Nonfiction · 1891
Life and Letters of Robert Browning
Sutherland Orr, Robert Browning
Sutherland Orr knew Robert Browning personally for decades before his death in 1889, and drew on both that friendship and Browning's own letters to write this biography — one of the first substantial accounts of his life, built while people who had actually known him were still available to check the details against.
Orr published Life and Letters of Robert Browning in 1891, two years after Browning's death.
Bibliomancer publishes the 1891 text exactly as Sutherland Orr wrote it.
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About this edition
The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
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About the authors
1828–1903 · Victorian
Alexandra Sutherland Orr (1828–1903), born in Saint Petersburg and the only sister of the painter Frederic Leighton, married an army surgeon and was widowed young. She became one of Robert Browning's closest friends and confidantes during the last two decades of his life, and drew on that friendship — along with access to his letters and family — to write A Handbook to the Works of Robert Browning (1885), a guide to his poetry that went through several editions, and Life and Letters of Robert Browning (1891), the first full biography of the poet, published two years after his death.
1812–1889 · Victorian
Robert Browning (1812–1889) was born in Camberwell, London, and largely self-educated through his father's extensive library. Early long poems including Paracelsus (1835) and Sordello (1840) found little audience, and it was as a dramatic poet working in shorter forms — the dramatic monologue, which he made his own — that he found his lasting voice: "My Last Duchess," "Porphyria's Lover" and the collections Men and Women (1855) and Dramatis Personae (1864) built the reputation that The Ring and the Book (1868–69), a twenty-thousand-line account of a Roman murder trial told through multiple narrators' conflicting testimony, secured. In 1846 he married the poet Elizabeth Barrett, eloping with her to Italy against her father's wishes; they lived in Florence until her death in 1861, after which Browning returned to London with their son. He died in Venice in 1889, the day his last collection, Asolando, was published, and is buried in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey.
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