Elizabeth Barrett Browning

At 15, Elizabeth, along with her sisters Henrietta and Arabel, contracted some sort of disease. Elizabeth was much slower to recover for some reason, and it was around then that she started talking about her chronic ill health and a myriad of strange symptoms. She went to a spa in Gloucester, becoming addicted to laudanum (prescribed to help her sleep) and staying a little over a year, long past the point when her doctor was telling her to go home.

But she never let anything stop her from reading and writing. In 1826, she had a poetic "Essay on Mind" published, at family expense, along with 14 shorter poems. By this time, she had firmly decided that marriage was awful and not for her; her life would be completely devoted to poetry.



Her mother died suddenly in 1828, which really shook Elizabeth. She pulled even further away from society. In 1832, when the family finances sank too low, Hope End had to be sold and the family moved to Sidmouth, Devonshire. This house was along the seashore, which tempted Elizabeth into walking, which improved her health noticeably.

She also published (again at family expense, which couldn't have been easy to manage) a translation of Aeschylus' Prometheus plus 19 more short poems of her own. When, in 1835, the Barretts moved to London, Elizabeth saw her chance. She began meeting (with great nervousness) several of the literary giants of the day, such as Wordsworth and Mary Russell Mitford. A year later, Elizabeth read Paracelsus by the distinctly un-famous Robert Browning. She loved it, but was too shy to even think of meeting him.



The Seraphim and Other Poems was printed in 1838, the first volume to have Elizabeth's name on it, and it was generally well received. Elizabeth's health had taken a turn for the worse, and she was ordered to winter someplace warm. Bro and Henrietta went with her to Torquay that same year. In 1840, brother Sam died of fever in Jamaica, followed a few months later by Bro's death in a boating accident. Elizabeth was devastated. It took about a year, but it was eventually the prospect of writing that pulled her out of her depression. She returned to London in 1841 and took up literary criticism.



In August 1844, the two-volume Poems was published, containing a work in which Elizabeth paid homage to those she considered the great poets of her time: Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Robert Browning. He was in Naples when the book was published, but as soon as he could, he wrote to Elizabeth to thank her. . Robert eventually got her to agree to a visit, which was soon followed by another, which was soon followed by a proposal of marriage, which Elizabeth turned down cold. Robert soon figured out that the surest way to Elizabeth's heart was through her work, so that was the way he went. They were married, secretly, on 12 September 1846, and acted like nothing had happened until they set off for Italy a week later.



Six months later, Elizabeth had decided she was an Italian at heart and was writing poems on Italian politics. On 9 March 1849, Robert Wiedmann Browning was born, a very healthy child, which surprised Elizabeth a great deal, since she was still taking laudanum and had already had two miscarriages. Robert's mother, whose maiden name had become Pen's middle name, died without knowing about her grandson, and in order to cheer Robert up, Elizabeth presented him with the "Sonnets from the Portuguese" that she had written during their courtship.



Her health was continually fluctuating during these years, but she still managed to write Aurora Leigh , the epic poem that made her reputation then and has just recently been discovered to be on women's rights. Elizabeth started dabbling in spiritualism about now, possibly because she sensed her health failing, or maybe just because Italy sometimes got a little boring during the off-season. This dabbling increased somewhat after Mr. Barrett died in 1857, never having forgiven his daughter. Elizabeth became convinced that she'd actually seen spirits, in spite of Robert's efforts to talk her out of the whole thing.



It was becoming more and more difficult to pretend that the warm weather of Italy was helping Elizabeth's health anymore. Writing was the only thing that really made her feel any better, though the publication of Poems Before Congress in 1860 got her into a little trouble back home with what the reviewers called her anti-British sentiment. In November of that year, Henrietta, who had actually run off and married her beloved Surtees back in 1850, died of cancer. Elizabeth herself now felt so ill that she was taking far too much morphine and eating almost nothing. She fretted constantly that she was holding Robert and Pen back, though neither one seemed to mind.



In June of 1861 Robert finally called in a doctor, somewhat against Elizabeth's wishes. The doctor diagnosed an abcess on the lung as the cause of her respiratory distress and increased her dose of morphine. On 29 June 1861, Elizabeth died in Robert's arms, probably from paralysis of the breathing caused by the excessive morphine. Robert took it very well at first, handling most of the necessary details calmly and more capably than usual, but he broke down a week or so later. Like his wife, he got through the sadness by working. Elizabeth's Last Poems , edited by Robert, were published in 1862.