Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Elizabeth Barrett Browning was a leading English poet of the Victorian era, born in Durham and raised largely in the countryside before her family settled in London. A prodigiously gifted child, she read widely in classical literature and began writing verse at an early age despite lifelong ill health following a lung condition and a spinal injury in her youth.

She became one of the most acclaimed poets of her generation, admired for combining deep religious and moral seriousness with formal skill and emotional intensity. Her most celebrated work, Sonnets from the Portuguese, is a sequence of love poems including the famous «How Do I Love Thee? (Sonnet 43)», written for and about her courtship with fellow poet Robert Browning, whom she married in secret before moving with him to Italy. Her long narrative poem Aurora Leigh and socially engaged works like «The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point» show her willingness to address political and moral issues, including slavery, through verse.

Barrett Browning's poetry helped expand the emotional and intellectual range available to women writers in the nineteenth century, and her reputation, though it fluctuated after her death, has remained central to the history of English Romantic and Victorian poetry.