Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (/ËˆbraÊŠnÉªÅ‹/; 6 March 1806 â€" 29 June 1861) was one of the most prominent English poets of the Victorian era. Her poetry was widely popular in both Britain and the United States during her lifetime.

Born in County Durham, the eldest of 12 children, Elizabeth Barrett was educated at home. She wrote poetry from around the age of six and this was compiled by her mother, comprising what is now one of the largest collections extant of juvenilia by any English writer. At 15 she became ill, suffering from intense head and spinal pain for the rest of her life, rendering her frail. She took laudanum for the pain, which may have led to a lifelong addiction and contributed to her weak health.

In the 1830s Elizabeth's cousin John Kenyon introduced her to prominent literary figures of the day such as William Wordsworth, Mary Russell Mitford, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Alfred Tennyson and Thomas Carlyle. Her first adult collection, The Seraphim and Other Poems, was published in 1838. During this time she contracted a disease, possibly tuberculosis, which weakened her further. Living at Wimpole Street, in London, she wrote prolifically between 1841 and 1844, producing poetry, translation and prose. She campaigned for the abolition of slavery and her work helped influence reform in the child labour legislation. Her prolific output made her a rival to Tennyson as a candidate for poet laureate on the death of Wordsworth.

Elizabeth's volume Poems (1844) brought her great success. During this time she met and corresponded with the writer Robert Browning, who admired her work. The courtship and marriage between the two were carried out in secret, for fear of her father's disapproval. Following the wedding she was disinherited by her father and rejected by her brothers. The couple moved to Italy in 1846, where she would live for the rest of her life. They had one son, Robert Barrett Browning, whom they called Pen. Towards the end of her life, her lung function worsened, and she died in Florence in 1861. A collection of her last poems was published by her husband shortly after her death.

Elizabeth was brought up in a strongly religious household, and much of her work carries a Christian theme. Her work had a major influence on prominent writers of the day, including the American poets Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Dickinson. She is remembered for such poems as "How Do I Love Thee?" (Sonnet 43, 1845) and Aurora Leigh (1856).

Life and career

Early life

Some of Elizabeth Barrett's family had lived in Jamaica since 1655. The main wealth of the household derived from Edward Barrett (1734â€"1798), landowner of 10,000 acres (40Â km²) in Cinnamon Hill, Cornwall, Cambridge, and Oxford estates in northern Jamaica. Elizabeth's maternal grandfather owned sugar plantations, mills, glassworks and ships that traded between Jamaica and Newcastle. Biographer Julia Markus states that the poet 'believed that she had African blood through her grandfather Charles Moulton'. There is no evidence to suggest that her line of the Barrett family had any African ancestry, although other branches did, through the children of plantation owners and slaves. What the family believed to be their genealogy in relation to Jamaica is unclear.

The family wished to hand down their name as well as their wealth, stipulating that Barrett should be held as a surname. In some cases inheritance was given on condition that the name Barrett had to be used by the beneficiary. Given the strong tradition, Elizabeth used 'Elizabeth Barrett Moulton Barrett' on legal documents and before she was married often signed herself as 'Elizabeth Barrett Barrett', or 'EBB' (initials which she was able to keep after her wedding). Elizabeth's father chose to raise his family in England while his fortune grew in Jamaica. The fortune of Elizabeth's mother's line, the Graham Clarke family, also derived in part from slave labour, and was considerable.

Elizabeth Barrett Moulton-Barrett was born on 6 March 1806, in Coxhoe Hall, between the villages of Coxhoe and Kelloe in County Durham, England. Her parents were Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett and Mary Graham Clarke; Elizabeth was the eldest of their 12 children (eight boys and four girls). All the children lived to adulthood except for one girl, who died at the age of three when Elizabeth was eight. The children in her family all had nicknames: Elizabeth was "Ba" to her family. She rode her pony in the lanes around the Barrett estate, went with her brothers and sisters for walks and picnics in the countryside, visited other county families to drink tea, accepted visits in return, and participated with her brothers and sisters in homemade theatrical productions. But, unlike her two sisters and eight brothers, she immersed herself in the world of books as often as she could get away from the social rituals of her family. She was baptized in 1809 at Kelloe Parish Church, though she had already been baptized by a family friend in her first week of life.

In 1809, after the fifth child, Henrietta, was born, their father bought Hope End, a 500-acre (2.0Â km²) estate near the Malvern Hills in Ledbury, Herefordshire, where Elizabeth spent her childhood. Her wealthy father converted the stately Georgian home into stables and built a new mansion of opulent Turkish design, including minarets, which his wife described as something from Arabian Nights Entertainments. The interior's brass balustrades, mahogany doors inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and finely carved fireplaces were eventually complemented by lavish landscaping: ponds, grottos, kiosks, an icehouse, a hothouse, and a subterranean passage from house to gardens. Her time at Hope End would inspire her in later life to write Aurora Leigh.Her most ambitious work, Aurora Leigh (1857), went through more than twenty editions by 1900 but none between 1905 and 1978.

She was educated at home and attended lessons with her oldest brother, tutored by Daniel McSwiney. She began writing poetry at the age of four, a calling to which her father encouraged her. During the Hope End period, she was an intensely studious, precocious child. She writes that at age six she was reading novels, at eight she was entranced by Pope's translations of Homer, studying Greek at ten and writing her own Homeric epic The Battle of Marathon: A Poem.In 1820 Mr. Barrett privately published The Battle of Marathon, an epic-style poem Browning had written around the age of twelve, though the fifty copies he printed remained within the family. Her mother compiled early efforts of the child's poetry into collections of "Poems by Elizabeth B. Barrett". Her father called her the 'Poet Laureate of Hope End' and encouraged her work. The result is one of the largest collections of juvenilia of any English writer. Also about this time, Browning injured her spine in a riding accident, and seven years later she suffered a burst blood vessel in her chest, leaving her permanently weakened. Despite frequent assertions beginning in early biographical accounts, no evidence exists to link her invalidism to any mishap in saddling or riding a horse. Sent to recover at the Gloucester spa, she was treatedâ€"in the absence of symptoms supporting another diagnosisâ€"for a spinal problem. She went on to delight in reading Virgil in the original Latin, Shakespeare and Milton. By 1821 she had read Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), and she became a passionate supporter of Wollstonecraft's ideas. She watched her brothers go off to school knowing that there was no chance of that education for herself. The child's intellectual fascination with the classics and metaphysics was reflected in a religious intensity which she later described as "not the deep persuasion of the mild Christian but the wild visions of an enthusiast". The Barretts attended services at the nearest Dissenting chapel, and Edward was active in Bible and Missionary societies. Elizabeth was close to her siblings and had great respect for her father: she claimed that life was no fun without him, and her mother agreed. Her family's fortunes also began to suffer. Mrs. Barrett died in 1828, and in 1832 the mismanagement of Mr. Barrett's sugar plantations forced him to sell Hope End at a public auction. The family rented houses in Sidmouth, Devonshire, before settling in London in 1835. By the time Browning arrived in London, she had already developed a reputation as an emerging poetic talent.

Publication

Barrett Browning's first known poem was written at the age of six or eight, "On the Cruelty of Forcement to Man". The manuscript, which protests against impressment, is currently in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library; the exact date is controversial because the "2" in the date 1812 is written over something else that is scratched out. Her first independent publication was "Stanzas Excited by Reflections on the Present State of Greece" in The New Monthly Magazine of May 1821; this was followed in the same publication two months later by "Thoughts Awakened by Contemplating a Piece of the Palm which Grows on the Summit of the Acropolis at Athens". Her first collection of poems, An Essay on Mind, with Other Poems, was published in 1826 and reflected her passion for Byron and Greek politics. Its publication drew the attention of a blind scholar of the Greek language, Hugh Stuart Boyd, and that of another Greek scholar, Uvedale Price, with whom she maintained a sustained scholarly correspondence. Among other neighbours was Mrs. James Martin from Colwall, with whom she also corresponded throughout her life. Later, at Boyd's suggestion, she translated Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound (published in 1833; retranslated in 1850). During their friendship Barrett studied Greek literature, including Homer, Pindar and Aristophanes.

At about age 15 Elizabeth began to battle with a lifelong illness, which the medical science of the time was unable to diagnose. All three sisters came down with the syndrome although it lasted only with Elizabeth. She had intense head and spinal pain with loss of mobility. Apocryphally it was told that she fell while trying to dismount a horse, or that she was creating the illness; However, there is strong evidence that she was seriously sick. The illness(es) of this time were, however, unrelated to the lung disease which she contracted in 1837. This illness caused her to be frail and weak. Mary Russell Mitford described the young Elizabeth at this time, as having "a slight, delicate figure, with a shower of dark curls falling on each side of a most expressive face; large, tender eyes, richly fringed by dark eyelashes, and a smile like a sunbeam". She began to take opiates for the pain, laudanum (an opium concoction) then morphine, commonly prescribed at the time. She would become dependent on them for much of her adulthood; the use from an early age would have contributed to her frail health. Biographers such as Alethea Hayter have suggested that this may have contributed to the wild vividness of her imagination and the poetry that it produced.

Elizabeth's mother died in 1828; Elizabeth later wrote "scarcely I was a woman when I lost my mother". The mother is buried at the Parish Church of St Michael and All Angels in Ledbury, next to her daughter Mary. Sarah Graham-Clarke, Elizabeth's aunt, helped to care for the children, and she had clashes with Elizabeth's strong will. In 1831 Elizabeth's grandmother, Elizabeth Moulton, died. The family moved three times between 1832 and 1837, first to a white Georgian building in Sidmouth, Devonshire, where they remained for three years. Later they moved to Gloucester Place in London.

Elizabeth opposed slavery and published two poems highlighting the barbarity of slavers and her support for the abolitionist cause: "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point"; and "A Curse for a Nation". In "Runaway" she describes a slave woman who is whipped, raped, and made pregnant as she curses the slavers. Elizabeth declared herself glad that the slaves were "virtually free" when the Emancipation Act abolishing slavery in British colonies was passed in 1833, despite the fact that her father believed that Abolitionism would ruin his business. The date of publication of these poems is in dispute but her position on slavery in the poems is clear and may have led to a rift between Elizabeth and her father. She wrote to John Ruskin in 1855 "I belong to a family of West Indian slaveholders, and if I believed in curses, I should be afraid". After the Jamaican slave uprising of 1831â€"2 her father and uncle continued to treat the slaves humanely but the family became mired in thirty-eight years of chancery litigation over the division of land and other property. Following lawsuits and the abolition of slavery Mr. Barrett incurred great financial and investment losses that forced him to sell Hope End. Although the family were never poor, the place was seized and put up for sale to satisfy creditors. Always secret in his financial dealings, he would not discuss his situation and the family was haunted by the idea that they might have to move to Jamaica. In 1838, some years after the sale of Hope End, the family settled at 50 Wimpole Street.

In London, John Kenyon, a distant cousin, introduced Elizabeth to literary figures including William Wordsworth, Mary Russell Mitford, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Alfred Tennyson and Thomas Carlyle. Elizabeth continued to write, contributing "The Romaunt of Margaret", "The Romaunt of the Page", "The Poet's Vow" and other pieces to various periodicals. She corresponded with other writers, including Mary Russell Mitford, who would become a close friend and who would support Elizabeth's literary ambitions. In 1838 The Seraphim and Other Poems appeared, the first volume of Elizabeth's mature poetry to appear under her own name. During 1837â€"8 the poet was struck with illness again, with symptoms today suggesting tuberculous ulceration of the lungs. In 1838, at her physician's insistence, she moved from London to Torquay, on the Devonshire coast. Two tragedies then struck: in February 1840 her brother Samuel died of a fever in Jamaica and her brother Edward ("Bro"), with whom she was very close, went with her to Torquay and was drowned in a sailing accident in July. This had a serious effect on her already fragile health; when they found his body after a couple of days, she had no strength for tears or words. She felt guilty as her father had disapproved of Edward's trip to Torquay but had not forbidden the visit. She wrote to Mitford "That was a very near escape from madness, absolute hopeless madness". The family returned to Wimpole Street in 1841.

A Royal Society of Arts blue plaque now commemorates Elizabeth at 50 Wimpole Street.

Success

At Wimpole Street Browning spent most of her time in her upstairs room. Her health began to improve, though she saw few people other than her immediate family. One of those she did see was Kenyon, a wealthy friend of the family and patron of the arts. She received comfort from her spaniel named Flush, a gift from Mary Mitford. (Virginia Woolf later fictionalised the life of the dog, making him the protagonist of her 1933 novel Flush: A Biography).

Between 1841 and 1844 Browning was prolific in poetry, translation and prose. The poem "The Cry of the Children", published in 1842 in Blackwoods, condemned child labour and helped bring about child labour reforms by raising support for Lord Shaftesbury's Ten Hours Bill (1844). At about the same time, she contributed critical prose pieces to Richard Henry Horne's A New Spirit of the Age. In 1844 she published two volumes of Poems, which included "A Drama of Exile", "A Vision of Poets", and "Lady Geraldine's Courtship" and two substantial critical essays for 1842 issues of The Athenaeum. "Since she was not burdened with any domestic duties expected of her sisters, Browning could now devote herself entirely to the life of the mind, cultivating an enormous correspondence, reading widely". Her prolific output made her a rival to Tennyson as a candidate for poet laureate in 1850 on the death of Wordsworth.

Robert Browning and Italy

Her 1844 volume Poems made her one of the most popular writers in the country at the time, and it inspired Robert Browning to write to her, telling her how much he loved her work. He had admired her poetry for a long time and wrote "I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett" praising their "fresh strange music, the affluent language, the exquisite pathos and true new brave thought." Kenyon arranged for Robert Browning to meet Elizabeth on 20 May 1845, in her rooms, and so began one of the most famous courtships in literature. Elizabeth had produced a large amount of work and had been writing long before Robert Browning had. However, he had a great influence on her writing, as did she on his: two of Barrettâ€™s most famous pieces were produced after she met Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese and Aurora Leigh. Robert's Men and Women is a product of that time. Some critics, however, point to him as an undermining influence: "Until her relationship with Robert Browning began in 1845, Barrett's willingness to engage in public discourse about social issues and about aesthetic issues in poetry, which had been so strong in her youth, gradually diminished, as did her physical health. As an intellectual presence and a physical being, she was becoming a shadow of herself." Her doctors strongly encouraged her to go to the warmer climates of Italy to avoid another English winter, but her father would not hear of it.

"My Little Portuguese" was a pet name that Browning had adopted for Elizabeth. The title of Sonnets from the Portuguese also refers to the series of sonnets of the 16th-century Portuguese poet LuÃs de CamÃµes; in all these poems she used rhyme schemes typical of the Portuguese sonnets. The verse-novel Aurora Leigh, her most ambitious and perhaps the most popular of her longer poems, appeared in 1856. It is the story of a female writer making her way in life, balancing work and love. The writings depicted in this novel are based on Elizabeth's own experiences. The North American Review praised Elizabeth's poem in these words: "Mrs. Browning's poems are, in all respects, the utterance of a woman â€" of a woman of great learning, rich experience, and powerful genius, uniting to her woman's nature the strength which is sometimes thought peculiar to a man."

The courtship and marriage between Robert Browning and Elizabeth were carried out secretly as she and her siblings were convinced that their father would disapprove. Six years his elder and an invalid, she could not believe that the vigorous and worldly Robert Browning really loved her as much as he professed. After a private marriage at St. Marylebone Parish Church, they honeymooned in Paris. Browning then imitated his hero Shelley by spiriting his wife off to Italy, in September 1846, which became their home almost continuously until her death. Elizabeth's loyal nurse, Wilson, who witnessed the marriage, accompanied the couple to Italy.

Mr. Barrett disinherited Elizabeth, as he did each of his children who married. Elizabeth had foreseen her father's anger but had not anticipated her brothers' rejection; they saw Browning as a lower-class gold-digger and refused to receive him socially. As Elizabeth had some money of her own, the couple were reasonably comfortable in Italy, and their relationship together was harmonious. The Brownings were well respected in Italy, and even famous. Elizabeth grew stronger and in 1849, at the age of 43, between four miscarriages, she gave birth to a son, Robert Wiedeman Barrett Browning, whom they called Pen. Their son later married but had no legitimate children.

At her husband's insistence, Elizabeth's second edition of Poems included her love sonnets; as a result, her popularity increased (as well as critical regard), and her artistic position was confirmed.

The couple came to know a wide circle of artists and writers including, in Italy, William Makepeace Thackeray, sculptor Harriet Hosmer (who, she wrote, seemed to be the "perfectly emancipated female") and Harriet Beecher Stowe. In 1849 she met Margaret Fuller, and the female French novelist George Sand in 1852, whom she had long admired. They met Alfred Tennyson in Paris, and John Forster, Samuel Rogers and the Carlyles in London, later befriending Charles Kingsley and John Ruskin.

Decline

At the death of an old friend, G. B. Hunter, and then of her father, her health faded again, centering around deteriorating lung function. She was moved from Florence to Siena, residing at the Villa Alberti. Deeply engrossed in Italian politics, she issued a small volume of political poems titled Poems before Congress (1860) "most of which were written to express her sympathy with the Italian cause after the outbreak of fighting in 1859". They caused a furore in England, and the conservative magazines Blackwood's and the Saturday Review labeled her a fanatic. She dedicated this book to her husband. Her last work was A Musical Instrument, published posthumously.

Browning's sister Henrietta died in November 1860. The couple spent the winter of 1860â€"61 in Rome where Browning's health further deteriorated and they returned to Florence in early June 1861. She became gradually weaker, using morphine to ease her pain. She died on 29 June 1861 in her husband's arms. Browning said that she died "smilingly, happily, and with a face like a girl's. â€¦ Her last word was â€¦ 'Beautiful'". She was buried in the Protestant English Cemetery of Florence. "On Monday July 1 the shops in the section of the city around Casa Guidi were closed, while Elizabeth was mourned with unusual demonstrations." The nature of her illness is still unclear, although medical and literary scholars have speculated that longstanding pulmonary problems, combined with palliative opiates, contributed to her decline. Some modern scientists speculate her illness may have been hypokalemic periodic paralysis, a genetic disorder that causes weakness and many of the other symptoms she described.

Spiritual influence

Much of Barrett Browning's work carries a religious theme. She had read and studied such famous literary works as Milton's Paradise Lost and Dante's Inferno. She says in her writing, "We want the sense of the saturation of Christ's blood upon the souls of our poets, that it may cry through them in answer to the ceaseless wail of the Sphinx of our humanity, expounding agony into renovation. Something of this has been perceived in art when its glory was at the fullest. Something of a yearning after this may be seen among the Greek Christian poets, something which would have been much with a stronger faculty". She believed that "Christ's religion is essentially poetryâ€"poetry glorified". She explored the religious aspect in many of her poems, especially in her early work, such as the sonnets. She was interested in theological debate, had learned Hebrew and read the Hebrew Bible. The poem Aurora Leigh, for example, features religious imagery and allusion to the apocalypse.

Barrett Browning Institute

In 1892, Ledbury, Herefordshire held a design competition to build an Institute in honour of the poet Elizabeth. Brightwen Binyon beat 44 other designs for the Institute in Ledbury. The design was based on the timber-framed Market House, which was opposite the site. It was completed in 1896, although Nikolaus Pevsner was not impressed by its style. In 1938, it became a Public Library, now Grade II-listed since 2007.

Critical reception

Browning was widely popular in the U.K. and America during her lifetime. American poet Edgar Allan Poe was inspired by her poem Lady Geraldine's Courtship and specifically borrowed the poem's meter for his poem The Raven. Poe had reviewed Browning's work in the January 1845 issue of the Broadway Journal and said that "her poetic inspiration is the highest â€" we can conceive of nothing more august. Her sense of Art is pure in itself." In return, she praised The Raven and Poe dedicated his 1845 collection The Raven and Other Poems to her, referring to her as "the noblest of her sex".

Her poetry greatly influenced Emily Dickinson, who admired her as a woman of achievement. Her popularity in the United States and Britain was further advanced by her stands against social injustice, including slavery in the United States, injustice toward Italian citizens by foreign rulers, and child labour.

Lilian Whiting published a biography of Browning (1899) which describes her as "the most philosophical poet" and depicts her life as "a Gospel of applied Christianity". To Whiting, the term "art for art's sake" did not apply to Barrett Browning's work for the reason that each poem, distinctively purposeful, was borne of a more "honest vision". In this critical analysis, Whiting portrays Barrett Browning as a poet who uses knowledge of Classical literature with an "intuitive gift of spiritual divination". In Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Angela Leighton suggests that the portrayal of Barrett Browning as the "pious iconography of womanhood" has distracted us from her poetic achievements. Leighton cites the 1931 play by Rudolf Besier, The Barretts of Wimpole Street, as evidence that 20th-century literary criticism of Barrett Browning's work has suffered more as a result of her popularity than poetic ineptitude. The play was popularized by actress Katharine Cornell, for whom it became a signature role. It was an enormous success, both artistically and commercially, and was revived several times and adapted twice into movies.

Throughout the 20th century, literary criticism of Barrett Browning's poetry remained sparse until her poems were discovered by the women's movement. She once described herself as being inclined to reject several women's rights principles, suggesting in letters to Mary Russell Mitford and her husband that she believed that there was an inferiority of intellect in women. In Aurora Leigh, however, she created a strong and independent woman who embraces both work and love. Leighton writes that because Elizabeth participates in the literary world, where voice and diction are dominated by perceived masculine superiority, she "is defined only in mysterious opposition to everything that distinguishes the male subject who writes..." A five-volume scholarly edition of her works was published in 2010, the first in over a century.

Works (collections)

1820: The Battle of Marathon: A Poem. Privately printed
1826: A Essay on Mind, with Other Poems. London: James Duncan
1833: Prometheus Bound, Translated from the Greek of Aeschylus, and Miscellaneous Poems. London: A.J. Valpy
1838: The Seraphim, and Other Poems. London: Saunders and Otley
1844: Poems (UK) / A Drama of Exile, and other Poems (US). London: Edward Moxon. New York: Henry G. Langley
1850: Poems ("New Edition", 2 vols.) Revision of 1844 edition adding Sonnets from the Portuguese and others. London: Chapman & Hall
1851: Casa Guidi Windows. London: Chapman & Hall
1853: Poems (3d ed.). London: Chapman & Hall
1854: Two Poems: "A Plea for the Ragged Schools of London" and "The Twins". London: Bradbury & Evans
1856: Poems (4th ed.). London: Chapman & Hall
1857: Aurora Leigh. London: Chapman and Hall
1860: Poems Before Congress. London: Chapman & Hall
1862: Last Poems. London: Chapman & Hall

Posthumous publications of Barrett Browning's works

1863: The Greek Christian Poets and the English Poets. London: Chapman & Hall
1877: The Earlier Poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1826â€"1833, ed. Richard Herne Shepherd. London: Bartholomew Robson
1877: Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning Addressed to Richard Hengist Horne, with comments on contemporaries, 2 vols., ed. S.R.T. Mayer. London: Richard Bentley & Son
1897: Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 2 vols., ed. Frederic G. Kenyon. London:Smith, Elder,& Co.
1899: Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett 1845â€"1846, 2 vol., ed Robert W. Barrett Browning. London: Smith, Elder & Co.
1914: New Poems by Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. Frederic G Kenyon. London: Smith, Elder & Co.
1929: Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Letters to Her Sister, 1846â€"1859, ed. Leonard Huxley. London: John Murray
1935: Twenty-Two Unpublished Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning to Henrietta and Arabella Moulton Barrett. New York: United Feature Syndicate
1939: Letters from Elizabeth Barrett to B.R. Haydon, ed. Martha Hale Shackford. New York: Oxford University Press
1954: Elizabeth Barrett to Miss Mitford, ed. Betty Miller. London: John Murry
1955: Unpublished Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Hugh Stuart Boyd, ed. Barbara P. McCarthy. New Heaven, Conn.: Yale University Press
1958: Letters of the Brownings to George Barrett, ed. Paul Landis with Ronald E. Freeman. Urbana: University of Illinois Press
1974: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Letters to Mrs. David Ogilvy, 1849â€"1861, ed. P. Heydon and P. Kelley. New York: Quadrangle, New York Times Book Co., and Browning Institute
1984: The Brownings' Correspondence, ed. Phillip Kelley, Ronald Hudson, and Scott Lewis. Winfield, Kans.: Wedgestone Press

References

External links

Works by Elizabeth Barrett Browning at Project Gutenberg
Works by or about Elizabeth Barrett Browning at Internet Archive (search optimized for the non-Beta site)
Works by Elizabeth Barrett Browning at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning at Online Books Page
Profile of Elizabeth Barrett Browning at PoetryFoundation.org
The Brownings: A Research Guide (Baylor University)
Archival material relating to Elizabeth Barrett Browning listed at the UK National Archives
Browning Family Collection at the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin
Digitized Browning love letters at Baylor University

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Thursday, February 19, 2015

Elizabeth Barrett Browning