Henry Vaughan

Elizabeth Barrett Browning's life reads like a novel, more dramatic and compelling than the poet's own work suggests. This biographical study, on the other hand, tries to cram itself and the poet within the narrow boundaries of the Welsh-English border region where Barrett Browning spent her youthful years at Hope End, the ""Indian Gothic"" mansion her father designed and built in 1809. Arranging the scholarly book thematically rather than strictly chronologically, Dennis, a professor of Victorian studies in Wales, takes pains to give credit for the works from Barrett Browning's London and Italian fame to those formative ""Hope End Years."" Born in 1806, she was intellectually and artistically precocious, publishing famed poems in her teens. The remoteness of Hope End and her father's authoritarianism, however, helped keep her socially isolated. The first man with whom she developed a friendship outside her family circle was her married, blind tutor, Hugh Boyd. Letters and poems present her regard for him with all the expected propriety, while her diary at age 25 reveals a mad schoolgirl crush. ""Where the letters are balanced, dispassionate, witty, the diary... rages with anguished questioning and the torments of jealousy and suspected slights."" Mentions of the dependence of the poet on laudanum and of her family's finances on slavery are incomplete, but the author well details Barrett Browning's relationships with Boyd, Mary Mitford, her father, her favorite brother and husband Robert Browning. Photos. (Oct.)