Elizabeth Barett Browning and Robert Browning are two of England's
most noted romantic poets. Elizabeth grew up in a priviliged, wealthy
family. She had 11 brothers and sisters.
Their brothers dressed the boys just like the girls
in dresses and long hair until they were quite old. Elizabeth lived a
very closeted life at home until she met and married Robert. Her father
objected to the mairrage. The two moved to Italy and let an idelic life,
devoting themselves to art and poetry. Elizabeth was a crusader for
women's rights and social justice. They had a
son, Pen, who became the light of her life and she spoiled outrageously.
Like her mother, she insisted on long hair and dresses for her son.
In her early twenties Barrett befriended Hugh Stuart Boyd, a blind,
middle-aged scholar, who
rekindled Barrett's interest in Greek studies. During their friendship Barrett absorbed an astonishing
amount of Greek literature--Homer, Pindar, Aristophanes, etc... But after a few years Barrett's
fondness for Boyd diminshed and she began to view him as naive limited and
pathetic.
Her intellectual fascination with the classics and metaphysics was
balanced by a religious obsession
which she later described as not the deep persuasion of the mild
Christian but the wild visions of an
enthusiast. Her family attended services at
the nearest Dissenting chapel, and Mr. Barrett was active in the Bible and
Missionary societies. From 1822 on, Elizabeth Barrett's interests tended
more and more to the scholarly and literary. Her An Essay on Mind and
Other Poems was published in 1826 and was
followed by Prometheus and Other Poems.
Mr. Barrett's financial losses in the early 30's forced him to sell
Hope End, and although never poor, the
family moved three times between 1832 and 1837, settling at 50 Wimpole
Street in London. Her Searaphim and Other
Poems in 1838 expressed Christian sentiments in the artistic form of a
Greek tragedy. Her An Essay on Mind and Other Poems was published in 1826 and was
followed by Prometheus and Other Poems.
She published The Seraphim and Other Poems in 1838, the first
volume of Elizabeth's mature poetry to
appear under her own name. She was always in delicate health, having
suffered from a spinal injury in childhood and a later lung ailment.
Confined to her room for a number of years from about 1838, she continued her
literary activity. Her health forced her to move
to the resort town Torquay, on the
Devonshire coast. Edward who was her favorite brother went along with
her. Disastrously he drowned later
that year. It was a blow which prostrated her for months and from which
she never fully recovered.
When she returned to Wimpole Street, she became an invalid and a recluse,
spending most of the
next 5 years in her bedroom, seeing only one or two people other than her
immediate family.
One of those people was John Kenyon, a wealthy and convivial friend of
the arts. Her 1844 Poems
made her one of the most popular writers in England. Lady's Geraldine's
Courtship in particular received critcal aclaim--in both England
and America. Kenyon inspired Robert Browning to write her, describing how
much he
admired her poetry. Kenyon arranged for Browning to come see her in May
1845, and so began one of the most famous literary courtships.
Browing was 6 years his elder and an
invalid himself. Elizabeth found it difficult to 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, perhaps her most admired work, which she wrote
over the next 2 years in secret.
Love eventually conquered all, however, and Browning imitated his
hero Shelley by spiriting his beloved off to Florence, Italy in August
1846. Elizabeth described it
as being taken from couch to alter. Of course, since they
were proper Victorians they were married a week beforehand. They spent
15 happy years in Italy until her untimely death. After arriving in Italy,
her husband discoverd Sonners from the Portuguese and was so moved
that he insisted on their publication.
Elizabeth's father was outraged and disinherited her, as he did each
one of his children who got married without his permission--and of course
he never gave his permission. Unlike her brothers and
sisters, Elizabeth had inherited some money of her own, so the Brownings
were reasonably comfortable in Italy.
At her husband's insistence, the second edition of her Poems included her love sonnets, and this
helped increase her popularity and the high critical regard in which the Victorians held their favorite
poetess. (On Wordsworth's death in that same year, she was seriously considered for the
Laureateship, which went to Tennyson.) Her growing interest in the Italian struggle for independence
is evident in Casa Guidi Windows (1851) and Poems before Congress (1860). 1857 saw the
publication of the verse-novel Aurora Leigh, which today attracts more attention than the rest of
her poetry.
Barrett's treatment of social injustice (slave trade in America, the
oppression of the Italians by the
Austrians, the labor of children in the mines and the mills of England,
and the restrictions placed
upon women) is manifested in many of her poems. Two of her poems, Casa
Guidi Windows and Poems Before Congress, dealt directly with
the Italian fight for independence. The first half of
Casa Guidi Windows, published in 1851 was filled with hope that the newly awakened liberal movements
were moving toward unification and freedom in the Italian states. The
second half of the poem,
written after the movement of liberalism had been crushed in Italy, is
dominated by her
disillusionment. After a decade of truce, Italians once again began to struggle for their freedom, but
were forced to agree to an armistice that would leave Venice under Austrian control. Barrett wrote
Poems Before Congress (1860) which responded to these events by bashing the English
government for not providing aid. One of the poems in this collection,
A Curse For a Nation,
attacked slavery and had been previously published in an abolitionist journal in Boston.
She did not do a great deal of work for a year or so after
her marriage--as she says,
before she could go forward she had to learn how to stand up steadily
after so great a revolution --
the intermission was brief and the follow-through impressive. Before her
death in 1861: Poems of
1850, Casa Guida Windows (1851), Aurora Leigh, Poems
before Congress (1860), and her last Poems. Aurora Leigh,
her longest work, was a didactic, romantic poem in blank verse It has
received considerable attention because of its feminest themes. Aurora
Leigh also dealt with social injustice, but its subject was the subjugation of women to the
dominating male. It also commented on the role of a woman as a woman and poet. Barrett's
popularity waned after her death, and late-Victorian critics argued that although much of her writing
would be forgotten, she would be remembered for The Cry of the
Children, Isabel's Child,
Bertha in the Lane, and most of all Sonnets from the Portuguese.
One literary exper argues that Aurora
Leigh's heroine, "with her passionate interest in the social questions, her conflict as artist and
woman, her longing for knowledge and freedom, is the true daughter of her
age." Woolfe's praise
guaranteed that Elizabeth Barrett Browning would be remembered . Although it was largely ignored
at the time, recent feminist criticism has heeded her words.
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