Robert Browning’s Widows

Abstract

Perhaps, no love story is better known than the romance of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning. The meeting of these two poets — she 39, he six years younger; courtship under the handicap of her father’s monomaniacal opposition to the marriage of any of his eleven children; the clandestine wedding and flight to Italy: all these and more their letters recorded in detail. ‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways’, wrote Elizabeth, and she counted them over and over again in her Sonnets from the Portuguese, published four years later, after they had settled into Casa Guidi at Florence. Robert reciprocated her sentiments warmly. His best work is permeated with devotion to his ‘moon of poets’. And when she died after fifteen years of notoriously happy married life, the whole world knew that he shared her belief: ‘I shall but love thee better after death.’ As soon as the funeral was over he took their only child Pen, a boy of twelve, and departed from Florence for ever. But his heart, it was understood, he left behind, buried there with Elizabeth.KeywordsLove StoryGerman AccentCountry HouseRich WomanAmerican AgentThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.