title: Dared And Done: The Marriage of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning
author:  Julia Markus 
description: Defying her tyrannical father and in spite of poor health due to lung disease, English poet Elizabeth Barrett married poet-playwright Robert Browning in 1846 after a secret courtship, and they spent the next 15 years in Italy until her death. Elizabeth wrote great love sonnets, the proto-feminist novel in verse, Aurora Leigh, and fiery political poems condemning American slavery or supporting Italian unification. But illness and habitual depression took their toll. Robert, who during their marriage produced his breakthrough book of poems, Men and Women, witnessed the long decline of the great love of his life and he never remarried in 28 years of widowerhood. Markus, a novelist and head of Hofstra University's creative writing department in New York, has written a moving dual biography that peels away the myth and sentiment surrounding this union. She also delves into the Brownings' West Indies background. Pro-abolitionist Elizabeth's great-grandfather was a wealthy slaveholder in Jamaica, and the poet believed she had African blood. Robert's grandmother was Creole with claims to plantations in St. Kitts. Photos. <br />Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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  Her first glimpse of Ford Barrett after seven long years had flustered her
  even more than she’d expected. Not that he was the same ardent, charming young
  man she remembered. Time had changed him in many ways.  
    
  
  The pitiless Indian sun had darkened his skin to the colour of a Barbary
  pirate’s. The wild black curls she had once loved to twine around her fingers
  had been cropped to short, severe stubble. His mouth, once so mobile, was now
  set in an unyielding line. The years had chiselled his features into a visage
  of stark, savage beauty. Eyes once the warm, soft green of new moss were now
  hard and cool as jade.  
    
  
  Had all those changes been wrought by the passing years and his experiences in
  the Orient? Or had he always been such a forceful, ruthless man, while she’d
  been too naïve to see it?  
    
  
  Part of her itched to turn and flee from this formidable man, while another
  part felt irresistibly drawn towards him…
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Married: The Virgin Widow
  
  Deborah Hale 