Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

Rescuing Elizabeth Barrett Browning from her wax-doll image

Fiona Sampson breathes vigour into a poet generally represented as a delicate invalid without any inner life at all

Photograph of EBB taken from an ambrotype made by the Macaire brothers in Le Havre in 1858. Dante Gabriel Rossetti used it as the base for his portrait 
issue 30 January 2021

‘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.

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