Robert Browning
In her most famous work, the collection of love poetry titled Sonnets from the Portuguese, the unidentified object of the speaker’s affection and love is Robert Browning. A noted poet in his own right, Browning rescued Elizabeth from an enforced spinsterhood under the authoritarian control of her father. Over forty years old when they finally married in 1846, Elizabeth was reluctant to publish these love poems because they were so personal, but finally relented to the condition of a semi-fictional, semi-anonymous publication scheme when her husband finally convinced her that her sonnets rivaled those of Shakespeare.
Aurora Leigh
Tremendously popular during her lifetime, but long neglected after her death, Browning’s novel-in-verse Aurora Leigh today threatens to overtake her book of love sonnets as the defining work of her career. The title character was resurrected as an icon of feminism as part of the revisionist critical re-appreciation of Browning as a poet of myriad strengths whose legacy was unduly damaged by a wholesale rejection of Victorian ideals during the rise of Modernism. Featuring a heroine who rejects Austen-like conventions of Victorian womanhood whose primary function is to marry well and produce children, Aurora turns down a marriage proposal to instead pursue a literary career and unconventional personal life.
George Sand
George Sand was the male pen name adopted female novelist Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin whom Browning discovered during her long period as an invalid under the dictatorial rule of her father. Browning saw in the rebellious non-conformity of Sand everything that she desperately wanted to be, but seemed destined never to become. Once famous herself, Browning remained an ardent and faithful supporter of a woman many deemed non-respectable at best and downright immoral at worst. Sand is featured in two of Browning’s most famous short poems: “To George Sand: A Desire” and “To George Sand: A Recognition.”
Flush
Flush is the name of the poet’s dog whom she personally immortalized in the poem “To Flush, My Dog.” That poem is a loving tribute to her “Loving friend” that features verse as steeped in passion of its kind as any of the love poems directed toward her husband. Flush is also the central character of the much shorter and less passionate “Flush or Faunus.” Interestingly, Flush is a character with a life beyond Browning’s own poetry. In 1933, Virginia Woolf published Flush: A Biography which vividly imagined a fictional account of the dog and its adoption and subsequent adventures with Browning.
“The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point”
The title character of this poem is a woman who suffers not just the abominable conditions of bondage, but who experiences abuse of many forms, loses the man she loves to murder, and gives birth to a mixed-raced offspring of rape whom she kills. The woman’s story is punctuated by the constant refrain of the cry “I am black, I am black” and in the process the poem transforms into one of the most powerful indictments of American slavery by anyone regardless of gender, regardless of race and even, stunningly, regardless of nationality. The vividly intense imagery that propels the narrative of this poem makes the runaway slave’s tales even more astonishing by virtue of it having been written a white British woman who had no personal experience with the South and the system of slavery.
Laura Savio
Laura Savio is another real-life character starring in a poem with a historical basis. Savio is the title character of “Mother and Poet” which is a narrative account of the death of two sons who lose their lives in a battle for the re-unification of Italy. That cause was yet another which Browning took up in her passionate defense against charges that the age in which she lived offered no suitable subject for great poetry. A fierce defender of efforts to reunify Italy, she transformed the heartbreaking story of Italian poet Laura Savio’s personal loss as a mother in patriotic pursuit of a grander goal into one of her most stirring poetic dramas.
