One biographer described the young Elizabeth Barrett as "an elfin child wandering in a world of fairy dust." The poet herself admitted that in her father's house "books and dreams were what I lived in."

Elizabeth's father built a mansion for his wife and twelve children--a mansion which was to become a prison for the poet and the rest of her family living under Mr. Barrett's tyrannical rule.

Elizabeth was born near Durham, England on March 6, 1806. Her father, a former slave owner, demanded obedience and complete devotion from his children. The young Barretts were not allowed to play with other children who might contaminate them with ideas not approved of by their father. Therefore, Elizabeth was never able to have the normal childhood adventures; all her adventures were mental.

Mr. Barrett encouraged her to use his library. But she could only read the books on one side of the library, never the books on the other, the forbidden side. The permitted books consisted of Plato, Homer, Milton, Shakespeare and the Bible. The forbidden side contained Gibbon's History and Fielding's Tom Jones. However, Mr. Barrett had neglected to survey all the books which he said his daughter might read; among those were Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary, Tom Paine's Age of Reason, and Hume's Essays. As Elizabeth later wrote: "books which I was never suspected of looking towards...but which did just as well as the forbidden works."

Growing up with stories of the seige of Troy and the tragedy of Hector, the young girl began to write her own odes and lyrics. At the age of eight she had made a "little clasped notebook" of her poems; at nine she wrote an epic and at ten she wrote a French tragedy which was performed by her brothers and sisters. When she was thirteen Elizabeth wrote a long epic on the Battle of Marathon; her father was so proud of this one that he had 50 copies printed. And Elizabeth, who adored this benevolent dictator, dedicated the poem to him.

Impressed by his daughter's poetical skills, Mr. Barrett hired a private tutor for her and her oldest brother, Edward. Their education must be purely classical, Barrett said--no arithmetic. Until the end of her life Elizabeth envied those who could multiply "three times six without doing it on their fingers."

Elizabeth crossed her father once with disastrous results. Her brother Edward was her favorite companion of all the Barretts. Elizabeth begged her father to let her have a vacation at the seashore and take Edward with her. Mr. Barrett fumed and raged. A vacation for a woman was ridiculous, for a man, unheard of. Elizabeth persisted and finally her father gave in saying, "Very well, Elizabeth, but the responsibility is yours."

Brother and sister went on their vacation but one day when Edward was sailing with another young man a storm came up. Both boys were drowned and Elizabeth considered herself a murderess. She now had a mortal dread of going against her father's wishes in any way.

By the time Elizabeth was in her thirties she was an invalid confined to her room. She rarely even opened the curtains to let the sun in, and never came downstairs. A spine injury and lung congestion in her adolescence had sapped her strength. Her father read to her, pampered her and brought her medicine whenever she wished. He allowed her to have a dog named Flush, whose mutton must be roasted, not boiled, and who required his meat fed to him on a fork. Flush liked his cream cheese salted and his coffee had to come with muffins or he would not drink it. Flush was as much a tyrant as Mr. Barrett and just as insanely jealous of Elizabeth's affection.

Elizabeth was thirty-nine when she received her first letter from an admiring young poet, Robert Browning. She had recently published a volume of poems and Browning's letter praised her work. "I love your verse with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett--and I love you too."

While Robert's letters and his friendship were a great source of happiness for Elizabeth, they were also the cause of much anguish. She dreaded the reaction of her father, who had forbidden any of his children to marry. She herself was an invalid nearing forty and Browning was seven years younger than her. Yet, the young man persisted in his requests to be allowed to visit her.

At last Elizabeth said that he might come to her house between two and six o'clock--the hours when her father was away on business.

Robert's visits were like a tonic; soon Elizabeth was able to get out of bed and walk downstairs. She even began to take strolls with him down the street. But she still insisted that their relationship be kept secret from her father. "He would wish to see me dead at his foot," she said.

Indeed, when Robert and Elizabeth were married and set sail for Italy Mr. Barrett declared, "My daughter is now in her grave. Let us forget the dead."

Although Elizabeth wrote many letters to her father begging his forgiveness, he never answered her. Nevertheless, the happiness she had with Robert and their vagabond life in Italy overshadowed her sorrow.

One morning Elizabeth gave her husband a small parcel of forty-four sonnets and said, "Please don't read them until I am out of this room."

Robert Browning read the poems--personal revelations of a dying invalid recalled to life through love. They spoke of the triumph of love for every lover. He tried to persuade Elizabeth that they should be published, that they were the finest sonnets since Shakespeare. "You have no more right to hoard your genius than to hoard your money. Heaven intends our gifts to be spent," he said.

Finally, Elizabeth agreed that these highly personal poems might be published but only if they were disguised as translations from a foreign tongue, "Sonnets from the Portuguese." The critics acclaimed the collection as "one of the most exquisite translations in the history of literature!"

Just after Elizabeth's forty-third birthday she gave birth to a son, Wiedemann. Now the former invalid was hustling her family off on excursions around the Italian countryside--to the marble cliffs of Carrara, over mountain trails on the back of a donkey. The Brownings traveled to Paris, Venice, Geneva and finally to London to try to see Elizabeth's father.

But Mr. Barrett refused to see his daughter. He told his servants to "tell her, if she ever comes to this house, that I am not in."

Elizabeth still adored her father. At his rebuff her health began to fail again. She returned with her family to Italy and consoled herself with her writing. Soon she undertook her most ambitious work, Aurora Leigh, a novel in verse.

One critic evaluated the work as "a hundred times over, the finest poem every written by a woman." The poet Walter Savage Landor said he was unaware "that anyone in this age was capable of so much poetry."

Elizabeth's strength was rapidly failing. One day she received a letter and a package from her father. The letter was a short note addressed to Robert: "In the accompanying package you will find the letters sent to me by your wife. All these letters, you will note, have remained unopened. The seals upon them are still intact."

Shortly after the return of the letters, Mr. Barrett died and Elizabeth collapsed when she received the news. Browning, who had never left her side in all their fourteen years of marriage, stayed by her bedside now. He held her close as she slept, and when she woke she found herself still lying in his arms. And on June 30, 1861 she died there.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning's sonnets were once considered "the finest in any language since Shakespeare's." The sonnet beginning "How do I love thee" remains unsurpassed in its eloquence, and each of the "Sonnets from the Portuguese" speaks of the renaissance of the soul through the power of love.