Elizabeth Browning  Poems

Elizabeth Barrett Moulton-Barrett was born March 6, 1806 in Coxhoe Hall, Durham, England. In 1809, her father Edward, having made most of his considerable fortune from Jamaican sugar plantations which he inherited, bought "Hope End", a 500-acre (2.0 km²) estate near the Malvern Hills in Ledbury, Herefordshire, England.

Elizabeth was educated at home, attending lessons with her brother's tutor and was consequently well-educated for a girl of that time.

The first poem on record is from the age of six or eight. The manuscript is currently in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, but the exact date is doubtful because the "2" in the date 1812 is written over something else that is scratched out). A long Homeric poem titled The Battle of Marathon was published when she was 14, her father paying for its publication. Barrett later referred to her first literary attempt as, "Pope's Homer done over again, or rather undone."

During her teen years she read the principal Greek and Latin authors and Dante's Inferno in the original languages. Her appetite for knowledge led her to learn Hebrew, and read the Old Testament from beginning to end. By the age of 12 she had written an "epic" poem consisting of four books of rhyming couplets.