This article was written by Lucy Gordon
Open to guests and visitors, Casa Guidi in Florence, where Robert and Elizabeth Browning spent their idyllic married life, offers us a firsthand glimpse of their lasting passion for Italy, poetry, and each other.
On the afternoon of September 12, 1846, fragile poetess Elizabeth Barrett defied her tyrannical and fanatically religious father, Edward, the widowed scion of rich Jamaican slaveholders. With faithful maid, Elizabeth Wilson, her only companion, she slipped out of the family home on London's Wimpole Street and married Robert Browning in secret at St. Marylebone Parish Church. She was forty; Robert was six years younger. She was already acclaimed for her verses; he was yet to achieve widespread fame.
The couple was passionately in love. They had met in May 1845, though Robert was already an admirer of Elizabeth's poetry and had been writing love letters to her for several months before their first meeting.
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