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Elizabeth Barrett Browning

© Megan Drummond

Elizabeth Barrett was born on March 6, 1806, to an affluent family in Durham, England. Her father, Edward Moulton-Barrett, had made most of his considerable fortune from Jamaican sugar plantations. In 1809, he bought the family a country estate called Hope End, a 500-acre property near Malvern Hills, Great Britain. Here, Elizabeth lived a privileged childhood, riding her pony around the grounds, visiting other families and arranging theatrical productions with her eleven brothers and sisters.

Elizabeth was a happy, self-taught child. She had read a number of Shakespearian plays, Pope’s Homeric translations, passages from Paradise Lost and the histories of England, Greece and Rome before the age of 10. During her teen years, Emily worked her way through the principle Greek and Latin authors. During this time, her voracious appetite for knowledge compelled her to learn enough Hebrew to read the Old Testament from beginning to end. By the time she was 12, Elizabeth had written her first epic poem, four books of rhyming couplets, which she later referred to as “Pope’s Homer done over again, or rather undone.”

Elizabeth had no apparent health problems until 1821, at 15, when her doctor prescribed opium for a nervous condition. The death of her mother seven years later also greatly affected Elizabeth. Scholars have found evidence of the devastating effects of this loss in Elizabeth’s most recognized poem, "Aurora Leigh."

In 1838, The Seraphim and Other Poems appeared. It was the first volume of matured poetry to be published under Elizabeth’s own name. That same year, health problems forced Elizabeth to move to Torquay on the Devonshire coast. Her favorite brother, Edward, accompanied her. Edward’s accidental death by drowning later that year dealt Elizabeth another devastating blow from which she never fully recovered. When she returned to her father’s home on Wimpole Street in London, she became an invalid and a recluse. Elizabeth spent most of the next five years in her bedroom, seeing only one or two people other than her immediate family.

One of the people she saw was John Kenyon, a wealthy and jovial friend of the arts. The publication of her 1844 poems made Elizabeth one of the most popular writers in the land and inspired a young poet named Robert Browning to write her and express his love for her poems. Kenyon arranged for Browning to meet Barrett in May of 1845, and thus began one of the most famous romances in literature.

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