Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861) was an English poet, the eldest of twelve children of a wealthy family whose fortune came from Jamaican plantations. A precocious classical scholar, she published poetry from her teens, but illness and her father's prohibition on marriage kept her an invalid in his London house through her thirties. Robert Browning wrote to her in 1845 to praise her poems, courted her in secret and eloped with her to Italy in 1846; her father never spoke to her again. Sonnets from the Portuguese records that courtship. Aurora Leigh, a verse novel about a woman poet, shows her as a political writer. She died in Florence.