Elizabeth Barrett Browning is the first full biography of the poet to be published since Gardner Taplin's life of 1957, and reviews substantial material uncovered during the intervening thirty years, including letters, diaries, papers and juvenilia collected by Philip Kelley and others.[2][5][6][7][8] Forster draws on the new material to expand on Barrett Browning's life before she met Robert Browning in 1845, at the age of almost forty. She stresses the importance of Barrett Browning's rural childhood at Hope End in Herefordshire,[9] and discusses the nature of her mysterious childhood illness, demonstrating that no diagnosis was made at the time by the doctors attending her.[10] She points out the central role that Barrett Browning's mother, Mary Barrett, played in guiding her daughter's education and earliest literary development.[6][9] Forster is sympathetic towards Barrett Browning's father, Edward Barrett – who was frequently demonised for "imprisoning" his daughter in their London home on Wimpole Street – highlighting their positive relationship during her childhood.[6][9] She emphasises the similarities in character between father and daughter, and the fact that Barrett Browning actively maintained their intimate relationship before the split over her wish to marry Browning. She asserts that Barrett Browning "created her own prison and it was one, moreover, in which she had wanted the warder on constant duty".[6] She was also among the first to suggest that Barrett Browning's relationship in the early 1830s with the married scholar Hugh Stuart Boyd, who tutored her in Greek, might have had an element of romantic attraction on her side.[11]
The second part of the book deals with the Brownings' marriage and life together in Italy. Forster documents a series of miscarriages that Barrett Browning experienced.[7] The biography is also innovative in its investigation of Barrett Browning's relationships with her female servants, whom she underpaid and in some cases abandoned when they had difficulties. Forster particularly highlights her poor treatment of her maid Elizabeth Wilson when she became pregnant.[5][6][7] Forster subsequently examined the relationship between Barrett Browning and Wilson from a fictional perspective in her novel Lady's Maid (1990).[1]
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