home

= = = = = Elizabeth Barrett Moulton-Barrett was born on March 6, 1806, in Coxhoe Hall, between the villages of Coxhoe and Kelloe in County Durham, England. Her parents were Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett and Mary Graham-Clarke; she was the eldest of their 12 children (eight boys and four girls). All the children lived to adulthood except for one girl, who died at the age of four when Elizabeth was eight. The children in her family all had nicknames: Elizabeth's was "Ba". The Barrett family, some of whom were part Creole, had lived for centuries in Jamaica, where they owned sugar plantations and relied on slave labour. Elizabeth's father chose to raise his family in England while his fortune grew in Jamaica. The Graham-Clarke family wealth was as great as the Barrett family wealth. = =Elizabeth Barrett Browning=

It was then (at age 20) that Elizabeth began to battle with a lifelong illness, which the medical science of the time was unable to diagnose. She began to take morphine for the pain and eventually became addicted to the drug. This illness caused her to be frail and weak. Her illness meant that Browning composed her poems primarily in her home. Mary Russell Mitford described the young Elizabeth as having "a slight, delicate figure, with a shower of dark curls falling on each side of a most expressive face; large, tender eyes, richly fringed by dark eyelashes, and a smile like a sunbeam." Anne Thackeray Ritchie described her as being "very small and brown" with big, exotic eyes and an overgenerous mouth. = =