Browning, Robert (1812-1889)

Robert Browning eloped to Italy with poet Elizabeth Barret in 1846. After his wife’s early death in 1861, he returned to England where his own reputation grew as bright as hers had been. George Eliot strongly preferred the poetry of Elizabeth Barret Browning, especially Aurora Leigh (1857), over Robert Browning’s writings, and wished she could have met her (GEL2: 278). Eliot met Robert Browning, who made his first visit to the Priory in 1862 for one of their Sunday afternoon salons and returned occasionally, including a visit in 1865, after which Lewes and Eliot followed Browning home to see the chair, table, and books that had been his wife’s (GEL4: 205). Browning attended Lewes’s funeral in 1878, and Eliot’s in 1880.

George Eliot Archive, edited by Beverley Park Rilett, https://georgeeliotarchive.org

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