Eldest of twelve and educated at home, Elizabeth Barrett Browning was an English poet whose work achieved immense renown for its clarion voice and gemlike turns of phrase. While her lapidry and lyrical work constitutes as singular and powerful poetic achievement, it was also one of the charming details of her biography that she formed one half of a major literary power couple with her husband, Robert Browning, with whom she moved to Italy in the 1840s. Their love was immortalized in her incandescent, scintillatingly romantic collection, Sonnets from the Portuguese.