Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Elizabeth Barrett Browning was born on March 6, 1806, in Coxhoe Hall, near Durham., England. She was the eldest child of Mary Graham Clarke and Edward Moulton-Barrett. Her father was Edward Moulton-Barrett, whose wealth was derived from sugar plantations in the British colony of Jamaica and her mother, Mary Graham-Clarke, came from a family with similar commercial interests.
Elizabeth was an accomplished child. She had read a number of Shakespearian plays, parts of Pope's Homeric translations, passages from Paradise Lost, and the histories of England, Greece, and Rome before the age of ten. She was self-taught in almost every respect. During her teen years she read the principal Greek and Latin authors and Dante's Inferno — all texts in the original languages. Her voracious appetite for knowledge compelled her to learn enough Hebrew to read the Old Testament from beginning to end. Her enjoyment of the works and subject matter of Paine, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Wollstonecraft was later expressed by her concern for human rights in her own letters and poems. By the age of twelve she had written an "epic" poem consisting of four books of rhyming couplets. Barrett later referred to her first literary attempt as, "Pope's Homer done over again, or rather undone." Elizabeth began to write poetries when she was a child about 9-year-old. She was a clever girl, Elizabeth was growing up in a west of England, and she received an informal largely education at home from her younger brother tutor. When she was young her parents supporting her early writng, and many of her birthday odes to her parentd.
At the age of 14, she wrote her first collection of verse, THE BATTLE OF MARATHON. From an early age Elizabeth suffered a chronic lung ailment. At 15, Elizabeth was along with her sisters Henrietta and Arabel to contract some sort of disease. Elizabeth was much slower to recover for some reasons, and it was around . And she tried to treat her chronic ill health and a...
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