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| 1/10/1845 |
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Browning, Barrett, Love
On this day in 1845 Robert Browning wrote his first letter to Elizabeth Barrett, so inciting one of the most legendary of literary love stories. The letter belongs to the 'fan mail' category -- the praise of a thirty-two-year-old up-and-comer for one just six years older and already internationally famous -- but it was more than just poet-to-poet: "...I do, as I say, love these books with all my heart -- and I love you too." |
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| 9/12/1846 |
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The Brownings: "Dared and Done" read it now!
On this day in 1846, Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning married secretly. Until she received a fan letter from Browning, Barrett showed every sign of complying with her father's ban on marriage. Twenty months later -- 575 letters from Browning, and almost daily visits -- Barrett would shed her "graveclothes" and walk out of the bedroom she hadn't left for six years except when carried. |
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| 12/12/1889 |
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Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett and After
Popularity came late to Robert Browning, but in his last years he could walk the streets of London without hearing the gossip that he had married Elizabeth Barrett for her fame or money, and see shop windows full of posters bearing some of his cheeriest lines: "God's in his heaven -- All's right with the world!" and "O to be in England/Now that April's there" and "A man's reach should exceed his grasp/Or what's a heaven for?" |
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Academy of American Poets
Browning biography, bibliography, links, and selected poems including "How Do I Love Thee?", "My Letters! all dead paper ..." [Sonnet XXVIII].
"Elizabeth's Sonnets from the Portuguese, dedicated to her husband and written in secret before her marriage, was published in 1850. Critics generally consider the Sonnets—one of the most widely known collections of love lyrics in English—to be her best work. Admirers have compared her imagery to Shakespeare and her use of the Italian form to Petrarch." |  | Online Books Page
Find electronic texts of Sonnets From the Portuguese, Aurora Leigh, The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point, and Selected Poems (1844). | | The Victorian Web
Find essays describing the political, social, and religious context in which Browning wrote. Also features several biographies which examine the poet's life and enduring legacy, and literary criticism and analysis of major themes, characterization, use of imagery and symbolism, and concordances with other authors (including Thomas Carlyle and Charles Dickens).
"No female poet was held in higher esteem among cultured readers in both the United States and England than Elizabeth Barrett Browning during the nineteenth century. Barrett's poetry had an immense impact on the works of Emily Dickinson who admired her as woman of achievement. ... Barrett's popularity waned after her death, and late-Victorian critics argued that although much of her writing would be forgotten, she would be remembered for 'The Cry of the Children,' 'Isobel's Child,' 'Bertha in the Lane,' and most of all the Sonnets from the Portuguese. Virginia Woolf argued that Aurora Leigh's heroine, 'with her passionate interest in the social questions, her conflict as artist and woman, her longing for knowledge and freedom, is the true daughter of her age.' Woolf's praise of that work predated the modern critical reevaluation of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and today it attracts more attention than the rest of her poetry. | |
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The TinL masthead features photography by
Natasha D'Schommer
, and the book art featured is by Jim Rosenau.
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