Elizabeth Barrett Browning
British poet
1806 CE to 1861 CE
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (6 March 1806 – 29 June 1861) was one of the most prominent poets of the Victorian era.
Her poetry is widely popular in both England and the United States during her lifetime.
A collection of her last poems is published by her husband, Robert Browning, shortly after her death.
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Elizabeth Barrett had been prolific in poetry, translation and prose between 1841 and 1844.
The poem "The Cry of the Children", published in 1842 in Blackwoods, had condemned child labor and had helped bring about child-labor reforms by raising support for Lord Shaftesbury's Ten Hours Bill (1844).
At about the same time, she contributed 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" and two substantial critical essays for 1842 issues of The Athenaeum.
Her prolific output will make her a rival to Tennyson as a candidate for poet laureate in 1850 on the death of Wordsworth.
Her 1844 volume Poems has made her one of the most popular writers in the country, and inspired Robert Browning to write to her.
He wrote, "I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett," praising their "fresh strange music, the affluent language, the exquisite pathos and true new brave thought."
Her cousin John Kenyon, Kenyon, a wealthy friend of the family and patron of the arts, arranges for Browning to meet Elizabeth on May 20, 1845, in her rooms, and so begins one of the most famous courtships in literature.
Elizabeth has already produced a large amount of work, but Browning will have a great influence on her subsequent writing, as will she on his: two of Barrett's most famous pieces are written after she meets Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese and Aurora Leigh.
Robert's Men and Women is also a product of this time.
Alfred Tennyson's early poetry, with its medievalism and powerful visual imagery, Is a major influence on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
In 1848, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt HAD made a list of "Immortals", artistic heroes whom they admired, especially from literature, notably including Keats and Tennyson, whose work WILL form subjects for Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood paintings.
The Lady of Shalott alone Is a subject for Rossetti, Hunt, John William Waterhouse (three versions), and Elizabeth Siddall.
ON September 27, 1855, Tennyson reads from his new book Maud and other poems, at a social gathering in the home of Robert and Elizabeth Browning in London; Dante Gabriel Rossetti makes a sketch of him doing so.
The English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning had begun taking morphine for pain relief at age fifteen (which she will takes for four decades until her death in 1861), although this seems not to impede her ability to write “poetical paragraphs”.
In 1857, the American writer Julia Ward Howe suggests that her genius is attributable to her use of the drug, provoking Robert Browning to enter into a heated literary argument defending his wife’s talent.