num_pages: 268
description: The story of the Brownings is one of the strangest love stories of literature. Elizabeth Barrett was a thirty-nine year old invalid when Robert Browning, six years younger than she, stormed impetuously into her life. She was already a well known author; he was a rising but scarcely recognized poet. Born in Durham, March 6, 1806, the eldest of eleven children, Elizabeth was extraordinarily precocious. She read Greek at eight; at twelve she wrote an "epic" in four books, The Battle of Marathon, which her father had printed. At fifteen she injured her spine, either by a fall from a horse or by strain caused by tightening the saddle girths. A persistent cough kept her confined in London with occasional visits to the seashore. The death of her beloved brother by drowning and her father's jealous possessiveness plunged her into a half real, half-enforced melancholy. Approaching her forties, she seemed destined for a life of shrouded invalidism. Her father, Edward Moulton Barrett, has been pictured as a cruel and almost tyrannical parent. Besier's popular play, The Barretts of Wimpole Street, presents him in the light of a villain, violent and even vindictive, a man from whom his children shrank in fear and who commanded their obedience but not their love. The disciples of Freud have made much of a subconscious incestuous attachment and have rung changes on the paradox of fascination and fear, of loving and loathing. But Elizabeth, Barrett's oldest child and his favorite daughter, was not, as we might be led to believe, revolted by her father's love. She returned his affection not only with the unreckoning simplicity of a child but with the full understanding of a constant companion. It might be surmised that this dedication was a youthful quid pro quo, the filial repayment of a girl just out of her teens. But this is far from chronological fact. The volume that contained this acknowledgment of glad dependence, loyalty and admiration was published in 1844, when Elizabeth Barrett was thirty-eight years. Just a year later Robert Browning was brought to her home. He was already in love with her, even before he saw her. She had praised some of his lines in a poem, "Lady Geraldine's Courtship," and his first letter to her began, "I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett." Then, after a page or two of literary compliments, he added boyishly, "And I love you too." In spite of her father's disapproval, the young poet practically forced his way into the forbidding house, courted Elizabeth swiftly and tempestuously, and challenged the very authority of her father. To counteract Browning's growing influence, Mr. Barrett made plans to move the entire family to the country. Browning was now aroused to act; on September 12, 1846, he persuaded Elizabeth to slip from the house and marry him secretly in Marylebone Church. A week later, accompanied only by her maid Wilson and her dog Flush -- the pet spaniel given to her by a friend Mary Russell Mitford, author of Our Village -- the married poets crossed the channel, passed to Paris, to Pisa, and finally to Florence where they began a new life. This collection of 92 poems written by Elizabeth Barrett Browing and Robert Browning over a period of many years, and selected by Louis Untermeyer, tells this rapturous love story.
language: English
title: THE LOVE POEMS OF ELIZABETH AND ROBERT BROWNING
titlecomplete: THE LOVE POEMS OF ELIZABETH AND ROBERT BROWNING
genres: Classics, Love, Poetry
ratings_count: 392
publisher: Barnes & Noble