Elizabeth Barrett Browning was born 6th March 1806, at Coxhoe Hall, Durham, England. She was the oldest of twelve children, and her family made their fortune from Jamaican sugar plantations. Educated at home, Barrett was a precocious reader and writer. Having devoured while still a child the classic works of John Milton and William Shakespeare, she wrote her first book of poetry by the age of twelve. She was deeply religious, and her writing often explored Christian themes, as it was throughout her life’s works.

When she was fourteen Elizabeth developed a lung illness that required her to take morphine for the rest of her life. The following year, she suffered a spinal injury that debilitated her further. Despite her poor health, she lived a full literary life, teaching herself Hebrew, studying Greek culture and publishing her first book in 1820, The Battle of Marathon.

In 1826, she anonymously published An Essay on Mind and Other Poems, which became a key work in her writing career. Soon after its release, Elizabeth’s mother died, and two years later and her father’s Jamaican business failed, forcing him to sell their estate. The family eventually settled in London, but she continued writing and published her translation of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound (1833). In 1838, she published The Seraphim and Other Poems.

Because of Elizabeth’s poor health she moved to live with her brother Edward at Torquay to benefit from sea air. Tragedy struck when he drowned, and she returned to London, emotionally and physically battered. Either despite or because of her grief she continued to write, and in 1844 her collection titled Poems was published. It was well received and caught the attention of established English poet Robert Browning. Browning wrote Barrett a letter, and the pair exchanged nearly 600 letters over the following 20 months, which culminated in their elopement in 1846. Barrett’s father was very much against the marriage, and he never spoke to his daughter again.

In 1849, the Brownings' only child, Robert , was born in Florence, Italy, the couple’s newly adopted country. A year later, Elizabeth published Sonnets From the Portuguese, a collection of 44 love sonnets that would become one of the greatest sequences of sonnets in history. The collection was dedicated to Robert Browning and written in secret during their courtship. “Sonnet 43” begins with the famous line, “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.”