During her lifetime Elizabeth Barrett Browning has been England’s most famous woman poet, but her Victorian didacticism and rhetorical excess caused her to fall into disrepute amongst modernists, and nowadays she mostly exists amongst an enforced readership of students and academics. She received a critical boost when feminist scholars become interested in her verse novel ‘Aurora Leigh’, an exploration of what it was like to be a woman poet in the suffocating masculine canon of her day. A child prodigy, Elizabeth Barrett started writing poetry at fourteen with Homer as her model, and, until Robert Browning in his lemon gloves entered her life, she embodied the Victorian poetic vogue for self-destruction. Turning invalid at 15, she was prescribed opium, either for a spinal injury or a ‘nervous disorder’, that popular Victorian malady. A burst blood vessel in her chest gave her the legacy of a hacking cough, and the death by drowning of her favourite brother left her broken spirited. Thus she achieved classic invalid status, languishing on a sofa high on opium, finding intellectual consolation in the works of deep-browed poets, of whom she declared, in ‘An Essay on Mind’, that Byron was ‘the Mont Blanc of intellect.’ The strain of poetic genius is illustrated in her verse-novel ‘Aurora Leigh’:

(from the Third Book of ‘Aurora Leigh’.

Virginia Woolf writes: ‘Elizabeth Barrett was inspired by a flash of true genius when she rushedⁱ into the drawing-room and said that here, where we live and work, is the true place for the poet.’ Woolf argues that Barrett’s poem (apparently longer than ‘Paradise Lost) gives us:

a sense of life in general, of people who are unmistakably Victorian, wrestling with the problems of their own time, all brightened, intensified, and compacted by the fire of poetry…Aurora Leigh, with her passionate interest in social questions, her conflict as artist and woman, her longing for knowledge and freedom, is the true daughter of her age.’ⁱⁱ

Woolf wrote an amusing novella, ‘Flush’, the story of Elizabeth Barrett’s spaniel; here is the moment of recognition when poetess and spaniel look at each other for the first time:

Each was surprised. Heavy curls hung down on either side of Miss Barrett’s face; large bright eyes shone out; a large mouth smiled. Heavy ears hung down on either side of Flush’s face; his eyes, too, were large and bright: his mouth was wide. There was a likeness between them. As they gazed at each other each felt: Here am I – and then each felt: But how different. Hers was the pale worn face of an invalid, cut off from air, light, freedom. His was the warm ruddy face of a young animal; instinct with health and energy. Broken asunder, yet made in the same mould, could it be that each completed what was dormant in the other? She might have been – all that; and he – But no. Between them lay the widest gulf that can separate one being from another. She spoke. He was dumb. She was woman; he was dog. Thus closely united, thus immensely divided, they gazed at each other. Then with one bound Flush sprang on to the sofa and laid himself where he was to lie for ever after – on the rug at Miss Barrett’s feet. ⁱⁱⁱ

Flush witnesses the fervent Mr Browning’s first visit to the frail poetess’s inner sanctum:

‘Twisting his yellow gloves in his hands, blinking his eyes, well groomed, masterly, abrupt, Mr Browning strode across the room. He seized Miss Barrett’s hand, and sank into the chair by the sofa at her side. Instantly, they began to talk.’

Afterwards, Flush could not bring himself to sit in the chair vacated by Mr Browning, and suffered ‘in tense and silent agony’ as the romance developed. ‘That dark, taut, abrupt, vigorous man, with his black hair, his red cheeks and his yellow gloves, was everywhere over the weeks, months…’ In Browning’s world, of poetry as in his life, love is never a matter for the faint hearted. When Flush savagely sunk his teeth into Mr Browning’s immaculately clothed leg, ‘the limb inside was as hard as iron.’ More insultingly, ‘Mr Browning brushed him off with a flick of his hand and went on talking.’ Flush eventually submitted to this competing and dominant presence; he was bundled up and taken on the elopement to Italy.

If Robert Browning’s ardent romanticism found expression through love for the languishing Miss Barrett, this woman of genius discovered in middle life not the death she waited for but the love she never expected. Elizabeth Barrett, who was described as having ‘a smile like a sunbeam,’ fell in love with Browning’s spirit before she ever saw him, loving the writer before she knew the man. Browning reciprocated this feeling; four months before he had even met her he wrote to her ‘I love your verses with all my heart dear Miss Barrett…and I love you too.’ Browning, like a chivalric hero, released the frail princess from the ivory tower of her sickroom and a repressive father, and brought her body back to life. The Barretts were a family who had amassed wealth in the West Indies, and some suggest that Edward Moulten Barrett tried to suffocate his children into celibacy because of a fear of ‘blood of the slaves,’ as Elizabeth Barrett Browning put it.

Barrett Browning’s ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’ record the stages of her love for Robert Browning, and which she coyly slipped into his pocket during the early years of their marriage. There is a theory that the title of this collection of love poems was contrived as though from a translation, perhaps to distance the poet from her effusions, although there are other opinions that maintain it was a term of endearment Robert Browning used for his wife ‘my little Portuguese’, due to her dark complexion. The famous sonnet xliii represents love as a retrieved emotion after previous sorrow, and was written shortly after her secret wedding. Love is represented as unquantifiable, transcendental, and immeasurable, with a ‘depth and breadth and height’ that fills her world. The poem was written soon after the secret fairytale marriage of these two poetic souls.

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints, – I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! – and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

The marriage and escape to Italy transformed Elizabeth Barrett Browning. She referred to Browning as ‘the prince of husbands…lenient to my desire.’ She gave birth to a son, ‘Pen’, and lived happily for another fifteen years, dying in 1861, in her husband’s arms, in Florence, where she is buried in an ornate, two-story tomb.

Tomb of Elizabeth Barrett Browning in the English Cemetery, Piazzole Donatello, Florence.

After her death her husband had her drawing room at Casa Guidi memorialised in a painting by George Mignaty, and tears would gather in his eyes as he pointed out her chair, sofa and writing table. On his return to England after Elizabeth’s death Browning recreated the Casa Guidi drawing room to include her books, such as her Hebrew Bible plus notes she had made, and copies of Greek dramatists with her annotations. He showed this museum dedicated to his dead wife to George Eliot, who was suitably impressed.

i Aurora Leigh was written between 1853-56 after her physical rehabilitation.

ii Woolf, Virginia. The Common Reader, Second Series. http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/w/woof/virginia/w91c2/chapter16.html

iii Woolf, Virginia, 2000. Flush, Oxford World’s Classics.