Selected Poems - Couverture souple

Elizabeth Barrett Browning was born in 1806 into a prosperous family. She grew up at the family home near Hereford, until the family moved to London in 1838. She was well educated at home, and her abilities were encouraged by her protective and authoritarian father, who paid for the first publication of her poetry when she was fourteen. From an early age she suffered from ill health, aggravated by an injury to her spine, and she lived a confined life as an invalid, though she became a well-known and admired poet. A correspondence with Robert Browning, who had written to her after the publication of her Poems of 1844, led to their secret marriage and elopement to Italy in 1846. Elizabeth Barrett Browning lived for the rest of her life in the Casa Guidi in Florence, where she found a new personal freedom and witnessed the struggle for Italian independence from Austrian control. She died in Florence in 1861.

Malcolm Hicks is a senior lecturer in the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Manchester. His publications include the Selected Poems of Aphra Behn for the Fyfield series, for which he has also edited the Selected Poems of Oscar Wilde.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning's reputation has sometimes been overshadowed both by the achievements of her husband, Robert Browning, and by the romantic story of their elopement. This selection recovers the best work of this independent, passionate and intelligent poet, presenting it on its own terms. Browning emerges as an acute observer of the political dramas taking place in Italy and the private dramas of relationships. Brought up to a life of confinement, Browning (1806-1861) matured into a champion of personal and social freedom, a poetic innovator who wrote some of the nineteenth century's most politically engaged and subtly erotic poetry. Malcolm Hicks's introduction and notes clarify the contemporary context and contain suggestions for further reading.