Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Born in County Durham in 1806, the eldest of twelve, Elizabeth Barrett began writing at eleven and never stopped - her juvenilia alone form one of the largest collections by any English writer. At fifteen an unexplained illness locked her into lifelong pain; laudanum became her daily companion, weakening her further even as she wrote prolifically through the 1840s on abolition, child labor reform, and the interior lives of women. Her 1844 Poems brought such acclaim she rivaled Tennyson for laureate. It also brought Robert Browning's letters. They courted in secret - her father would tolerate no marriage - wed anyway in 1846, and fled to Italy, where she was promptly disinherited. She spent her last fifteen years in Florence, writing Aurora Leigh and Sonnets from the Portuguese, raising a son called Pen, and dying in 1861 with her husband at her side. Poe and Dickinson both studied her; the Browning legend, built on locked rooms and elopement, has never quite left the ground.