Robert browning and elisabeth browning their life

Chapter 1. Robert Browning and Elisabeth Browning
1.1 English-speaking world in the 19th century

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
1806–1861
Engraving from original Painting by Chappel, 1872. (Photo by: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
Among all female poets of the English-speaking world in the 19th century, none was held in higher critical esteem or was more admired for the independence and courage of her views than Elizabeth Barrett Browning. During the years of her marriage to Robert Browning, her literary reputation far surpassed that of her poet-husband; when visitors came to their home in Florence, she was invariably the greater attraction. She had a wide following among cultured readers in England and in the United States. An example of the reach of her fame may be seen in the influence she had upon the reclusive poet who lived in the rural college town of Amherst, Massachusetts. A framed portrait of Barrett Browning hung in the bedroom of Emily Dickinson, whose life had been transfigured by the poetry of “that Foreign Lady.” From the time when she had first become acquainted with Barrett Browning’s writings, Dickinson had ecstatically admired her as a poet and as a woman who had achieved such a rich fulfillment in her life. So highly regarded had she become by 1850, the year of Wordsworth’s death, that she was prominently mentioned as a possible successor to the poet laureateship. Her humane and liberal point of view manifests itself in her poems aimed at redressing many forms of social injustice, such as the slave trade in America, the labor of children in the mines and the mills of England, the oppression of the Italian people by the Austrians, and the restrictions forced upon women in 19th-century society.
Elizabeth Barrett was extremely fortunate in the circumstances of her family background and the environment in which she spent her youth. Her father, whose wealth was derived from extensive sugar plantations in Jamaica, was the proprietor of “Hope End,” an estate of almost 500 acres in Herefordshire, between the market town of Ledbury and the Malvern Hills. In this peaceful setting, with its farmers’ cottages, gardens, woodlands, ponds, carriage roads, and mansion “adapted for the accommodation of a nobleman or family of the first distinction,” Elizabeth—known by the nickname “Ba"—at first lived the kind of life that might be expected for the daughter of a wealthy country squire. 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. “Books and dreams were what I lived in and domestic life only seemed to buzz gently around, like bees about the grass,” she said many years later. Having begun to compose verses at the age of four, two years later she received from her father for “some lines on virtue penned with great care” a ten-shilling note enclosed in a letter addressed to “the Poet-Laureate of Hope End."
Before Barrett was 10 years old, she had read the histories of England, Greece, and Rome; several of Shakespeare’s plays, including Othello and The Tempest; portions of Pope’s Homeric translations; and passages from Paradise Lost. At 11, she says in an autobiographical sketch written when she was 14, she “felt the most ardent desire to understand the learned languages.” Except for some instruction in Greek and Latin from a tutor who lived with the Barrett family for two or three years to help her brother Edward prepare for entrance to Charterhouse, Barrett was, as Robert Browning later asserted, “self-taught in almost every respect.” Within the next few years she went through the works of the principal Greek and Latin authors, the Greek Christian fathers, several plays by Racine and Molière, and a portion of Dante’s Inferno—all in the original languages. Also around this time she learned enough Hebrew to read the Old Testament from beginning to end. Her enthusiasm for the works of Tom Paine, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Mary Wollstonecraft presaged the concern for human rights that she was later to express in her poems and letters. At the age of 11 or 12 she composed a verse “epic” in four books of rhyming couplets, The Battle of Marathon, which was privately printed at Mr. Barrett’s expense in 1820. She later spoke of this product of her childhood as “Pope’s Homer done over again, or rather undone.” Most of the 50 copies that were printed probably went to the Barretts’ home and remained there. It is now the rarest of her works, with only a handful of copies known to exist.
At the age of 20 Barrett offered to the public, with no indication of authorship, a slender volume entitled An Essay on Mind, with Other Poems (1826). Long afterwards in a letter to an American critic she called the book “a girl’s exercise, nothing more nor less!—not at all known to the public.” The poem for which the volume was named was a pretentious and frigid effort to survey in some 88 pages the history of science, philosophy, and poetry, from ancient Greece to the present. The other 14 poems were occasional pieces or verses of a personal nature which did not yet display the author’s authentic voice. Of the two journals which noticed the volume, one objected to its obscurity of language and its “barren themes,” and the other advised the poet to come down from the heights to look more closely at nature.
Shortly after the publication of this volume Barrett entered into one of the most important friendships of her life. Hugh Stuart Boyd, a totally blind, middle-aged dilettante scholar with private means, had published at his own expense several volumes of translations from the Greek patristic writings. Since the author of the “Essay on Mind” lived not far from him, he was eager to become acquainted with a poet of such extraordinary erudition. From his home in Malvern Wells he sent her copies of his works and invited her to pay him a visit. Starved as she was for intellectual companionship, she eagerly began to correspond with him and before long was making frequent visits to Ruby Cottage, where he lived with his wife and daughter. It was entirely owing to Boyd’s influence that Barrett’s enthusiasm for Greek studies was rekindled. During this period she read an astonishing amount of classical Greek literature—Homer, Pindar, the tragedians, Aristophanes, and passages from Plato, Aristotle, Isocrates, and Xenophon—as well as the Greek Christian Fathers Boyd had translated.