Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Elizabeth Barrett was born in County Durham, England, the eldest of 12 children and a distant cousin of the literary patron John Kenyon. She took an early interest in poetry and also developed health issues at a young age, including headaches and spinal pain that would recur throughout her life. She published her first adult collection of poetry in 1838 and wrote prolifically in the following years. In 1844, she published Poems, which earned the admiration of fellow poet Robert Browning. Elizabeth Barrett would eventually marry him, over the objections of her father, who disowned her. On both sides, Barrett Browning’s family profited from the slave trade and the sugar industry in Jamaica, although she herself would become politically active in the abolition movement and also the movement to regulate child labor. Barrett Browning published what is perhaps her best-known and most ambitious long work, Aurora Leigh, in 1856, a few years before her death in Italy.  Although Barrett Browning’s work was popular in her lifetime, much of it went out of print shortly after, only to be rediscovered later in the 1970s by feminist literary critics who helped contribute to Barrett Browning’s current reputation as one of the foremost poets of her era.