Sonnets from the Portuguese (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781443800617)

Elizabeth Barrett (later Barrett Browning) was born at Coxhoe Hall, near Durham, in 1806, and spent most of her childhood and youth at the estate of Hope End, near Malvern. She was an enthusiastic scholar, sharing her brothers' Latin and Greek lessons as well as starting to write poetry at an early age. Her first volume, The Battle of Marathon, was published privately in 1820. An economically forced move to London in 1832 brought her into literary circles, but in 1838 she began to suffer from lung disease which made her an invalid for the following few years. This was nonetheless a poetically productive period and one which won her critical recognition starting from 1838's The Seraphim and Other Poems, as well as attracting the notice, correspondence and love of Robert Browning. They were married secretly, anticipating opposition from Elizabeth's father, in September 1846 and settled in Florence, where a son was born in 1849. In 1856 Aurora Leigh, a verse-novel, secured Barrett Browning's reputation as the foremost English woman poet. A volume of political poetry in 1860 was poorly received, however, and she fell ill and died, shortly after the death of her sister, in 1861.