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Literary Passion · London, Greater London

50 Wimpole Street (the Barrett–Browning elopement)

From her sickroom at 50 Wimpole Street, under a father who forbade his children to marry, Elizabeth Barrett conducted a secret courtship of 573 letters with Robert Browning — then slipped out to marry him and flee to Italy. 'How do I love thee?' was written in this house's shadow.

StatusDocumented history
Datecourtship 1845–46; elopement 12 September 1846
The peopleElizabeth Barrett, Robert Browning
The site50 Wimpole Street, Marylebone
Coordinates51.51861, -0.14833 (confidence 4/5)

The story

A letter arrived at this Marylebone address in January 1845 for the poet Elizabeth Barrett — a semi-invalid of thirty-eight, confined for years to a second-floor back room, dosed with laudanum, ruled by a father who had forbidden all eleven of his surviving children ever to marry. It was from Robert Browning, and its first line ran: "I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett." What followed was perhaps literature's most documented courtship: 573 letters over twenty months, held at Wellesley College, and ninety-one supervised visits to that single room, each requiring her father's permission. On 12 September 1846 Elizabeth slipped out with only her maid, married Browning at St Marylebone Parish Church — then went home and lived another week under her father's roof before escaping for good to Italy with her maid and her spaniel Flush. Her father returned her letters unopened, disinherited her, and never spoke to her again. The Barrett fortune came from Jamaican sugar plantations worked by enslaved people, a fact Elizabeth knew and was ashamed of; a committed abolitionist, she wrote to Ruskin that she "belonged to a family of West Indian slaveholders" and feared the curse of it. In Italy her health revived and in 1849, aged forty-three, she bore a son; she died in Florence in 1861. The sonnets she wrote in secret during the courtship became Sonnets from the Portuguese. The house at 50 Wimpole Street was demolished in the 1930s and a modern building with a plaque stands on the site — but an American admirer bought the original front door, the one Browning stood before ninety-one times, and shipped it to Wellesley, where it sits alongside the letters.

More stories at this spot

Flush, the dog who was kidnapped

Elizabeth's cocker spaniel Flush, a gift from the writer Mary Russell Mitford, was stolen more than once by a London dog-stealing gang who knew a devoted owner would pay. Elizabeth paid the ransoms, over her family's objections, and took the dog to Italy. Virginia Woolf later wrote his biography, telling the love story from the spaniel's point of view.

The invalid who may not have needed the sofa

Elizabeth's decades of illness are real but their cause is disputed — possibly tuberculosis, possibly a spinal injury, possibly worsened by the laudanum prescribed for it. What is striking is how much her health improved once she escaped Wimpole Street for Italy, which has led some to suspect the sickroom was partly a cage.

The play that made a monster

In 1930 Rudolf Besier's hit play The Barretts of Wimpole Street turned Edward Moulton-Barrett into a byword for the domestic tyrant — so much so that the family's descendants protested at his portrayal. The play, and its film versions, fixed the story in the popular imagination as the great escape it was.

Sources

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Documented history

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