About Elizabeth Barrett Browning
She was popular in Britain and the United States during her life and many of her poems were collected after her death. Feminist scholarship in the 1970s and 1980s revived interest in her work. Born in County Durham as the eldest of twelve children, she began writing poetry at eleven. Her mother’s collection of her early poems is one of the largest surviving groups of juvenilia by any English writer. At fifteen she suffered severe head and spinal pain for the rest of her life, later developing lung problems, possibly tuberculosis, and she took laudanum for pain from an early age.
