BROWNING BARRETT, ELIZABETH. – English poet, born in Durham on 8 March 1806, died in Florence on 30 June 1861. Her happy childhood, later nostalgically recalled, came to an end with a riding accident that caused the fifteen-year-old B. a serious spinal disorder, with the collapse of the family fortune and the tragic drowning of her brother Ralph. From the seclusion imposed by her illness, she escaped to follow, against her father’s wishes, the poet Roberto Browning, whom she had met for literary reasons and who later became her husband. In Pisa and Florence, B. recovered the warmth of affection and, in part, her health, and was able to return to her literary pursuits, which had already made her known.
A profoundly emotional woman, she made her love for her husband her reason for living, and poetry the natural outlet of her spirit, as well as a mission of social redemption, joining the Victorian humanitarian movement with The cry of the children, a heartfelt alarm against the exploitation of children in factories. Profoundly religious, she saw God above all in the humble and composed lyrical poems on sacred subjects, among which Cooper's Greve is noteworthy. Of her works, open to the most varied influences (Milton, Byron, Coleridge, Tennyson, Swinburne), the following should be mentioned: The Seraphim and other poems (1838), in whose first poem two seraphim converse, hovering above the agonizing Redeemer; Casa Guidi Windows (1851), a song of the patriotic hopes and disappointments of the Risorgimento in Tuscany; Amora Leigh (1857), a vast poem, the confession of a soul meditating on ethical and social problems; Sonnets from Portuguese (1847), an outpouring of love in which B. expressed her most passionate cry and the highest possibilities of her art, not great but sincere and deeply felt.