Rated by her contemporaries among the leading poets--male or female--writing in English, Elizabeth Barrett Browning remained prominent in Great Britain, the United States, and parts of Europe from the 1840s throughout most of the nineteenth century. Scorning the label "poetess" automatically assigned in her era to women writers, she self-consciously joined the poetic tradition tracing back to classical antiquity, penning works in such varied forms as the Homeric epic, Popean didactic verse, Greek tragedy, a hybrid combining verse drama with Miltonic epic, a Petrarchan sonnet sequence, and a novel in verse in addition to many ballads and lyrics. Her themes range from the intensely personal to affairs of state, from loss and love to social oppression and Italian independence. She had achieved sufficient distinction by 1850 that critics proposed her to succeed William Wordsworth as poet laureate, and throughout her lifetime her reputation dwarfed that of her husband, poet...