Aurora Leigh: What the Heart Knows (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780942208627)

Elizabeth Barrett Browning was born in 1806 in northern England in an estate house, the firstborn child. When she was three, the family moved to Herefordshire, near Wales, to Hope End, a smaller house in a family that grew to be eleven children.. An early reader, she was given permission to browse in her father's library, and by 14 she was a published poet. At 22, her mother died, and four years later, when her father was forced to sell Hope End, they all moved to London. At 32, she did inherit enough to live on, a bequest from her Uncle Samuel Barrett. Her own health had not been good for years, though she persevered with poetry, attaining acclaim at age 38, which led to letters exchanged with Robert Browning, a younger and still struggling poet. She encouraged him when critics panned a work of his, and two years later they secretly married and left for Italy. For her this was an important act of self-expression against her father's forbidding, knowing that this would cut her off from any inheritance. Thriving in this new environment, she began traveling, and at the age of 43 had a child, Robert Barrett Browning. The same year, she was nominated (but did not achieve) the title of Poet Laureate of England. All these sites play a part in Aurora Leigh, as well as her passion for poetry, which is a central theme of the book. She died at 55 years of age, one year after the publication of Aurora Leigh.