Elizabeth Barrett wrote a Homeric epic at fourteen and her father printed it
By her own account she read novels at six, fell for Pope's Homer at eight, started Greek at ten and finished an epic called The Battle of Marathon at fourteen. Her father had it privately printed, keeping every copy in the family, and nicknamed her the Poet Laureate of Hope End. Decades later she really was considered for the laureateship.
Elizabeth Barrett was born in 1806 at Coxhoe Hall in County Durham, the eldest of twelve children, and known at home as Ba. Her family's wealth came from sugar plantations in Jamaica worked by enslaved people, where the Barretts had lived since 1655. In 1809 they moved to Hope End, a 500-acre estate in Herefordshire, where her father built a mansion in extravagant Turkish style with brass balustrades, doors inlaid with mother-of-pearl and an underground passage to the gardens. Her mother gathered the girl's verses into albums, producing one of the largest surviving collections of childhood writing by any English author.
Around fifteen she developed severe head and spinal pain that doctors could not diagnose and that never left her; later came lung disease. Laudanum and then morphine, routinely prescribed at the time, became a lifelong dependency. The family fortunes collapsed after lawsuits and the abolition of slavery, Hope End was sold to pay creditors, and in 1838 they settled at 50 Wimpole Street in London. In 1840 her favourite brother Edward drowned while sailing at Torquay, a loss she said nearly drove her mad.
Confined largely to an upstairs room, she was consoled by a spaniel named Flush, a gift from the writer Mary Russell Mitford, whose life Virginia Woolf later turned into a 1933 novel. Yet she was astonishingly productive. The Cry of the Children, published in 1843, attacked child labour and built support for Lord Shaftesbury's Ten Hours Bill. Her 1844 Poems made her famous and drew the admiration of Robert Browning.
Fearing her father's opposition, the couple courted and married secretly, and he disinherited her. They moved to Italy in 1846, and their son Pen was born in 1849. Her verse novel Aurora Leigh, drawing on memories of Hope End, ran through more than twenty editions by 1900. She died in Florence in 1861, having influenced both Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Dickinson.
Source: Elizabeth Barrett Browning
