For details on how to contact our editorial and commercial
departments, click here The poet and the portrait It was the
sort of love story that inspires writers, but the romance of
famed poets Elizabeth Barrett Barrett and Robert Browning hid a
dark secret. Although there are countless thousands of love
stories in English literature, many of them well-known, one of
the greatest is a work not of fiction, but of fact, a true
romance concerning two monumental 19th Century poets – Elizabeth
Barrett Barrett, who was born in County Durham, and Robert
Browning. Part of their story is well-known, having been told in
The Barretts of Wimpole Street on stage in 1930, on film in 1934
and 1957, and in a 1964 musical. Mr Barrett’s determination that
none of his 11 children should ever marry has always been
ascribed to his domineering Victorian paternalism, but it is now
becoming increasingly accepted that he was trying to expunge any
trace of his own mixed blood, something quite scandalous in
polite society at that time, i