Forster is sympathetic towards Barrett Browning's father, Edward Barrett – who was frequently demonised for "imprisoning" his daughter in their London home on Wimpole Street – highlighting their positive relationship during her childhood.
She points out the central role that Barrett Browning's mother, Mary Barrett, played in guiding her daughter's education and earliest literary development. She stresses the importance of Barrett Browning's rural childhood at Hope End in Herefordshire, and discusses the nature of her mysterious childhood illness, demonstrating that no diagnosis was made at the time by the doctors attending her. Forster draws on the new material to expand on Barrett Browning's life before she met Robert Browning in 1845, at the age of almost forty. Description Įlizabeth Barrett Browning is the first full biography of the poet to be published since Gardner Taplin's life of 1957, and reviews substantial material uncovered during the intervening thirty years, including letters, diaries, papers and juvenilia collected by Philip Kelley and others. It remained the most-detailed published biography of the poet in 2003, and was one of the best known of Forster's biographies in 2016. Forster draws on newly discovered letters and papers that shed light on the poet's life before she met and eloped with Robert Browning, and rewrites the myth of the invalid poet guarded by an ogre-like father, to give a more-nuanced picture of an active, difficult woman who was complicit in her own virtual imprisonment. Elizabeth Barrett Browning: A Biography by Margaret Forster, first published in 1988, is a biography of the English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, which won the Heinemann Award in 1989.
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