Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh and other Poems

Pages:132-135
Kamlesh (Singhania University, Pachari Bari, Jhunjunu, Rajasthan)

Elizabeth Barrett Moulton Barrett was a Regency child born in 1806 to parents who profited from the Slave Trade to the West Indies, her father, Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett, owning the slave plantation of Cinnamon Hill in Jamaica, her mother’s family being Newcastle slave trade shipowners. Her father, Edward Barrett Moulton · Barrett, with his sister, Sir Thomas Lawrence’s famous ‘Pinkie’ and whose real name was Sarah, had come to England from Jamaica, Sarah dying in 1795, very soon after her famous portrait was painted, from tuberculosis. With that slave wealth her father built Hope End in 1810, near Malvern, on the Welsh border, which he modeled on a Turkish seraglio (Turks also owned slaves) and which Elizabeth described as ‘crowded with minarets and domes, crowned with metal spires and crescents’. He also stocked its library· with books and engaged for his oldest son, also an Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett, a tutor from Ireland, Daniel McSwitney. He encour9-ged his first-born child, Elizabeth, to share in her brothers’ lessons and to explore the library. But he let her know that only the first-born son would inherit the slave wealth, not the daughters, and he even named the last-born sons of his twelve children, Septimius and Octavius, to indicate their place in the succession. The oldest boy was known as ‘Bro’. The older sister competed with her younger brother in Latin arid Greek, on her own studying French, Italian and Hebrew. She adored Byron and Greek and wrote The Battle of Marathon in their styles when she was eleven. Elizabeth, separated from Bro at his departure for Charterhouse, collapsed with tuberculosis. She nevertheless published poems in journals about Greece and Byron, and in 1826 published Essay on Mind, With Other Poems, the printing costs being paid for by a Jamaican family slave, Mary Trepsack. This volume prompted her friendships with Sir Uvedale Price and with blind Hugh Boyd, both Grecian scholars. Her letters on Greek metrics to Sir Uvedale Price, the classical scholar and friend of Wordsworth, were published under his name in 1827. She became Hugh Boyd’s amanuensis and read Aeschylus, Sophocles and the Greek Fathers with him.