The Cry of the Children (1843)
Protest poem against child labour in mines and factories
Literature · Poets
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
1806–1861 · English
Victorian poetry
Elizabeth Barrett Browning was the most celebrated English woman poet of the Victorian age, admired in her lifetime even more than her husband Robert Browning. She is best remembered for the love sonnets of Sonnets from the Portuguese and the verse novel Aurora Leigh, and she wrote passionately against child labour, slavery and for Italian unification.
How to spot them
- ▸"How do I love thee? Let me count the ways" (Sonnet 43)
- ▸Wife of Robert Browning; eloped from her tyrannical father's house at 50 Wimpole Street
- ▸Her spaniel Flush, subject of a 'biography' by Virginia Woolf
- ▸Aurora Leigh, a verse novel about a woman poet; died in Florence at Casa Guidi
Key works
Poems (1844)
The two-volume collection that made her famous and drew Robert Browning's admiration
Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850)
44 love sonnets to Robert Browning, disguised as translations; includes 'How do I love thee?'
The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point (1848)
Dramatic monologue of an enslaved woman, written for an American abolitionist publication
Casa Guidi Windows (1851)
Poem on the Italian struggle for independence, named after the Brownings' Florence home
Aurora Leigh (1856)
Nine-book verse novel following the life and career of a woman writer
Key ideas
- Showed that a woman could write major poetry on love, politics and social injustice
- Sonnets from the Portuguese is one of the great sonnet sequences in English, reclaiming the love sonnet for a female speaker
- Aurora Leigh argued for women's independence and for poetry dealing with the modern age
Quick-fire facts
- •Born at Coxhoe Hall, County Durham; grew up at Hope End in Herefordshire
- •Her father forbade any of his children to marry; she married Robert Browning secretly in 1846 and he never forgave her
- •The title Sonnets from the Portuguese played on Robert's pet name for her, 'my little Portuguese'
- •Considered for Poet Laureate in 1850 after Wordsworth's death; the post went to Tennyson
- •The couple lived in Florence at Casa Guidi; she died there in 1861 and is buried in the English Cemetery
- •Rudolf Besier's play The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1930) dramatised her courtship
- •Virginia Woolf's Flush: A Biography (1933) tells her life through the eyes of her cocker spaniel
Drill it — 7 cards
1 / 7new card
Sources
- Poetry Foundation — Elizabeth Barrett Browning