The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, 1845-1846, with Portraits and Facsimiles, in Two Volumes, Volume II
by Robert Browning (Author) 
, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Author)
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Elizabeth Barrett was a genuine celebrity of her time - and also she was as ill and fragile as your ancient Aunt Eleanor. Robert Browning was six years younger, a celebrity in his own right, and as unconcerned about societal conventions as any man born in the Victorian age could be. Their letters to one another, preceding their scandalous elopement, are mesmerizing. He tells her he loves her in his first letter! He writes a shocking letter that she makes him burn! He brings her back to life, when she has pretty much decided death is looking quite appealing - and that really happened.
I can't pick these two volumes up without becoming hypnotized by them - it's like falling off a cliff into endless space. Their poetry will never read the show more same to you after reading their letters. Elizabeth's "Sonnets from the Portuguese" brings to life the woman who was at the brink of death, and who was resurrected by (I can't help it - it's true) - well, by the power of true love. Robert's poetry bursts all over the place with the energy of the guy whose mind and heart were so full of life and ideas that he can hardly take the time to make them clear to the reader. They were Real People. And their story is beyond amazing. show less
I can't pick these two volumes up without becoming hypnotized by them - it's like falling off a cliff into endless space. Their poetry will never read the show more same to you after reading their letters. Elizabeth's "Sonnets from the Portuguese" brings to life the woman who was at the brink of death, and who was resurrected by (I can't help it - it's true) - well, by the power of true love. Robert's poetry bursts all over the place with the energy of the guy whose mind and heart were so full of life and ideas that he can hardly take the time to make them clear to the reader. They were Real People. And their story is beyond amazing. show less
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Robert Browning was the son of a well-to-do clerk in the Bank of England. He was educated by private tutors and from his own reading in his father's library and elsewhere. Browning's first publication was Pauline (1833). The work made no stir at all. The following year Browning went to St. Petersburg and from there to Italy. On his return to show more England in 1835 he published Paracelsus, a dramatic poem based on the life of the fifteenth-century magician and alchemist. Browning next attempted a play. Strafford was the first of the poet's dramatic failures; it ran only five nights at Covent Garden in 1836. An obscure and difficult poem, Sordello, appeared in 1840. It did a great deal toward giving Browning a reputation for being unintelligible and for limiting the circles of his readers. The most important event in Browning's life occurred in 1846, when he married Elizabeth Barrett. The marriage brought a new lightness and openness of voice to Browning's verse during the next 21 years, resulting in the great dramatic monologues of Men and Women in 1855 and the epic The Ring and the Book in 1867. It is not that these are the most beautiful poems of the Victorian Age, but they are the most perceptive; they reveal more clearly the men and women who speak the monologues, and the poet who conceived them, than any comparable works of the century. In the last two decades of his life Browning produced only a few great poems but much were grotesque and fantastic. He turned, too, to translations and transcriptions from the Greek tragedies; in spite of some powerful passages, these were not highly successful Robert Browning died in Italy in 1889. His body lies in Westminster Abbey. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Elizabeth Barrett was born in Coxhoe Hall, Durham, England, in 1806. Most of her childhood was spent on her father's estate, reading the classics and writing poetry. An injury to her spine when she was fifteen, the shock of her brother's death by drowning in 1840 and an ogre-like father made her life dark. But she read and wrote, and no little show more volume of verse ever produced a richer return than her Poems of 1844. Robert Browning read the poems, liked them, and came to her rescue like Prince Charming in the fairy story. Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning were married on September 12, 1846. Barrett Browning's enduring fame has rested on two works-Poems (1850), containing Sonnets from the Portuguese, and Aurora Leigh (1857). The former is a celebration of woman as man's other half and the latter is a celebration of woman's potential to stand on her own. During the Edwardian and later periods, it was Sonnets from the Portuguese that embodied Barrett Browning. Since the rise of feminism, it has been Aurora Leigh. More recently, a third side of Barrett Browning has been revealed: the incisive critical and political commentator, seen in her letters. Elizabeth Barrett Browning died in Florence, Italy, in 1861. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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