Elizabeth Barrett Browning
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was recognized in her lifetime as one of the most important poets of mid-Victorian Britain. She wrote a significant corpus of poetry which ranges from the lyric through the closet drama or dramatic lyric and the dramatic monologue to the epic, as well as letters and criticism. For much of the twentieth century, interest in her focused on her romantic life-story, her letters, and Sonnets from the Portuguese. Late in the century, critical interest in her epic female künstlerroman or verse novel Aurora Leigh and her other political poetry—in which she took up the causes of working-class children, the abolition of slavery, women's issues, and the Italian Risorgimento—revived. She is again considered one of the leading and most influential voices of her day.
- BirthName: Elizabeth Barrett Moulton Barrett
- Nickname: Ba
- Married: Elizabeth Barrett Browning She published first anonymously, sometimes under the initials , then (for her third volume, The Seraphim, and Other Poems) as Elizabeth B. Barrett, and then for Poems, 1844, as . After her marriage she came to be known popularly as Mrs Browning.
- Pseudonym: EBB She often signed her letters and manuscripts thus, both before and after her marriage. Scholars often familiarly refer to her by these initials, which remained unchanged throughout her career, rather than the other variously unsatisfactory versions of her name.