Browning Barrett, Elizabeth

BROWNING BARRETT, ELIZABETH. - English poet, b. at Durham on 8 March 1806, d. at Florence on 30 June 1861. Her happy childhood, nostalgically evoked in later years, came to a close with a riding accident which, when B. was fifteen, caused a serious spinal affection, together with the ruin of the family fortune and the tragic drowning of her brother Ralph. From the period of seclusion imposed by her illness she escaped in order to follow, against her father's will, the poet Robert Browning, whom she had come to know for literary reasons and who then became her husband. At Pisa and at Florence B. recovered warmth of affection and, in part, her health, and was able to return to the literary occupations which had already made her known.

A woman of deep feeling, she made love for her husband the reason of her life, and poetry the natural outlet of her spirit as well as a mission of social redemption, joining the Victorian humanitarian current with The cry of the children, a heartfelt warning against the exploitation of childhood in the factories. Profoundly religious, she saw God above all in the humble, and composed lyrics on sacred subjects, among which Cooper's Greve is notable. Of her works, open to the most varied influences (Milton, Byron, Coleridge, Tennyson, Swinburne), mention should be made of: The Seraphim and other poems (1838), in whose first poem two seraphs converse, poised 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 pondering ethical and social problems; Sonnets from Portuguese (1847), a love effusion, in which B. expressed her most passionate cry and the highest possibilities of her art, not great but sincere and deeply felt.