The first biography of Barrett Browning in more than 30 years is a nuanced and insightful account, dismantling previous studies that viewed the poet only in relation to her domineering father or husband. Fiona Sampson, a poet herself as well as a biographer of Mary Shelley, argues that central to Barrett Browning’s story is the construction of identity – both in her life and the myth-making that surrounds it. Such a construction is itself a two-way creation, argues Sampson. “That the life of the body both enables and limits the life of the mind is the paradox of the thinking self.”
Profile, 336pp, £20
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