Browning, Robert, 1812-1889

Robert Browning was a British poet. Born on May 7, 1812, Browning wrote his first major work,"Pauline: a fragment of a confession" at the age of twenty. He married Elizabeth Barrett in 1826 and with her encouragement went on to become one of the major Victorian poets.

Browning was an English poet.

Browning was a British Victorian poet. Furnivall was an English literary scholar.

Nineteenth-century English poet.

English poet.

Robert Browning (1812-1889), poet and dramatist. For full details of his life and work, see the Dictionary of National Biography

Dr. Derrick T. Vail purchased Robert Browning's desk from E.P. Dutton & Company on February 20, 1915 for his wife, Dellah Harris Vail. Mrs. Vail bequeathed the desk to Smith College in memory of her daughter, Charlotte Farrell Vail, Class of 1923, who died at Smith College on March 11, 1923. The desk was received by the College after Mrs. Vail's death on December 7, 1935.

Poet.

Epithet: poet

Robert Browning, English Victorian poet and playwright.

Robert Browning, one of the most influential Victorian poets, was born into an Evangelical family in Camberwell in South London. Educated largely at home, Browning as a young man read and traveled widely. His father subsidized his first, relatively unsuccessful publications, including several plays and the much-ridiculed long poem Sordello (1840).

In 1845 he met the more successful and popular poet Elizabeth Barrett (1806-1861); they eloped in September, 1846 and moved to Italy, where they spent the next fifteen years, mainly in Florence and Asolo. Browning published Men and Women, the collection of dramatic monologues that are now among his best-known works, in 1855. Following his wife's death in Florence in 1861, Browning returned to London and became a member of London's literary circles. Dramatis Personae appeared in 1864. Four years later, The Ring and the Book, Browning's longest and most ambitious work, was published, and was both very popular and critically acclaimed.

In his later years, Browning traveled often, returning to Italy for several visits with his son "Pen" (Robert Wiedemann Barrett Browning). "Browning Societies," reading groups that met to discuss and promote Browning's works and philosophy, were founded throughout England and the United States during the 1880s. Robert Browning died at his son's home, Ca' Rezzonico in Venice, on December 12, 1889.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, popular Victorian poet, was born in England to prosperous landowning parents and spent most of her childhood and adolescence at Hope End, the family's 500-acre estate in Herfordshire. Educated at home, Barrett began writing poetry when very young and continued to write despite frequent ill-health, publishing three collections in the 1830s as well as popular Abolitionist poems, including The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point .

After she moved with her family to London in 1838, Elizabeth was introduced to several literary figures, including Mary Russell Mitford, who became a close friend and mentor. Her health worsened, however, and by 1841 she was mostly confined to her upstairs room at 50 Wimpole Street. Her 1842 poem The Cry of the Children raised support for one of the first child labor laws; her collection of Poems, which appeared two years later, was a great popular and critical success.

It was also the occasion of her meeting Robert Browning, who sent her an admiring letter; the two met in 1845, and carried on a year-long courtship before eloping in September, 1846. During this time, she wrote the now-famous Sonnets from the Portuguese . On hearing of her marriage, her father disinherited her, and the two never spoke again. The Brownings moved to Italy shortly after their honeymoon, settling in Florence. There, Elizabeth's health improved, and in 1849 she gave birth to the couple's only child, Robert Wiedemann Barrett Browning ("Pen").

Browning continued to write and to publish. In addition to several collections of poems, in 1851 she published Casa Guidi Windows, a longer poem which expressed her passionate support for the Italian Risorgimento. Aurora Leigh, her "novel-poem" narrating the emotional and intellectual development of a woman poet, was published in 1856. It was extremely popular; nineteen editions appeared before 1885, and it was admired by many contenporaries, including George Eliot, Emily Dickinson, and Susan B. Anthony, for its outspokenness on the condition of women and the sexual "double standard."

Elizabeth's health failed rapidly after 1857. Her last publication, Poems Before Congress (1860), again exrpressed her support for the Italian revolutionaries and criticized the British for not coming to their aid. It was not well received in England. Elizabeth Barrett Browning died in Casa Guidi, Florence, on June 29, 1861. Her posthumous Last Poems were published by Robert Browning in 1862.