Born in 1806, Elizabeth Barrett Browning may be best known today for love sonnets such as ‘How Do I Love Thee? Let me Count the Ways’ and her romance with Robert Browning. But in her lifetime she was one of Britain’s most revered poets – for her poems on social injustice, not love – and was far more celebrated than her husband. Her circle included John Ruskin and Georges Sand, while Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allan Poe and George Eliot were great admirers.
Although her family owned slave plantations in the West Indies, she was an ardent abolitionist, anti-colonialist and republican. She wrote poems about child labour and runaway slaves – and in her verse novel Aurora Leigh created an innovative masterpiece of feminist writing.
Yet privately, she submitted for decades to her father’s oppressive will. Finally escaping, she married in secret and moved to Italy in 1846, her father cutting all ties with her. But in Robert Browning she found someone who devoted himself to her and to her work.
In The Rebellion of a Dutiful Daughter, Emer O’Sullivan brilliantly charts the conflicted life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who not only blazed a trail in modernising poetry but reshaped the role that women could play in society, ensuring that she remains as relevant today as she was then.
