Born in March 6, 1806 in Coxhoe Hall, Durham, England, Elizabeth Barrett Browning is the eldest of twelve children and was the first one in her family to be born in England for more than two centuries. Elizabeth's father, Edward, decided to raise his family in England while his fortune from his sugar plantations in Jamaica grow. She was homeschooled and has read passages from "Paradise Lost" and a number of Shakespearean plays among other great works before the age of ten.

 

          By her twelfth year, she had written her first epic poem which consisted of four books of rhyming couplets. Elizabeth developed a lung ailment two years after and doctors began treating her with morphine, which she will take until her death. When she was fifteen, she suffered a spinal injury while saddling a pony.

 

          Despite her ailments, she continued her studies. She taught herself Hebrew throughout her teenage years so she can read the Old Testament of the Bible. Accompanying her appetite for the classics was a passionate enthusiasm for her Christian faith. She became active in the Bible and Missionary Societies of her church.

 

          In 1826, she published her collection "An Essay on Mind and Other Poems" anonymously. Two years after, her mother passed away. The slow abolition of slavery and mismanagement of the plantations depleted their income. Eventually, in 1832, Elizabeth's father sold their rural estate at an auction. They moved to a coastal town and rented cottages for three years until they settle permanently in London. While Elizabeth is still living near the sea coast, she published her translation of "Prometheus Bound" by Aeschylus.

 

          She continued living in her father's London house in the 1830s, and wrote The Seraphim and Other Poems (1838), expressing Christian sentiments in the form of classical Greek tragedy. Due to her weakening disposition, she was sent to the sea of Torquay with her brother Edward. She returned home broken later that year because Edward "bro" drowned while sailing at Torquay. She then spent the next five years in her bedroom at her father's house. In 1944, she produced a collection entitled "Poems". This gained the attention of Robert Browning and he wrote her a letter.

 

          They exchanged 574 letters over the next twenty months. Elizabeth's father bitterly opposed their relationship as he doesn't want any of his children to marry. In 1846, Elizabeth and Robert married and settled in Florence, Italy where her health improved and she bore a son named Robert Wideman Browning. Her father never spoke to her again. She also produced a collection of sonnets named "Sonnets from the Portugese". Critics generally considered this as her best work.

 

          She died in Florence on June 29 1861.