When you hear the name Elizabeth Barrett Browning,
there's a very specific image that probably comes
to mind. If you know her at all, you know, outside
of maybe a high school literature class, you
probably know the greeting card version. The
frail Victorian invalid lying on a chaise lounge.
Exactly. She's the lady with the spaniel on her
lap, you know, lying on a sofa on Wimpole Street.
smelling salts probably nearby, just waiting
for Robert Browning to burst in and rescue her
from her tyrannical father. It's the ultimate
damsel in distress story. It's got all the elements.
It does. It's romantic. It's a little bit gothic.
And it fits perfectly into how we kind of like
to view Victorian women, frail, passive, waiting
for a man. It is a very sticky image, a really
powerful one. And it's a narrative that was,
well. It was basically cemented by pop culture.
Yeah. Specifically a play in the 1930s called
The Barretts of Wimpole Street. Right. But the
reality, the reality you find when you, you know,
you dig into her letters, her biographies and
the critical reception of her time is wildly,
almost, almost aggressively different. Yeah.
That is exactly what we were going to unpack
today, because that whole damsel narrative conveniently
forgets some pretty major details. Just a few.
Like the fact that before Robert Browning ever
showed up, Elizabeth. was a celebrity in her
own right. She was a political radical. She was
a long -term opium user. She was a fierce abolitionist
who was, and this is a complicated part, living
on money derived directly from slavery. And arguably...
During her lifetime, she was considered a better,
more important poet than her husband. Not even
arguably. I mean, she was a serious contender
for poet laureate when Wordsworth died. She was
rivaling Tennyson for the top job in English
poetry. Which is just incredible to think about.
So our mission for this deep dive is to take
that greeting card version of Elizabeth Barrett
Browning and, well, tear it up. We are going
to look at the medical mystery of her illness,
the very dark origins of her family's fortune,
and how she managed to write some of the most
scathing... political poetry of the 19th century
from a darkened room in London. We're basically
moving beyond the poet laureate of romance to
uncover the poet laureate of revolution. I love
that. Let's get into it. To really understand
Elizabeth, I think you have to start with the
money. You just have to. Oh, absolutely. It's
the foundation of everything. Because you don't
get to be a Victorian poet sitting around reading
Greek and writing epic poems at age 11 without
a very, very serious financial safety net. It's
not a cheap hobby. No, poetry is a leisure activity,
historically speaking. You need time. You need
education. You need access to books. And the
Barretts were not just comfortable. They were
fabulously, almost unimaginably wealthy. But
the source of that wealth is... It's the central
conflict of her life, isn't it? It's something
she struggled with for her entire adult life.
It really was. Because this wasn't old money
in the sense of, you know, English aristocracy
with land going back to the Norman conquest.
This was colonial money. This is the Jamaica
connection. Correct. The Barrett family had been
in Jamaica since the 1650s, since 1655. So this
wasn't just a portfolio of investments they had
somewhere overseas. This was a dynasty built
in the colonies. And her father, Edward Barrett
Moulton Barrett. He wasn't just a guy with some
shares in a sugar company. No, no. He owned,
and this number is staggering, 10 ,000 acres
of land in Jamaica. 10 ,000 acres. I was trying
to visualize that. That is roughly the size of
Manhattan south of Central Park. Wow. Owned by
one man. That's not an estate. That's a kingdom.
It is. A private kingdom. And it wasn't empty
land. These were highly profitable sugar plantations.
Estates with these very... grand English sounding
names like Cinnamon Hill, Cornwall, Oxford. But
they were massive industrial agricultural complexes.
And they ran on one thing. They ran on one thing,
the forced labor of enslaved people. We have
to be really explicit about this, I think. The
library where Elizabeth learned to read Greek,
the tutors who taught her, the paper she wrote
sonnets from the Portuguese on. Yeah. Every single
bit of it was paid for by the labor and the suffering
of enslaved people in the West Indies. Explicitly.
There's no separating it. And it wasn't just
on her father's side. Her maternal grandfather
also owned sugar plantations and merchant ships
that traded between Jamaica and Newcastle. So
on both sides of her family tree, the roots are
just soaked in the sugar trade. And it's not
just background noise for her story. You mentioned
it's woven into her actual name. It is, literally.
Right. I looked into this Moulton Barrett. double
barrel name. It sounds incredibly posh, like
standard British aristocracy. But it was actually
a legal hoop she had to jump through, wasn't
it? It was basically a brand deal from beyond
the grave. Her father's original surname was
just Moulton. But the Barrett side of the family,
the side with the massive Jamaican estates, had
a very strict stipulation in the will. Which
was? If you want to inherit the wealth, you had
to take the name Barrett. It was non -negotiable.
So if you want the cash, you have to wear the
logo. Exactly. So the family became the Moulton
Barretts, which meant that every time Elizabeth
signed a document, every time she introduced
herself or wrote her full name, she was reaffirming
her connection to that plantation economy. It
was an inescapable brand. Wow. So she's born
in 1806 into this incredibly complex blood money
wealth. She's born up in County Durham, but they
don't stay there for long. They move to an estate
that her father builds called Hope End in Herefordshire
and her father, Edward. We really need to talk
about him early because later in the story, he
becomes the villain, right? The tyrant of Wimpole
Street. The monster. But in the beginning, the
sources, her own letters, they paint a very different
picture. He's a fascinating, deeply contradictory
figure. In those early years at Hope End, he
wasn't suppressing her talent. He was her biggest
fan, her number one champion. And the house itself,
Hope End, it really reflects his personality.
Hope End sounds like a metaphor from a gothic
novel, but it was a real place. And the description
of it? Honestly, it sounds like he was trying
to build a personal theme park. It really does.
It was his vision of the Arabian Nights dropped
into the middle of the English countryside. He
took a standard, you know, Georgian style house
and just went wild with it. He added minarets.
Minarets. In Herefordshire? I'm just trying to
picture that. I know. Minarets with these green
copper domes. He had brass balustrades, mahogany
doors inlaid with mother of pearl. He even built
a subterranean passage from the house to the
gardens. Okay, that's just showing off. It is.
But imagine you're a child with this incredibly
active imagination. It would have been paradise.
It was a physical manifestation of fantasy and
wealth. And Elizabeth was the queen of this paradise.
She was the eldest of 12 children. 12, which
is just a staggering number. Eight boys, four
girls. You have to imagine this chaotic, noisy,
wealthy household. And right in the middle of
it is Bach. That was her family nickname holding
court. But she wasn't playing with dolls, was
she? The account of her childhood reading list
is, frankly, it's intimidating. Intimidating
is the perfect word. She claimed she was reading
novels at age six. By eight, she was completely
entranced by Alexander Polk's translations of
Homer. Which is not light reading for an eight
-year -old. Not at all. And then by 10, she decides
that's not good enough. And she starts studying
Greek so she can read the originals for herself.
This is the part that gets me. I was reading
in the biography notes where it mentions she
wrote her own Homeric epic at age 11, The Battle
of Marathon. Yes, a full on epic poem. I mean,
most 11 year olds are writing bad diary entries
or, you know, stories about their pets. She's
writing about ancient Greek warfare in complex
verse. And this is where the father really surprises
you. He didn't tell her to stop. He didn't say
that's not for girls. Go do your needlepoint.
Quite the opposite. He privately published it
for her. He had 50 copies printed to give to
family and friends. He called her the poet laureate
of Hope Bend. You have to understand how rare
that was, right? In the early 19th century, the
blue stocking, the intellectual woman, was often
a fetter of mockery. Fathers were usually trying
to marry their daughters off to good families,
not turn them into classical scholars. He was
actively nurturing this massive intellect. She
was tutored right alongside her oldest brother,
Bro. She had the complete run of this enormous
library. She's reading Mary Wollstonecraft's
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1821.
At 15. She's 15 years old, reading radical feminist
texts, and she's being encouraged by her father,
who is living off the profits of slavery. The
contradictions in this family start so early.
They do, and that intellectual freedom was the
foundation for everything that came later. She
had the space, the resources, the support. But
just as her mind is expanding at this incredible
rate, her physical world, it starts to shrink.
This brings us to what you called the cage, the
onset of her illness. It starts when she's around
15. And reading the descriptions of the symptoms,
it really does feel like a medical thriller.
It wasn't just she felt a bit faint. No, it was
violent. It was terrifying. Intense head pain,
spinal agony, spasms that would rack her whole
body. She lost mobility to the point where she
often had to be carried from room to room. And
the doctors of the 1820s. They were completely
baffled. Totally in the dark. They attributed
it to a spinal injury for a long time, right?
Yeah. There was a story about her falling off
a horse or a pony. Yeah, that was the prevailing
theory, that she had fallen while trying to saddle
a pony. But modern medical historians have gone
back and looked at the journals, at the descriptions
of the symptoms, the intermittent nature of it,
the specific kinds of weakness and pain, and
they don't think it was an injury at all. So
what's the modern thinking? The leading theory
now is something called hypokalemic periodic
paralysis. Okay, break that down for me. It's
a rare genetic disorder that affects the ion
channels in your muscles. Essentially, your body's
potassium levels can suddenly drop, which leads
to these episodes of extreme muscle weakness
and pain. And it can be triggered by all sorts
of things. Stress, illness, even certain foods.
And of course, in 1821, they don't have genetic
testing. They don't know about ion channels.
They have... leeches and blistering. Exactly.
The treatments were often medieval. They were
often worse than the disease itself. They would
cup her, which is essentially using suction to
draw blood to the surface of the skin. They kept
her in darkened rooms. They enforced strict bed
rest, which we now know causes muscle atrophy
and actually makes the weakness worse. So it
became a self -fulfilling prophecy of invalidism.
The treatment Reinforce the sickness. Precisely.
And for the pain, which was very real and very
intense, they gave her the one thing they had.
Laudanum. We hear this word all the time in Victorian
literature, but what are we actually talking
about here? It's opium dissolved in alcohol.
It is a potent and highly addictive narcotic.
And Elizabeth wasn't just taking a drop here
and there for a bad back. She was prescribed
it at 15, and she took it in some form essentially
every single day for the rest of her life. So
from adolescence onward, her entire consciousness
is being altered by opiates. There's a fantastic
biographer, Alethea Hader, who wrote a book called
Mrs. Browning, and she argues very convincingly
that you cannot separate the poetry from the
opium. The wild vividness, as she calls it, the
dream -like, sometimes feverish imagery you find
in her work. That's not just an artistic style.
That is, at least in part, a chemical influence.
It really reminds me of the analysis people do
of, you know, the Beatles in the late 60s or
Samuel Taylor Coleridge with Kublai Khan. This
idea that the visionary aspect of her work is
coming from a brain that is fundamentally operating
on a different chemical level. It's a really
valid lens to look through. But it also created
a lifelong dependency. She called it her elixir.
Later in life, she was using morphine to sleep,
to think, to function. She was managing a severe
chronic illness with heavy daily narcotic regimen.
So she's sick. She's medicated. She's increasingly
confined. And at the exact same time, the Arabian
Nights fantasy of her childhood is collapsing
around her. The money is running out. The whole
sugar economy was in a state of crisis. The abolition
movements were gaining ground, thank goodness.
But for plantation owners like the Barretts,
it meant financial ruin. Plus, her father was
famously, almost comically, bad at managing money.
The irony is just, it's palpable. The very movement
that she would later champion in her poetry abolition
was the thing that was destroying her father's
fortune and her childhood home. Absolutely. And
in 1832, it all came crashing down. Hoban was
seized by creditors. It was sold off. The minarets,
the library, the subterranean passage, all of
it, gone. And the family becomes nomadic for
a while. They move to a seaside town, Sidmouth,
and then eventually they land in London. But
before London, there is this period, this tragedy,
that I think really defines the rest of her life,
the Torquay period. This is the absolute darkest
moment. You can't understand the rest of her
story without understanding what happened in
Torquay. So set the scene for us. It's 1838.
She's in her early 30s now. Her health has crashed
again, badly. And the doctors say she needs sea
air. So she goes to Torquay on the Devon Coast.
And her father didn't want her to go alone. No,
but he also didn't want the family separated.
He was becoming increasingly possessive and controlling.
But Elizabeth, she adored her brother Edward.
He was her favorite, the one she'd been educated
with. And she called him bro. Bro. Yes, Bro.
He was her rock, her closest confidant. She convinced
her father to let Bro come with her to Torquay
to keep her company while she was essentially
bedbound in a rented house. So he's there for
her. He's there for her. But in July of 1840,
Bro and two of his friends went out sailing on
a small boat in the bay. And he didn't come back.
The boat capsized in a sudden squall. All three
of them drowned in Babacombe. And the worst part
was that the body wasn't recovered immediately.
It was days and days of waiting and hoping. The
trauma of losing him is bad enough, but the guilt.
When you read her letters from this time, the
guilt seems almost psychotic. It's all -consuming.
It completely consumed her because she felt that
Bro was only in Torquay because of her. Because
she was sick and had begged him to come. She
felt that she had, in a very real sense, killed
him. She wrote that it was a near escape from
madness. And you have to remember, she had already
lost another brother, Samuel, to a fever in Jamaica
earlier that same year. But Bro's death just
broke her. And this explains so much about her
relationship with her father later on, doesn't
it? Because her father had been so reluctant
to let Bro go in the first place. Exactly. In
her mind, she defied her father. And God had
punished her by taking her favorite brother away.
It terrified her into submission. She came to
believe her father's protectiveness, however
tyrannical it might seem, was justified because
the outside world was deadly. So when the family
finally settles at 50 Wimpole Street in London,
she doesn't just move in, she retreats. She goes
upstairs to the back bedroom on the second floor,
and she closes the door. And she barely comes
out for the next five years. This is the setup
for The Reckless of Wimpole Street, the myth.
But here is where our deep dive really needs
to correct the record. Because when you and I
hear the word recluse, we think hermit. We think
disconnected. Right. You picture Miss Havisham
from great expectations, just sitting in the
dust, wearing an old wedding dress, letting the
world crumble. That wasn't Elizabeth. Not even
close. She was in the room, yes. She was on the
sofa for much of the day, yes, but her mind was
everywhere. She was more connected to the world
than most people walking around on the street
below. She was incredibly connected. She had
a constant stream of books, journals, newspapers
coming into that room. She was corresponding
with all the major writers, critics, and artists
of the day, and she had flush. Flush. We have
to mention the Spaniel. The Golden Cocker Spaniel.
He was a gift from her friend, the writer Mary
Russell Midford. And Flush is so important because
he was her proxy for the outside world. He was
the living, breathing thing she could lavish
affection on. Virginia Woolf actually wrote a
biography of the dog, didn't she, called Flush,
as a way of writing about Elizabeth without being
direct. She did. It's a brilliant, wonderful
little book. It tells Elizabeth's story from
the dog's perspective. But while she's petting
the dog and, you know, taking her laudanum, she
is also writing. And she's not writing nice little
sonnets about flowers. She is looking at the
industrial horrors of Victorian London, and she
is attacking them head on. This is what she called
the new spirit of the age. She was reading government
reports. Blue Books. In 1843, she reads a parliamentary
commission report about the conditions of children
working in mines and factories. And these reports
were just horrific. I mean, you read them today
and it's hard to believe. Five -year -olds dragging
coal carts underground in total darkness for
12 hours a day. It's the stuff of nightmares.
And Elizabeth reads this from her comfortable
room and she writes. The Cry of the Children.
I want to look at this poem for a second because
it is just brutal. She writes from the perspective
of the children. For oh, say the children, we
are weary and we cannot run or leap. If we cared
for any meadows, it were merely to drop down
in them and sleep. It's so haunting. She took
the dry statistics of a government report and
she gave the children a voice. She used this
relentless grinding rhythm in the poem that mimics
the sound of factory wheels turning. And this
wasn't just art for art's sake, was it? This
had a real impact. A huge impact. The poem was
published in Blackwoods Magazine, a major publication,
and it caused a sensation. It helped build public
support for Lord Shaftesbury's 10 Hours Bill
of 1844, which restricted child labor in factories.
Just think about the power dynamic there for
a moment. She is an invalid woman. Legally considered
the property of her father. I'm able to even
leave her room. And yet from that sofa, she is
influencing acts of parliament. She was using
her poetry as a political weapon. She did the
exact same thing with slavery. Which, as we've
established, is incredibly complicated given
her family's income. Incredibly complicated.
But she didn't shy away from it. Not at all.
She wrote a poem called The Runaway Slave at
Pilgrim's Point. And in that poem, she adopts
the persona of an enslaved woman who has been
raped by her master, has a child as a result,
and then kills the child because it looks too
much like the white men who enslaved her. That
is unbelievably dark and confrontational for
a Victorian. lady poet. It was shocking. She
was forcing her white British middle class audience
to confront the real physical and sexual violence
of the slavery system that was making them rich.
And she knew the hypocrisy of her own position.
There's that letter she wrote to the critic John
Ruskin, right? Yes. Much later in life she wrote
to him and she said, I belong to a family of
West Indian slaveholders and if I believed in
curses, I should be afraid. If I believed in
curses, I should be afraid. That is such a heavy
self -aware line. She knew. She knew the minarets
at Hope End, her education, her comfort. It was
all built on a cursed foundation. And you could
argue she spent the rest of her literary life
trying to expiate that thin through her work.
And it worked. In terms of her career, her 1844
collection, which was just titled Poems, it lands
and it just explodes. It establishes her as a
true literary titan. So much so. that when William
Wordsworth died in 1850, her name was officially
put forward for the position of Poet Laureate.
She was the first woman ever to be seriously
considered for the role. She was neck and neck
with Alfred Lord Tennyson. That's the level she
was operating at. So let's just picture the scene.
It's 1844. She is 38 years old. She is one of
the most famous writers in the English -speaking
world. brilliant. And she's also completely convinced
that her life is over, that she will die in that
room on Wimpole Street. She called herself a
broken machine. She really thought that was it.
And then one day in January 1845, a letter arrives
in the post from a guy named Robert. A guy who
was at that time a largely unknown poet. Robert
Browning was not a celebrity. He was a failed
playwright. His poetry was considered chaotic
and obscure. He was six years younger than her
and still living at home with his parents in
New Cross. Very different situation. Very different.
He reads her 1844 poems collection, and there's
a line in one of her poems where she praises
his work. And he just, he decides to write to
her. And he doesn't hold back. This isn't a tentative,
you know, dear Miss Barrett, I enjoyed your book.
No. His opening salvo is the stuff of literary
legend. It starts, I love your verses with all
my heart, dear Miss Barrett. And then later,
that very same first letter, he says, I do, as
I say, love these books with all my heart. and
I love you too. That is an incredibly bold move,
telling a woman you have never met that you love
her. It was a total intellectual seduction. He
fell in love with her mind first. He praised
her fresh, strange music. And for Elizabeth,
who was surrounded by doctors and family members
who treated her like this fragile, broken object,
here was a man who saw her as a genius, as an
equal. So the letters start flowing back and
forth, and we're talking hundreds of letters.
It's one of the great correspondences in all
of literature. They debate Greek translations.
They gossip about other writers. They analyze
each other's poetry. It's a true meeting of minds.
And finally, her cousin, John Kenyon, who was
a friend to both of them, arranges an actual
meeting. May 20, 1845. He brings Robert to Wimpole
Street. She's in the room. He comes in. And by
all accounts, the connection moves from the purely
intellectual to the physical and emotional almost
immediately. But there was a massive, massive
obstacle. The father. Edward Moulton Barrett?
By this point, Edward had moved from being merely
protective to being genuinely tyrannical. He
had explicitly forbidden any of his children
to marry. Wait, any of them? Not just Elizabeth
because she was ill. Any of them. Any of his
12 children. He disinherited every single one
that dared to marry. Three of them did, and he
cut them off completely. Why? What was his reasoning?
It's hard to say for sure. Some biographers speculate
he was a miser who wanted to keep the family
wealth intact under his control. Others think
it was a pathological need for control, maybe
rooted in the trauma of losing his wife and then
his sons. He couldn't bear the thought of his
family unit breaking up. So if Elizabeth wants
to be with Robert, she has to be prepared to
lose everything. Her father, her home, her financial
security, her siblings. Everything. And you have
to remember, she still believes she is a profound
invalid. She hasn't left the house in years.
The idea of running away wasn't just socially
scandalous for a woman of her class. It was physically
terrifying. She genuinely thought the shock and
the travel might kill her. So what do they do?
They conduct the entire courtship in secret.
Secret visits when her father was out at his
office in the city. Secret letters that had to
be hidden in boxes. It went on for over a year.
20 months. Like a teenage romance, but they're
middle -aged poets. It's kind of wonderful. She
was 40. He was 34. And in September of 1846,
they decide they can't live like this anymore.
They have to do it. So they arrange a secret
marriage at St. Marylebone Parish Church, not
far from her house. Her loyal maid, Elizabeth
Wilson, was the only witness from her household.
And then what? She just goes back home? She went
back home for a week. Can you imagine the nerve?
She lived in the house with her family, keeping
this enormous secret, packing her things bit
by bit, pretending everything was normal. That
is an unbelievable act of courage. And then,
on September 19th, a week after the wedding,
she told her family she was going out, walked
out of the house with Wilson, and flushed the
dog, got in a cab, and they fled. They went to
Paris. And then on to Italy. Great escape. It
was a true escape. And the fallout was nuclear,
just as she expected. Her father disinherited
her on the spot. He never spoke to her again.
For the rest of his life, he returned her letters
unopened. Unopened, that is a special kind of
cruelty, to not even read what your child has
to say. And even her brothers, who she loved
so dearly, they rejected her initially. They
felt she had abandoned them to face their father's
wrath alone. So she gave up everyone and everything
for Robert. She traded the gilded cage of Wimpole
Street for the complete unknown. And shockingly,
instead of dying from the stress as she feared,
she flourished. This is the rebirth in Italy
phase of her life. They eventually settle in
Florence, in an apartment they call Casa Guidi.
The change in her health is the part of the story
that always just, it fascinates me, was the illness
psychosomatic. Because suddenly she's traveling
across Europe, she's walking around Florence.
I think it's a mix of things. The warmer, drier
climate of Italy certainly helped her lungs.
The escape from the coal smog of London definitely
helped. But there was undeniably a huge psychological
component. The cage of Wimpole Street was, in
some ways, keeping her sick. Happiness, autonomy,
sunshine, and Robert's constant loving encouragement
gave her a vitality she hadn't had in decades.
And she didn't just survive. She became a mother.
Which was incredibly dangerous for a woman of
her age and with her health history in that era.
She suffered four devastating miscarriages. But
then, at age 43, she gave birth to a healthy
son. Robert Weidman Barrett Browning, who they
nicknamed Penn. 43. In the 1840s, with her medical
history, that is just pure grit and determination.
It really is. And Casa Guidi, their home, it
became this major cultural hub. Because you have
to remember, at this point in their lives, she
was the famous one. Robert Browning is a legend
to us now, but at the time, he was largely known
as Mrs. Browning's husband. That's a fantastic
dynamic shift. He was Mr. Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
He really was. Visitors would flock to Casa Guidi
to see her. William Makepeace Thackeray, the
author of Vanity Fair. Harriet Beecher Scow,
who wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin. George Sand, the
French novelist. And Elizabeth admired George
Sand immensely, right, even though she was considered
so scandalous. She did. She called her an emancipated
female. She respected Sand for living life on
her own terms, which is exactly what Elizabeth
herself is now doing. And during this incredibly
productive and happy time, she finally publishes
the work that she's most famous for today, Sonnets
from the Portuguese. Published in 1850, these
were the intensely personal poems she had written
during their secret courtship. She hadn't even
shown them to Robert until after they were married.
He was the one who insisted they had to be published.
And the title, Sonnets from the Portuguese, I
feel like I believed for years that these were
actual translations from Portuguese. And that
was exactly the point. She was incredibly shy
about the personal nature of the poems. They
were so intimate, so nakedly emotional. So she
wanted to present them as translations to give
herself a layer of artistic distance. But the
title is also a double entendre, a private joke.
It is. My Little Portuguese was a private pet
name Robert had for her. Why Portuguese? It was
a reference to her dark complexion and dark hair,
which was unusual for an English woman of her
class. So the title is A Public Mask and A Private
Wink All in One. And this collection is where
we get the big one, Sonnet 43. How do I love
thee? Let me count the ways. It's iconic. It's
on a million Valentine's cards. But when you
read it, knowing her full story, it hits so differently.
It's not just fluffy, sentimental romance. How
so? What should we be looking for? Well, look
at the language she uses. I love thee with a
love I seem to lose, with my lost saints. She
is talking about the loss of her family, the
religious intensity she used to channel into
her faith, or even her relationship with her
father, now being redirected entirely to Robert.
He has become her new religion. And that ending,
and if God shoes, I shall but love thee better
after death. Given her lifelong illness, death
was always a very real presence in the room for
her. It's not just a pretty romantic sentiment.
It's a profound statement of defiance against
mortality. She is saying, my broken body might
fail, but this connection we have, this love,
it transcends that completely. But while the
sonnets are beautiful and obviously what she's
most known for now, you mentioned earlier that
there's a bigger work, a magnum opus, that defines
her not just as a lover, but as a major feminist
voice. Yes, Aurora Lee. Tell me about Aurora
Lee, because this is the one the critics always
say we should be reading, but most people haven't
even heard of it. They should be. It was published
in 1856 and it was her masterpiece. It's what
she considered her most important work. It is
a verse novel. So a novel in poem form. Exactly.
A whole novel with a complex plot, characters,
dialogue, social commentary, but it's all written
in blank verse. It's nine books long, longer
than Paradise Lost. That sounds incredibly dense.
It is dense, but it's also incredibly readable
and gripping. It's the story of a female writer,
Aurora. who is struggling to balance her artistic
ambition with the societal expectations of love
and marriage. Okay, so what's the central conflict?
Early on, her wealthy, socially conscious cousin
Romney, which is a terrible name for a romantic
lead, by the way. Oh, a great one, no. He proposes
to her, but he doesn't want an equal partner.
He wants a helper. He basically tells her she
should give up her silly poetry to help him with
his socialist charity work. But classic. Put
down the pen, honey, and help me with my very
important mission to save the world. That is
exactly the vibe. And she refuses him. Point
blank. She chooses her art. She gives this incredible
speech where she says, I, too, have my vocation
work to do. That must have been absolutely radical
in 1856. A woman in a novel saying her work,
her art is as important as a man's social project.
It was explosive. It was a sensation. The North
American Review praised it for uniting woman's
nature with the strength. which is peculiar to
a man, which is a very 19th century way of saying
it was powerful. It challenged the core Victorian
ideal that a woman's only true role was domestic.
And this wasn't just abstract fiction for her.
This was her life story, fictionalized. It was
heavily autobiographical. It was her manifesto.
And it had a real world impact. Susan B. Anthony,
the American suffragist, carried a copy of Aurora
Lee with her everywhere she went in her trunk.
She wrote in her copy about how the book had
influenced her thinking on women's need for economic
and personal independence. So Elizabeth Barrett
Browning isn't just a romantic poet. She's writing
a foundational text for the first wave of the
women's rights movement. Precisely. Aurora Lee
argues that a woman doesn't have to choose between
her work and love, or rather that she shouldn't
have to, even if society tries to force that
choice upon her. It's an incredibly modern idea.
But she didn't stop at feminism. After she moved
to Italy, she got deeply involved in international
politics too, right? She became completely obsessed
with the cause of Italian unification, the Risorgimento.
She was living in Florence, she loved the Italian
people, and she desperately wanted to see them
free from Austrian rule and united as a single
country. And she wrote about it. Oh, she wrote
about it. Passionately. Her 1860 collection was
called Poems Before Congress. How did that go
over back in Britain? Badly. Very, very badly.
It caused a furor, as they said. The conservative
magazines in Britain labeled her a fanatic. They
were outraged. They thought it was unseemly and
inappropriate for an English lady to be so heated
and opinionated about foreign politics. They
essentially told her to go back to writing love
sonnets and stay in her lane. That's exactly
what they did. But she never cared about staying
in her lane, did she? Never. Whether it was slavery,
child labor, women's rights, or Italian politics,
if she felt strongly about something? She wrote
about it. She saw the role of the poet as a kind
of prophet, someone with a moral duty to speak
truth to power. And this moral intensity was
also tied to her spiritual side. The outline
mentions she was a congregationalist and really
interested in theological debate. She was deeply,
deeply religious, but in a very nonconformist,
individualistic way. She rejected the hierarchy
and ritual of the Church of England. And in a
move that is just so quintessentially her, she
actually learned Hebrew. Why Hebrew? So she could
read the Old Testament in the original language.
Of course she did. That fits her personality
perfectly. I'm not going to take the priest word
for it. I'll translate it myself. Thank you very
much. Exactly. Her work is saturated with biblical
imagery. Aurora Lee is full of allusions to Miriam,
the sister of Moses, who was a prophetess. For
her, poetry was a deeply spiritual act. But all
this intensity, the writing, the politics, the
mothering, the constant opiate use, it had to
take a toll on her already fragile body. It did.
Her health, which had been relatively stable
for her first decade in Italy, began to decline
sharply in the late 1850s. She suffered a series
of emotional blows as well. The death of her
father in 1857, who, remember, never reconciled
with her, and then the death of her beloved sister
Henrietta hit her incredibly hard. And the end
comes in 1861. June 29, 1861. She was only 55.
She was in their apartment at Casa Guidi in Florence.
Her lungs, which had always been her weak point,
were failing. The official cause was likely a
lung abscess, complicated by a lifetime of illness.
And the story of her death is, well, it's very
much in character with their love story. It is.
She died in Robert's arms. He wrote letters about
it later, and he reported that she died smilingly,
happily, and with a face like a girl's. And when
he asked her how she felt in her final moments,
her last word was simply, beautiful. Beautiful.
That is a poet's exit, if ever there was one.
It really is. She was buried in the Protestant
English cemetery in Florence. And the local Florentine
shops in their neighborhood, the Casa Guidi area,
closed their shutters on the day of her funeral
to mourn her. So they saw her as one of their
own. She wasn't just some foreign writer to them.
She was a local hero who had championed their
cause for freedom. So she dies a legend, a literary
titan, a political activist, a beloved figure
in her adopted city. But then something happens
to her reputation. We go from that image to the
lady with the spaniel. What happened? How did
she get reduced? It's what you call the critical
roller coaster. Yeah. Immediately after her death,
she was still revered. But as the 19th century
gave way to the 20th, modernism took over. literary
scene. And the modernists hated Victorian sentimentality.
And her work is nothing if not emotional. It
is high emotion. It is incredibly earnest. It
wears its heart on its sleeve. And the new generation
of critics started to dismiss it as hysterical
or overly feminine or just bad poetry. But the
real nail in the coffin of her literary reputation
was that play we mentioned right at the start.
The Barretts of Wimpole Street. The 1931 play
by Rudolf Bessier. It was a massive, massive
hit on stage in London and on Broadway. It was
made into several movies. But it turned her life
into a simple melodrama. It focused entirely
on the tyrannical father and the whirlwind romance.
So she became a character in a love story, not
a writer. Exactly. This is what you could call
the Bessier effect. People stopped reading the
nine books of Aurora Lee and started watching
the movie where she swoons on a sofa. She became
the damsel in distress. Which is the ultimate
irony, because she was the one who engineered
her own rescue. But there's been a rediscovery
in recent decades, hasn't there? Yes, thankfully.
Starting in the 1970s and 80s, feminist scholars
went back to the text. Critics like Angela Layton
and others argue that we had been distracted
by the myth and needed to look at the work again.
They reclaimed her as a serious political and
intellectual figure. But it took a very long
time. A complete scholarly edition of all her
works wasn't even published until 2010. 2010?
That's wild. That's nearly 150 years after she
died. It just shows you how long and how thoroughly
she was neglected by the literary establishment.
Before we wrap up, I want to touch on one more
part of her legacy, a connection that just blew
my mind when I read it in the source material.
Her connection to Edgar Allan Poe. Oh, yes. The
Master of the Macabre was a massive EBB fanboy.
A huge fan. It's an unexpected pairing. He dedicated
his 1845 collection, The Raven, and other poems
to her. He called her the noblest of her sex.
He was deeply impressed by her intellect and
her poetic skill. And he didn't just admire her
from afar, he borrowed from her heavily. Borrowed
is a very polite word for it. The specific rhythm
and meter of The Raven. That hypnotic, driving,
trochaic octameter beat. Once upon a midnight
dreary, while I pondered, Weak and weary. He
took that meter directly from her poem, Lady
Geraldine's Courtship. It's almost identical.
So in a very real way, without Elizabeth Barrett
Browning, we might not have quothed The Raven
Nevermore. Not in the form we know it anyway.
And her influence didn't stop there. Emily Dickinson.
Dickinson revered her. She kept a portrait of
Elizabeth in her room. For Dickinson, Elizabeth
was the model. She was the proof that a woman
could achieve the highest levels of greatness
in poetry. So let's bring it all together. When
we step back from the chaise lounge and the spaniel,
what's the real story? What's the takeaway? It
means we need to completely rewrite our mental
image of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. She wasn't
just a wife. She wasn't just a patient. She wasn't
just the subject of a romance. She was a powerhouse.
Yeah. She was an agent in her own life. She took
the immense privilege of her background, a background,
as we've said, stained by the sin of slavery,
and she tried to use her platform to fight for
justice. She took the profound pain of her illness
and her personal tragedies and she turned it
into revolutionary art. She was a celebrity poet
who used her fame to advocate for child labor
reform and abolition. And she was a woman who,
at age 40, an age when most Victorian women were
considered old, putting on their lace caps and
fading into the domestic background, she completely
reinvented her life. It really makes you wonder.
And I think this is the final provocative thought
to leave with you, our listener. It's about the
road not taken. If she hadn't eloped. If she
hadn't found the courage to walk out of that
door on Wimpole Street that day. Would we even
know her name today? Maybe as a minor poet. A
historical curiosity. But she certainly wouldn't
have written Aurora Lee. She wouldn't have had
her son. She wouldn't have become this global
icon of independence. She would have almost certainly
just faded away in that room. So the romantic
story, the elopement, it wasn't just about love.
It was about artistic and personal survival.
It was an act of profound rebellion. And that
rebellion gave us one of the most important,
complex and powerful voices of the 19th century.
So to everyone listening, next time you see a
greeting card with How Do I Love Thee? On it,
remember the woman who wrote it. Remember the
opium, the politics, the Jamaican plantations,
the minarets at Hope End, and the revolution
she started in her own life. And maybe go read
a few pages of Aurora Lee. That's where the real
Elizabeth is waiting. Couldn't have said it better
myself. Thanks for diving deep with us on this
one. A pleasure, as always.