting to her woman’s nature the strength
which is sometimes thought peculiar to a man.”^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}

Courtship and marriage to Robert Browning

The courtship and marriage
between Robert Browning and Elizabeth were carried out secretly. Six years his
elder and an invalid, she could not believe that the vigorous and worldly
Robert Browning really loved her as much as he professed to. After a private
marriage at St. Marylebone Parish Church, Browning imitated his hero [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] by spiriting his beloved off to Italy in
September 1846, which became her home almost continuously until her death. Elizabeth's loyal nurse, Wilson, who witnessed the
marriage, accompanied the couple to Italy.

Mr. Barrett disinherited Elizabeth, as he did each
of his children who married. As Elizabeth had
some money of her own, the couple were reasonably comfortable in Italy,
and their relationship together was harmonious. The Brownings were well
respected in Italy,
and even famous. Elizabeth
grew stronger and in 1849, at the age of 43, she gave birth to a son, [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], whom
they called Pen. Their son later married but had no legitimate children, so
there are apparently no direct descendants of the two famous poets.

“Several Browning critics
have suggested that the poet decided that he was an "objective poet"
and then sought out a “subjective poet” in the hope that dialogue with her
would enable him to be more successful.”^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}

At her husband's insistence,
the second edition of Elizabeth’s
Poems included her love sonnets; as a result, her popularity increased
(as well as critical regard), and her position was confirmed. In 1850, upon the
occasion of the death of William Wordsworth, her name was proposed for [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], but the
position went to [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].

Decline

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Elizabeth
Barrett Browning's tomb from [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.],
1896

At the death of an old
friend, G.B. Hunter, and then of her father, her health faded again, centering
around deteriorating lung function. She was moved from [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] to [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], residing at the Villa
Alberti. In 1860 she issued a small volume of political poems titled Poems
before Congress. These poems related to political issues for the Italians,
“most of which were written to express her sympathy with the Italian cause
after the outbreak of fighting in 1859”.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
She dedicated this book to her husband. Her last work was A Musical
Instrument, published posthumously.

In 1860 they returned to Rome, only to find that Elizabeth’s
sister Henrietta had died, news which made Elizabeth weak and depressed. She became
gradually weaker and died on 29 June 1861. She was buried in the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]. “On
Monday July 1 the shops in the section of the city around Casa Guidi were
closed, while Elizabeth
was mourned with unusual demonstrations.”^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
The nature of her illness is still unclear, although medical and literary
scholars have speculated that longstanding pulmonary problems, combined with
palliative [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.],
contributed to her decline.