Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861) was an English Victorian poet celebrated for her lyrical intensity and social conscience. A precocious writer, she published early volumes of poetry and gained wide recognition with *Poems* (1844). In 1846 she married fellow poet Robert Browning and moved from England to Italy, where she lived mainly in Florence. Her love sequence *Sonnets from the Portuguese* (1850) became one of the era’s best-known collections of sonnets. She also wrote the verse-novel *Aurora Leigh* (1856), a major work exploring art, women’s roles, and contemporary society. She died in Florence in 1861.