Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Impact as a Female Poet

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Impact as a Female Poet

Elizabeth Barrett Browning began writing poetry in her teens, and wrote until the end of her life. She is one of the most influential female poets of all time because of her exceptional powers of expression. Browning’s ability to express herself in her poetry was influenced by her childhood, and by her passionate love affair with Robert Browning in her late thirties. Some of her most famous poems include “Sonnet 43” and Aurora Leigh. An article in The North American Review states, “Although, Mrs. Browning’s Aurora Leigh is considered her finest work, there are many critics who feel that her earlier poems still move deeply” (Poems 441).

Elizabeth Barrett Browning was the daughter of Mary Graham Clark and Edward Barrett Moulton-Barrett. She was born on March 6, 1806, and lived most of her early life in Herefordshire, England with her family in a house called Hope End. She and her brother Edward, whom she called Bro, were only a year apart and extremely close. Before Edward was old enough to go away to school, they had tutors come to their house. Only boys went to school, so she was left behind with no teacher when Edward went away to school. Browning never attended school, but was self-taught. Her two favorite subjects were Poetry and Greek, and she became an expert in both. Teaching herself the Greek language was one of Browning’s greatest accomplishments. When she was fifteen, she became very ill, and her family did not know if she would recover. She was sent to Gloucester for a year of treatment for her illness, and no doctor could determine what caused her illness from which she never fully recovered. Her family believed that she suffered from tuberculosis caused from an injury to her back in a horse accident. The doctors performed numerous tests to figure out the cause of her illness, but none of them could correctly diagnose her. They began to caution her against excessive reading and writing because they...