The Brownings

Elizabeth and Robert Browning both wrote poetry about love. However, their poetry was very different. Elizabeth wrote about how much she loved her husband and how wonderful he was to her (in her mind). She was madly (or obsessively) in love with him and her whole world revolved around him. This love was not reciprocated. To the contrary, Robert Browning wrote of a love for someone other than his wife. His love was more of an very unhealthy possessive desire to own and control another woman. He had fallen so obsessed with this other woman that he refused to let anyone other than himself be with her. He actually killed her so that he would be the last person on her mind and the last one that she would have been with. Neither one of the Browning’s had a healthy form of love for someone else. It’s interesting to think that these two were married for anything other than a safety of “being married”.