Elizabeth Barrett Moulton-Barrett was to become the wife of Robert Browning and one of England's foremost poets. Her date and place of birth may be somewhat uncertain, and have variously been given as London, Herefordshire and Durham.

According to most biographers, she  was born March 6, 1806 at Coxhoe Hall, in Durham, England. Her parents were Edward Moulton Barrett and Mary Graham-Clarke. Her father, Edward Moulton-Barrett was an emigrant from Jamaica, where the Barrett family had lived for years. He made most of his fortune from his Jamaican sugar plantations, worked by slave labor. In 1809 he bought Hope End, a 500-acre estate near the Malvern Hills. The Barretts had 12 children in all.

Elizabeth was home schooled and in large part self educated with the help of self-chosen tutors. On her own, and later from a neighbor, the blind Greek scholar Hugh Stuart Boyd, she learned enough Greek to translate Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound. She also learned Latin and enough Hebrew to read the Old Testament in the original. All of these influences are evident in her work.

Elizabeth Barrett was an invalid for most of her life, but the nature of her health problems is obscure. According to one version, she contracted a lung ailment, possibly tuberculosis, at an early age.

A different version (see here) claims that she had no health problems until 1821, when a Dr. Coker prescribed opium for a nervous disorder, and presumably she became addicted. The opium may have been prescribed for the lung ailment. She became an invalid and was treated as such, spending most of her unmarried life in her room. It is possible that this seclusion was enforced to hide the social embarrassment of addiction.

Her mother died in 1828, when she was 22, and this event influenced some of her work as well. 

Elizabeth was precocious and accomplished. With her brothers and sisters, she had staged numerous plays. By the age of ten, she had read Shakespeare, parts of Pope's Homeric translations, parts of Milton's Paradise Lost, and the histories of England, Greece, and Rome before the age of ten. As a teenager, her knowledge of languages was used and developed by reading the major Greek and Roman authors and Dante's Inferno in the original languages.

She read eighteenth and nineteenth century social criticism by Paine, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Wollstonecraft, foreshadowing her own interest in politics and social matters. Her first recorded poem was written at about age 6 or 8 in 1812 or perhaps 1814. The manuscript is in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. A long Homeric poem, apparently inspired by Pope, titled "The Battle of Marathon" was published at the expense of her father when she was fourteen.  In 1826 she published her first poetry collection, "An Essay on Mind and Other Poems."

The Barretts were Methodists, and Elizabeth Barrett shared the reforming enthusiasm and religious sincerity of that sect.

The abolition of slavery nearly ruined the Barrett family financially, forcing Mr Barrett to sell the Hope End and move several times, finally settling at 50 Wimpole Street in London in 1837.

In 1838, Elizabeth Barrett's first major poetry collection appeared, The Seraphim and Other Poems. Health problems caused her to move to Torquay, on the Devonshire coast, with her favorite brother Edward. Edward died by drowning. This event supposedly forced her into seclusion, according to some accounts. Nonetheless, she continued to publish and write, and her fame grew steadily. In 1844 she published two volumes of Poems, which included "A Drama of Exile", "Vision of Poets", and "Lady Geraldine's Courtship". This volume made her one of the most popular writers in the England, and inspired Robert Browning to write her, telling her how much he loved her poems.

A friend and patron of the arts arranged for Browning to come see her in May 1845, initiating one of the most famous romantic courtships in literature. Elizabeth Barrett was six years older than Browning and an invalid. She could not believe that the vigorous and worldly Browning really loved her as much as claimed. Some of her doubts are expressed in the Sonnets from the Portuguesewhich she wrote over the next two years. Nonetheless, the couple were destined to be together.  Browning imitated his hero Shelley by carrying Elizabeth off to Italy in August 1846. But being more conventional, they were married a week earlier, and then eloped to Italy. They remained happily married until her death in 1861. A "defect" cited in their love letters, published posthumously, is that they did not record even one lovers' quarrel.

Elizabeth Barrett's father disinherited her. It was his wont to disinherit his his children if they got married without his permission. He never gave his permission, so all his married children were disinherited. Fortunately, Elizabeth had an independent inheritance from an uncle,  so the young couple were able to live in comfort in Italy. Elizabeth's health improved. In 1849, they had a son, Robert Wiedeman Barrett Browning ("Pen," apparently short for "Penini").

During her courtship with Robert Browning, Elizabeth had written a cycle of sonnets called Sonnets from the Portuguese. The title is variously attributed to Browning's pet name for her, and to a desire to make these Petrarchian sonnets appear to be "translated."  It is possibly related to the sonnets of the 16th-century Portuguese poet Luiz de Camões, since in all these poems she supposedly used rhyme schemes typical of the Portuguese sonnets. According to yet another version, the poems were originally to be called "Sonnets from the Bosnian," and it was Robert Browning who suggested using the name "Sonnets from the Portuguese." The fiction of translation was used to protect the couple's privacy. 1864, Browning explained the story behind the sonnets, especially the delay in their publication:

all this delay, because I happened early to say something against putting one's love into verse: then again, I said something else on the other side . . . and next morning she said hesitatingly "Do you know I once wrote some poems about you?" — and then — "There they are, if you care to see them." . . . How I see the gesture, and hear the tones . . . Afterward the publishing them was through me . . . there was a trial at covering it a little by leaving out one sonnet which had plainly a connexion with the former works: but it was put in afterwards when people chose to pull down the mask which, in old days, people used to respect at a masquerade. But I never cared. [qtd. in Mermin 359]

Robert Browning insisted that the second edition of Elizabeth's Poems include the Portuguese sonnets, raising her popularity to new heights in Victorian England. In 1850, she was a candidate for poet laureate, but lost to Tennyson.  

Elizabeth Browning was caught up in the Italian struggle for independence, producing Casa Guidi Windows (1851) in support of the revolt against Austria, and Poems before Congress (1860) excoriating British and other politicians for failing to support the revolt. In 1857 she published the epic verse-novel Aurora Leigh. This book was praised by Virginia Woolf, and has helped to fuel a further revival in the popularity of Elizabeth Browning, as it is seen as asserting themes related to women's liberation.

Among female poets, she was the most esteemed in both the United States and England during the nineteenth century. One critic wrote:

Her poetry greatly influenced Emily Dickinson who admired her as woman of achievement. Her popularity in the US and Britain was further advanced by her stands against social injustice, including opposition to slavery in the United States, championing of the Italian national cause, protest against child labor.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning was pretty and personable. Mary Russell Mitford wrote of her,  "A slight, delicate figure, with a shower of dark curls falling on each side of a most expressive face; large, tender eyes, richly fringed by dark eyelashes, and a smile like a sunbeam." Anne Thackeray Ritchie described her as, "Very small and brown" with big, exotic eyes and an overgenerous mouth. 

Elizabeth Barrett Browning was finally overcome by her ill-health, and died in the arms of Robert Browning in Florence, on June 29, 1861. She is buried in the English cemetery in Florence.

Following her death, her popularity suffered an eventual decline. Perhaps later Victorian critics did not take kindly to her political views, or to any political views expressed by a woman, and her love poetry was of less interest with the gradual eclipse of romanticism. According to one theory, the publication of the love letters of the Brownings in 1866 by their son eclipsed the Portuguese Sonnets, which supposedly had made her popular, because the main interest of the sonnets had been biographical, and the letters provided better material from this point of view. According to that theory, the Sonnets from the Portuguese were  admired for the wrong reasons by Victorian critics, who were happy to see their picture of the docile and domesticated woman affirmed. Indeed, one critic wrote of the sonnets that they are :

But Elizabeth Barrett was an accomplished and well known poet before the publication of the Sonnets from the Portuguese. Her achievements are what attracted Browning to her. The most likely explanations of her declining popularity are prosaic. The causes she advocated were no longer current news. The slaves had been freed and the Italians had won their independence, and child labor had been corrected. With time, the popularity of the sonnet, formal poetry and of Victorian literature in general faded, especially following WW I. 

Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning