Elizabeth Barrett Moulton Barrett was born on 6 March 1806, in Coxhoe Hall, County Durham, the eldest of twelve children. The family's wealth was derived from sugar plantations manned by slaves in Jamaica and enabling them to also purchase a 500-acre estate in Herefordshire. This wealth allowed her to publish poems from an early age. However by age twenty the family’s fortunes were to decline, but never below comfortable, after losing a lawsuit over their plantations. Shortly thereafter Elizabeth became afflicted with an unknown disease and became addicted to morphine. Despite this she continued to write and became increasingly popular both in England and in the United States. Her poems against slavery chronicled her abhorrence of the basis of the family wealth. In 1844 she was introduced to the younger Robert Browning who was a great admirer of her work and began a secret courtship and thence to marriage. To him she wrote and dedicated one of her greatest works,
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Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861) is generally considered the greatest of English poetesses. She was well educated for a woman of her time at home, being confined to bed by a lung complaint, possibly tuberculosis. The appearance of her Poems in 1844 attracted the attention of Robert Browning, who courted her in secret before eloping with her to Italy. There Elizabeth’s health improved and she threw herself into politics, becoming a pioneer of early liberal movements.
Ghizela Rowe has worked in broadcast television for thirty years on a broad range of programming. Her specialization is in music. She helps run the Copyright Group, an extensive collection of master recording rights, and has lent her voice to many audiobooks, including The Poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Elizabeth Gaskell: The Short Stories, and The Romantics: An Introduction.
Richard Mitchley is an actor and narrator who has appeared in Auf Wiedersehen, Pet…, The Black Adder, and Doctor Who.