Elizabeth Barrett Browning was the most famous female poet in England during her lifetime. Born in Durham, England in 1806, Barrett suffered a spinal injury as a teenager, which damaged her health. After growing up in the countryside, the family moved to 50 Wimpole Street in London. She led a reclusive existence as a semi-invalid but wrote for several periodicals and published a volume of poetry The Seraphim and Other Poems in 1838 and another Poems, by E. Barrett in 1845. The poet Robert Browning sent her a telegram in early 1845 expressing his love for poetry and its author; they established a correspondence and finally met. They hid their relationship and marriage from her despotic father who had forbidden any of his children to marry. The couple eventually eloped to Italy in 1846 where they lived for a number of years. 
She developed an interest in spiritualism and the occult and a passion for Italian nationalist politics until she died from a chill in Florence in 1861.
Barrett Browning’s early poetry was marked by moral sensibility in keeping with the visionary modes of Romantic narrative poetry but she became more concerned with contemporary issues such as the exploitation of children in coal mines and factories, which inspired her work The Cry of the Children. Presented as translations to disguise their personal nature, her best-known work was Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850), a sequence of sonnets documenting the stages in her love for Robert Browning. However, Aurora Leigh (1857) a verse novel has come to attract the most critical attention, including praise from Virginia Woolf, as it depicts the life of a woman poet and is the first English composition by a woman with a female writer as heroine. The artist is depicted as committed to socially accessible realist art and is daring for it presentation of social issues and responsibilities and arguments for poetry as a vocation. While some Victorian artists, such as Matthew Arnold, felt that there were not enough heroic acts to inspire great poetry and Tennyson used Arthurian legend, Barrett Browning felt that the domestic and psychological was suitable material for epic poetry.
Sonnets from the Portugese 43 (extract)