Elizabeth Moulton-Barrett was born in Durham, England in 1806. Although her youth was fairly normal for a child of wealthy parents living on a large estate in the country with her eleven siblings, her father’s non-conformist attitudes meant that she was brought up in a manner completely contrary to most of her fellow nineteenth century women. Her father, a merchant made rich by the slave trade, forbade her from marrying but encouraged her to educate herself in the classics and to write. It was he who published her first book of poetry - when she was thirteen.

Her greatest work Sonnets From The Portuguese (1850) is a series of love sonnets for her husband Robert Browning. Such was her standing as a poet in Victorian England that she was seriously considered for the laureateship that was eventually awarded to Tennyson.
She died in 1861