Love Means Leaving the World Out of It | Michelle Dean @ Hazlitt
Elizabeth Barrett Browning would, today, be a strong candidate for one of those awful magazine stories about the delusions of single women. She was 38 the day Robert first wrote to her, 40 when they married. She was far more successful a poet, at the time, than her younger suitor. Because of her father’s tyranny, and because of the era, she was saved from accusations of excessive pickiness, of too much focus on career and too little on the necessities of childbearing. Still, she had other suitors in her life, and a model for disobedience: one sister had managed to run off with a cousin. But until Browning nothing could move her to defy her father. She had no intentions of escaping spinsterhood. Her art was everything. And had she not had that attitude, she might not have waited long enough to find him.