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Elizabeth Barrett Browning |
Elizabeth Barrett was a promising poet by the time she met Robert Browning, though suffering from a lung ailment for which she was taking morphine. Her Cry of the Children in 1842 condemned the poverty and squalor of England at the onset of the industrial age, and her new book of poems in 1844 established her as one of the country’s most popular social critics.
After a secret courtship vehemently opposed by her father, she married the poet Robert Browning and during their fifteen-year marriage she wrote the love poems on which her lasting reputation is based. “She was a slight delicate figure,” one of her friends wrote, “with a shower of dark curls falling on each side of her expressive face . . . and a smile like a sunbeam”.
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Immortal Poets: Their Lives and Verse, by Christopher Burns |