This new biography, based on the recent discovery of hundreds of letters and personal papers, challenges the legend of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's early family life and delivers an unforgettable portrait of this talented and tormented writer's marriage, exile in Italy, and vibrant creative life.

Few poets have captured the essence of love as beautifully as Elizabeth Barrett Browning in Sonnets from the Portuguese or in the famous love letters she and Robert Browning wrote to one another. But she was also a woman of great cerebral power. An early feminist, influenced by Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women, Elizabeth Barrett Browning championed the causes of women in such poems as "Aurora Leigh." She wrote political poetry, translated classics from Greek and Latin, and lived an intellectual life of brilliant vitality from an astonishingly young age.