Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Elizabeth Barrett Moulton Barrett was born on 6 March 1806, in Coxhoe Hall, County Durham, the eldest of twelve children. Family wealth was derived from sugar plantations manned by slaves in Jamaica and enabling them to also purchase a 500 acre estate in Herefordshire. This wealth allowed her to publish poems from an early age. However by age 20 the family's fortunes were to decline, but never below comfortable, after losing a lawsuit over their
...When Robert Browning first met the ailing Elizabeth Barrett in 1845 it must have seemed to him like something from a gothic novel. All but a prisoner to her strict, disciplinarian father, (who had forbidden all twelve of his children from marrying and disinherited any who disobeyed him), Elizabeth had recently published a book of poems that had made her one of the most lauded writers in the land. Robert, enamored by Elizabeth's poems sought out
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