As one of the most accomplished poets of nineteenth-century Britain, Elizabeth Barrett was proposed as a possible successor to William Wordsworth as poet laureate. Barrett enjoyed a physically active and intellectually vigorous childhood. Under the guidance of her brother Edward's tutor and the family's neighbor, classicist Hugh Stuart Boyd, she studied Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and several modern continental languages, becoming deeply versed in these literatures and eventually producing several translations from Greek poetry, including one of Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound, first published in 1833. She began writing poetry as a very young child, and by fourteen had penned The Battle of Marathon (1820), which her father had privately printed. By age fifteen she was publishing publicly as well, two of her poems appearing anonymously in the New Monthly Magazine. That same year Elizabeth Barrett and several of her siblings fell ill of an uncertain disorder that may have been either tuberculosis of the spine or bronchitis. Sent to a spa for treatment, she returned an invalid under physician's orders to avoid intellectually strenuous pursuits. Nevertheless, she continued to read, study, and write, producing An Essay on the Mind (1826) as well as several shorter poems by age 20. Despite her poetic success, the next decade brought her several crushing losses and a dangerous intensification of her illness: the unexpected death of her much-loved mother in 1828, the loss of the family home, and, in 1838 a hemorrhage of her lungs which forced her to a spa on England's south coast, where she spent the next three years, and where her brother Edward, with whom she was exceptionally close, drowned in 1840. By the time she returned to London in 1841, again under orders to avoid intellectual stimulation, both her physical and emotional health seemed irretrievably broken. Yet her poetry appeared regularly in periodicals and popular gift annuals, and The Seraphim, and Other Poems was published in 1838. Despite her illness, too, when Barrett returned to London she enjoyed a widening circle of literary and artistic acquaintances, including William Wordsworth, Walter Savage Landor, Mary Russell Mitford, art critic Anna Jameson, and painter Benjamin Robert Hayden. Her second volume of poetry, Poems (1844), established her beyond question as a significant poet. It also brought her a warm letter from Robert Browning, initiating a passionate courtship that culminated, because of her father's fervent opposition to her marriage, in the couple's elopement and departure for Italy in 1846. During their courtship, Elizabeth composed the sonnets collected as Sonnets from the Portuguese, which appeared in an expanded 1850 edition of Poems. Under the influence of a more active life and the genial Italian climate, Elizabeth's health improved dramatically. She continued to publish, with Casa Guidi Windows (1851), her response to the Italian struggle for independence the next major work to appear. Her epic poem Aurora Leigh (1856) details the maturation and career of a fictional female poet, and is often compared to William Wordsworth's autobiographical epic, The Prelude (1850). Strong in its criticism of Victorian social mores, particularly the restrictive attitudes toward women, the poem scandalized many critics, but enjoyed immediate public success. Her last volume to be published in her lifetime, Poems before Congress (1860), returns to the subject of Italian politics. Having enjoyed a period of relatively good health after her marriage, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's health again began to deteriorate, and in 1861 a rupture in her lungs proved fatal. She left behind a body of work that contemporaries praised as placing her at the apex of female poetic tradition and even her detractors recognized for its combination of sensitivity and intellectual depth.