Biography
Elizabeth Barrett Browning was a crusader for the oppressed. Some of her works were about her speaking out against injustices such as male domination of women, child labor, oppression of the people in one country by another, and slavery (“Elizabeth Barrett Browning”).
Born in 1806 at Coxhoe Hall, Durham, England, Browning was the first in her family to be born in England in over two-hundred years due to the fact that her family was part Creole and owned a plantation in Jamaica (“Elizabeth Barrett Browning”). Educated at home, Browning was an avid reader and writer and had written her first epic poem by the age of twelve (“Elizabeth Barrett Browning”). Due to various illnesses, injuries, and deaths in the family, Browning became a house-arrested victim to her dictatorial father (“Elizabeth Barrett Browning”). However, this all changed when she met, courted, and married Robert Browning, a fellow writer several years her junior (“Elizabeth Barrett Browning”). Elizabeth Barrett Browning died on June 29, 1861 in Florence (“Elizabeth Barrett Browning”). Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s works span over her whole life (“Elizabeth Barrett Browning”). In 1826, she anonymously published her collection "An Essay on Mind and Other Poems" and in 1833 she published her translation of Prometheus Bound (1833), by the Greek dramatist Aeschylus (Browning was very interested in languages and had studied Greek and Hebrew in her younger years) (“Elizabeth Barrett Browning”). She also secretly wrote love poems for her husband before their wedding and entitled them "Sonnets from the Portuguese", which were published in 1850. Critics consider the Sonnets—one of the most widely known collections of love lyrics in English—to be her best work and they are often considered to have imagery similar to Shakespeare and form similar to Petrarch (“Elizabeth Barrett Browning”). In her later years, her work became more politically and socially oriented as she was very against oppression in all of its forms (slavery being one of the main ones but also political and social oppression) (“Elizabeth Barrett Browning”). These works include Casa Guidi Windows (1848-1851), Poems Before Congress (1860). And her verse novel Aurora Leigh (1857) (“Elizabeth Barrett Browning”). |
SOURCE: http://digitalcollections.baylor.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection/ab-letters
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Literary Movement and Time Period
The Victorian era (c.1832-1901) is remembered for its prolific literary criticism of
stringent social, political, and sexual conservatism. Elizabeth Barrett
Browning’s courage to address social injustices such as child labor and slavery
contributed to sweeping social reform in Europe. Browning was known as the
“Shakespeare among her sex” and her poem “A Thought for a Lonely Death-Bed”
exemplifies her ability to apply iambic pentameter, made famous by Shakespeare,
to create one of the most beautifully controversial pieces of her time (Browning).
Photographs and Images