Rescuing Elizabeth Barrett Browning from her wax-doll image

‘Ah, did you once see Shelley plain?’ asks the speaker in Robert Browning’s poem ‘Memorabilia’ — a line which recognises how easy it is to misread a writer once they’ve passed into a hazy afterlife of fame, neglect or simple misunderstanding. Yet few of Browning’s contemporaries are as hard to see plain as his own wife: the poet who was known to her family as Ba, signed herself EBB, and published a number of popular works under her married name of Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

During her lifetime she was one of the most admired poets of the age; a framed portrait of her hung in the bedroom of Emily Dickinson, and when Wordsworth died in 1850 there was serious talk of her becoming the first female poet laureate. Since her death in 1861, however, her reputation has sunk like a bad soufflé.

For many readers, knowledge of her poetry is now restricted to a single line reproduced every year on thousands of Valentine’s Day cards — ‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways’ — while her lifelong struggles with illness and laudanum addiction have been replaced in the popular imagination by sugary romances such as Rudolf Besier’s 1930 play The Barretts of Wimpole Street and its 1964 musical adaptation Robert and Elizabeth.

Even the Google Doodle that celebrated her birthday in 2014 turned her into a girlish figure who appeared to be oddly fascinated by a wilting flower. Tiny in real life (Annie Thackeray described her as ‘very very small, not more than four feet eight inches I should think’), in death she has been treated more like a wax doll: a pretty simulacrum of a human being without any inner life at all.

There were some early warning signs in Virginia Woolf’s 1933 novel Flush, a playful version of Elizabeth Barrett’s life as seen from the perspective of her pet spaniel.