Elizabeth Barrett Browning was born in 1806 in County Durham, the eldest of twelve children in a wealthy family whose fortune came from Jamaican sugar plantations. She began writing poetry at the age of eleven, and her mother saved so many of those early pieces that the collection is one of the largest surviving bodies of juvenilia by any English writer. That early productivity wasn't just a phase — it foreshadowed her future success.
At fifteen, her health took a turn for the worse. She experienced severe head and spinal pain that would haunt her for the rest of her life, and she later developed serious lung issues, likely tuberculosis. Laudanum became a regular part of her life, prescribed to manage her pain, but it likely worsened her physical fragility over time. For years, she lived a reclusive life in her family home on Wimpole Street in London, under the strict control of a father who opposed all of his children marrying.
“Then Robert Browning reached out to her. He had read her 1844 collection and admired it greatly.”
What started as a literary exchange blossomed into one of the most famous love stories in English literary history. They met, fell in love, and in 1846 eloped to Italy — defying her father's wishes, who never forgave her for it. She never saw him again. The couple settled in Florence, where Barrett Browning found that her health improved in the warmer climate, and her writing flourished.
Her most ambitious work, *Aurora Leigh* (1856), is a novel-length poem in blank verse that explores a woman poet's struggle for artistic independence and social recognition. It was bold, unconventional, and widely read. Her *Sonnets from the Portuguese*, published in 1850, included the love poems she had written privately during her courtship with Robert — notably "How Do I Love Thee?" — which became some of the most quoted lines in the English language.
