Author: Maria Popova / Source: Brain Pickings
In 1856, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (March 6, 1806–June 29, 1861) staggered the world with a sensation best described today as viral: Aurora Leigh — her epic novel in blank verse about a young woman caught in the tension between the life of love and the life of genius, who finds her powerful voice as an artist in a society that seeks to silence it by sublimation to convention.
These were dangerous ideas in an era when women could not vote, attend university, or even enter many cultural establishments. Barrett Browning — a key figure in Figuring, from which this piece is adapted — proudly reported that mothers wouldn’t let their daughters read Aurora Leigh, but young women devoured it in secret. It stunned, it shocked, it unsettled the status quo with more than its central claim of women’s intellectual and artistic autonomy, of the right to choose the public sphere and the life of creative work over the domestic sphere and the life of deadening dependence.Ba — as Elizabeth Barrett was known in childhood — had begun writing poetry before the age of eight, her first known poem protesting compulsory military service. It was in childhood, too, that Ba — the eldest of twelve children — started suffering from the intense spinal headaches and muscle pain that would bedevil her for the remaining four decades of her life, now believed to have been hypokalemic periodic paralysis — a rare disorder that depletes muscles of potassium, effecting extreme weakness and bouts of acute pain. By seventeen, she had published — anonymously — Essay on Mind, and Other Poems, in the preface to which she defined poetry as “the enthusiasm of the understanding,” argued that “thought catches the light reflected from the object of her contemplation,” and divided “the productions of the mind” into two classes: the philosophical and the poetical. Her body of work would rise to the pinnacle of both, rendering her one of the most influential writers of the century. But she was to surmount an uncommon share of adversity before becoming a titan of her time, all the while renouncing the dangerous myth of the suffering artist.
A close succession of tragedies compounded a particularly painful episode of her disease. Just before her thirty-fourth birthday, one of Elizabeth’s brothers died of fever and another — her most beloved sibling — in a sailing accident for which she blamed herself. “That was a very near escape from madness, absolute hopeless madness,” she would later recount. The following year, as her physical symptoms inflicted new heights of anguish, her father took her to London in an invalid carriage. She spent seven years almost continuously bedridden in a darkened upstairs room on Wimpole Street alongside her beloved spaniel Flush, communicating with the outside world only via letters, “as people shut up in dungeons take up with scrawling mottoes on the walls.” Secluded in her sickroom, Barrett counterbalanced her stillness with a ferocious pace of composition that led to her first major literary success and invited the courtship of Robert Browning. “I love your verses with all my heart, Dear Miss Barrett,” Browning — an obscure poet six years her junior — wrote to the stranger whose 1844 poetry collection had enchanted him beyond words. “I love these books with all my heart — and I love you too.”
So began an epistolary courtship — carried out in secret, as Barrett knew her father would condemn the union — that produced some of the most exquisite love letters ever written. Within two years, Barrett and Browning eloped to marry in a small ceremony at a London church around the corner from her sickroom. Her punitively possessive father disinherited her. Poetry became the locus of her self-possession. She began envisioning “a sort of novel-poem… running into the midst of our conventions, and rushing into drawing-rooms… ‘where angels fear to tread’; and so, meeting face to face and without mask the Humanity of the age, and speaking the truth.” She spent the next eleven years conceiving and composing…
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