It’s the birthday of poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861), whose greatest poems include Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and Aurora Leigh (1857) and who taught the world that you’re never too old to run away from home.

Browning was born at Coxhoe Hall, Durham, England and raised in rural Worcestershire and was the oldest of 12. Browning’s forebears had lived in Jamaica for centuries and her father still owned sugar plantations and slaves there, something that Browning was strongly against. Her childhood, however, was spent happily reading Shakespeare and Milton and writing poetry herself, until she developed a lung condition at 14, which led to a lifelong morphine addiction, and then a spinal injury at 15. But she continued to study, teaching herself Hebrew and Greek. In 1828, Browning’s mother died and the family finances tanked, and her father sold the country home and moved the family first to the coast, then London.

By this point, Browning was publishing: in 1826, she had published An Essay on Mind and Other Poems, and in 1833 she published her translation of Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus. (Gesundheit.) The Seraphim and Other Poems came out in 1838. In 1840, while Browning was living on the coast at Torquay for health reasons, she lost two brothers. One died in Jamaica (Browning’s father had been shipping her siblings off to Jamaica to try to manage the plantations there), and the other, Browning’s favorite, drowned at Torquay. Browning was devastated and returned to her father’s home in London, basically living like an invalid.

But things got better! (How often does that happen?) After Browning’s collection Poems came out in 1944, she received a letter of admiration and love from the poet Robert Browning. The two exchanged 574 letters in less than two years—that’s actual handwritten letters, people, not texts—and secretly married on September 12, 1846. It had to be a secret, because Browning’s father did not want any of his twelve children to marry (I have no idea what his plan was there). One week later, they skedaddled to Italy, settled in Florence, and eventually had a child. And they were happy. (Take that, Daddy.) They were embraced by an expat community of artists and by Italians alike.

Browning had one final illness and died on June 29, 1861. Robert, heartbroken, left Florence after Browning’s burial there and never returned.

Browning’s poem “How Do I Love Thee?” (Sonnet 43) begins:

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight

For the ends of being and ideal grace…

(Read the rest here.)

Have a fine Wednesday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.