DARED AND DONE: THE MARRIAGE OF ELIZABETH BARRETT AND ROBERT BROWNING - Hardcover

MARKUS, JULIA

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0747522960 ISBN 13: 9780747522966

Publisher: Bloomsbury, 1995

Synopsis

Defying her tyrannical father and despite poor health, Elizabeth Barrett married Robert Browning in 1846 after an intense courtship, and they spent the next 15 years in Italy until her death. This book chronicles their union, drawing on their copious correspondence including many of Elizabeth's hitherto unpublished letters. Setting out to cast new light on the life and work of the pair, it shows how the political events of the times inspired their poetry. Delving into their Creole background, it examines Elizabeth's belief that she had African blood. It explores the couple's friendships with Tennyson, Thackeray, Rossetti and William Story, with Harriet Hosmer, Charlotte Cushman and George Sand.

About this title

From the Inside Flap

nd brilliant work of biography. The story of two great English poets, Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, whose work was immediately recognized and adored by their contemporaries, whose courtship ranks with the great love stories of all time -- and in whose marriage romance was not merely sustained but intensified.

We enter their story through the sealed Victorian world of the Barretts of Wimpole Street: Elizabeth, at thirty-nine, a poet of international fame, a child prodigy who had grown to be a middle-aged spinster, a woman for whom romantic love seemed not to be possible, confined by illness, morphine, and the tyranny of her father, scion of rich Jamaican slaveholders, rum and sugar traders.

It is to this fortress that Robert Browning, already an admired young poet and playwright, already a devotee of Elizabeth's, lays siege. ("I love your verses," he had written Elizabeth in his first letter to her, long before they met. "I love your verses with all my

About the Author

Julia Markus graduated from Boston University and received her Ph.D. from the University of Maryland. Robert Browning was the subject of her doctoral thesis, and she has written extensively on both Brownings. She served for eight years on the Board of Directors of the Browning Institute. Ms. Markus is the Director of Creative Writing at Hofstra University. She is the author of four novels: Uncle, which won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Award, American Rose. Friends Along the Way, and A Change of' Luck. Her articles and reviews have appeared in Smithsonian and The New York Times. She lives in Connecticut and New York City and is at work on a novel.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0747522960
• ISBN 13: 9780747522966
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384