Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Elizabeth Barrett Browning - Project Gutenberg eText 16786.jpg
A portrait of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Born March 6, 1806(1806-03-06)
Durham, England
Died June 29, 1861 (aged 55)
Florence, Italy
Occupation Poet
Influenced

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (March 6, 1806 – June 29, 1861) was one of the most respected poets of the Victorian era.

Contents

Family background

For generations the Barrett family had been associated with Jamaica. As a boy, Elizabeth's father Edward Moulton Barrett emigrated to England with his brother and sister Sarah. Sarah is the subject of the painting "Pinkie" in the Huntington Museum.

Sarah Barrett Moulton: “Pinkie” by Thomas Lawrence. Oil on canvas, 57½" x 39¼" (146 x 100 cm).

Elizabeth was the eldest of Edward and his wife Mary Graham-Clarke, who had 12 children.

Early life

Elizabeth Barrett Moulton-Barrett was born March 6, 1806 in Coxhoe Hall, Durham, England. In 1809, her father Edward, having made most of his considerable fortune from Jamaican sugar plantations which he inherited, bought "Hope End", a 500-acre (2.0 km2) estate near the Malvern Hills in Ledbury, Herefordshire, England.

Elizabeth was educated at home, attending lessons with her brother's tutor and was consequently well-educated for a girl of that time.

The first poem on record is from the age of six or eight. The manuscript is currently in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, but the exact date is doubtful because the "2" in the date 1812 is written over something else that is scratched out). A long Homeric poem titled The Battle of Marathon was published when she was 14, her father paying for its publication. Barrett later referred to her first literary attempt as, "Pope's Homer done over again, or rather undone."

During her teen years she read the principal Greek and Latin authors and Dante's Inferno in the original languages. Her appetite for knowledge led her to learn Hebrew, and read the Old Testament from beginning to end. By the age of 12 she had written an "epic" poem consisting of four books of rhyming couplets.

Publication

In 1826, she published her first collection of poems, An Essay on Mind and Other Poems. Its publication drew the attention of a blind scholar of the Greek language, Hugh Stuart Boyd, and that of another Greek scholar, Uvedale Price, with both men she maintained a scholarly correspondence. At Boyd's suggestion, she translated Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound (published in 1833; retranslated in 1850). During their friendship Barrett absorbed an astonishing amount of Greek literature — Homer, Pindar, Aristophanes, and otehrs — but after a few years, Barrett's fondness for Boyd faded. From 1822 on, Elizabeth Barrett's interests tended more and more to the scholarly and literary.

The abolition of slavery in the early 1830s, a cause which she supported (see her work The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point (1849)), reduced Mr. Barrett's finances. His financial losses in the early 30s forced him to sell Hope End, and although never poor, the family moved three times between 1832 and 1837, first to Sidmouth and afterwards to London, finally settling at 50 Wimpole Street. After the move to London, Elizabeth continued to write, contributing to various periodicals The Romaunt of Margaret, The Romaunt of the Page, The Poet's Vow, and other pieces, and corresponded with literary figures of the time, including Mary Russell Mitford. In 1838, The Seraphim and Other Poems appeared, the first volume of Elizabeth's mature poetry to appear under her own name. That same year her health forced her to move to Torquay, on the Devonshire coast. Her favorite brother Edward went along with her.

The subsequent death of her brother, Edward, who drowned in a sailing accident at Torquay in 1840, had a serious effect on her already fragile health. When she returned to Wimpole Street, she became an invalid and a recluse, spending most of the next five years in her bedroom, seeing only one or two people other than her immediate family.

Eventually, however, she regained strength, and meanwhile her fame was growing. The publication in 1843 of The Cry of the Children gave it a great impulse, and about the same time she contributed some critical papers in prose 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.

Robert Browning

During Elizabeth's confinement at Wimpole Street, one of the only people besides her immediate family whom she saw was John Kenyon, a wealthy and convivial friend of the arts. Her 1844 Poems made her one of the most popular writers in the land, and inspired Robert Browning to write to her, telling her how much he loved her poems. Kenyon arranged for Browning to meet her in May 1845, and so began one of the most famous courtships in literature. Their courtship and marriage, owing to her delicate health and the extraordinary objections made by Mr. Barrett to the marriage of any of his children, were carried out secretly. Six years his elder and an invalid, she could not believe that the vigorous and worldly Browning really loved her as much as he professed to, and her doubts are expressed in the Sonnets from the Portuguese which she wrote over the next two years. Love conquered all, however, and after a private marriage at St. Marylebone Parish Church Browning imitated his hero Shelley by spiriting his beloved off to Italy in August 1846, which became her home almost continuously until her death. Elizabeth's loyal nurse, Wilson, who witnessed the marriage at the church, accompanied the couple to Italy and became at service to them.

Mr. Barrett disinherited Elizabeth, as he did for each of his children who married. As Elizabeth had inherited some money of her own, the Brownings were reasonably comfortable in Italy and the union proved happy. Elizabeth grew stronger, and in 1849, at the age of 43, she gave birth to a son, Robert Wiedemann Barrett Browning, called Pen. He later married but had no children, so there are no direct descendants of the poets.

At Browning's insistence, the second edition of her Poems included her love sonnets. These increased her popularity and high critical regard so that she cemented her position as favourite Victorian poetess. On William Wordsworth's death in 1850, she was a serious contender to become Poet Laureate, but the position went to Tennyson.

The Brownings settled in Florence, where she wrote Casa Guidi Windows (1851) under the inspiration of the Tuscan struggle for liberty, for which she and her husband were sympathisers. In Florence she became close friends to British-born poets Isabella Blagden and Theodosia Garrow Trollope.

The verse-novel Aurora Leigh, 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.

Among Barrett Browning's best known lyrics is Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) - the 'Portuguese' being her husband's pet name for her – to disguise the work as "translations" as a means to "depersonalise" the work. The title also refers to the series of sonnets of the 16th-century Portuguese poet Luis de Camões; in all these poems she used rhyme schemes typical of the Portuguese sonnets.

Death

In 1860 she issued a small volume of political poems titled Poems before Congress. Her health underwent a change for the worse; she became gradually weaker and died on June 29, 1861. She was buried in the English Cemetery of Florence. Elizabeth Barrett Browning was a woman of nobility and charm. Mary Russell Mitford described the young Elizabeth as: "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." Anne Thackeray Ritchie described her as: "Very small and brown" with big, exotic eyes and an overgenerous mouth.[1]

The nature of her illnesses is still unclear[2], although medical and literary scholars have speculated that longstanding pulmonary problems, combined with palliative opiates contributed to her decline.

References

  1. ↑ Julia Markus, Dared and Done: Marriage of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, Ohio University Press, 1995 ISBN 0 8214 1246 9, p.14
  2. ↑ Julia Markus, Dared and Done: Marriage of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, Ohio University Press, 1995 ISBN 0 8214 1246 9, p. 16

Bibliography

External links