Minor Victorian poets.

Wimpole Street

The address 50 Wimpole Street, London, is synonymous with both the semiseclusion of the gifted poet Elizabeth Barrett and with the romantic story of the love between Barrett and Robert Browning.

In 1835 the Barrett family moved to Wimpole Street. While living there Elizabeth gained a literary reputation with the publication in 1838 of The Seraphin and Other Poems. Then illness and the shock of her brother's death placed her frail life at risk, and for the next six years she was confined to her room, where she continued to write. A reference to Browning in her poem "Lady Geraldine's Courtship" is supposed to have first led Browning to write to Barrett in 1845. Soon afterward he visited the invalid, and during the following year they fell in love, apparently against the wishes of her father. They eloped to Italy from Wimpole Street.