Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Elizabeth Barrett Browning was the English poet who, from her father's house in Wimpole Street where ill health had confined her, wrote the Sonnets from the Portuguese — forty-four poems tracing the growth of love from uncertainty to certainty — and produced what many consider the finest love sequence in the English language. Born in 1806, she was famous before she met Robert Browning, who wrote to admire her work; they married secretly in 1846 and fled to Florence, where she spent the rest of her life. Aurora Leigh, her verse novel published in 1856, argued for women's education and professional lives with a directness that made it controversial and influential in equal measure. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways is the most recognised line; but you were made perfectly to be loved — and surely I have loved you, in the idea of you, my whole life long — is the more searching one.