ELIZABETH BARRETT
BROWNING
- LIFE STORIES -
1/10/1845 Browning, Barrett, Love
On this day in 1845 Robert Browning wrote his first letter to Elizabeth
Barrett, so inciting one of the most legendary of literary love stories. The
letter belongs to the 'fan mail' category -- the praise of a
thirty-two-year-old up-and-comer for one just six years older and already
internationally famous -- but it was more than just poet-to-poet: "...I
do, as I say, love these books with all my heart -- and I love you too."
9/12/1846 The Brownings:
"Dared and Done" read it
now!
On this day in 1846, Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning married
secretly. Until she received a fan letter from Browning, Barrett showed every
sign of complying with her father's ban on marriage. Twenty months later -- 575
letters from Browning, and almost daily visits -- Barrett would shed her
"graveclothes" and walk out of the bedroom she hadn't left for six
years except when carried.
12/12/1889 Robert Browning,
Elizabeth Barrett and After
Popularity came late to Robert Browning, but in his last years he could
walk the streets of London without hearing the gossip that he had married
Elizabeth Barrett for her fame or money, and see shop windows full of posters
bearing some of his cheeriest lines: "God's in his heaven -- All's right
with the world!" and "O to be in England/Now that April's there"
and "A man's reach should exceed his grasp/Or what's a heaven for?"