The Poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Poems from one half of literatures most famous couple

Written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Narrated by Richard Mitchley and Ghizela Rowe

Elizabeth Barrett Moulton Barrett was born on 6 March 1806, in Coxhoe Hall, County Durham, the eldest of 12 children. The family's wealth was derived from sugar plantations manned by slaves in Jamaica and enabling them to also purchase a 500-acre estate in Herefordshire. This wealth allowed her to publish poems from an early age. However by age 20 the family’s fortunes were to decline, but never below comfortable, after losing a lawsuit over their plantations.

Shortly thereafter Elizabeth became afflicted with an unknown disease and became addicted to morphine. Despite this she continued to write and became increasingly popular both in England and in the United States. Her poems against slavery chronicled her abhorrence of the basis of the family wealth. In 1844 she was introduced to the younger Robert Browning who was a great admirer of her work and began a secret courtship and thence to marriage. To him she wrote and dedicated one of her greatest works, Sonnets from the Portuguese, and they went to live in Italy in 1846. Although by now an invalid, she seemed insecure of the love of the vigorous Robert but continued to write and publish poetry as diverse as love sonnets and political pieces before succumbing to death in 1861. Our readers include Ghizela Rowe and Richard Mitchley.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Copyright Group
• Release date: Jan 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781780003948

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) was an English poet. The daughter of a wealthy family—her father made his fortune as a slave owner in Jamaica, while her mother’s family owned and operated sugar plantations, mills, and ships—Browning eventually became an abolitionist and advocate for child labor laws. Her marriage to the prominent Victorian poet Robert Browning caused the final break between Browning and her family, after which she moved to Italy and lived there with Robert for the rest of her life. She began writing poems at a young age, finding success with the 1844 publication of Poems. Browning went on to be recognized as one of the foremost poets of early Victorian England, influencing such writers as Edgar Allen Poe and Emily Dickinson. She is most famous for her Sonnets from the Portuguese, a collection of 44 love poems published in 1850, and Aurora Leigh, an 1856 epic poem described by leading Victorian critic John Ruskin as the greatest long poem written in the nineteenth century. Browning suffered from numerous illnesses throughout her life, eventually succumbing in Florence at the age of 55.