A Washington Post 2021 Non-Fiction Book of the YearNew York Times Review of Books Editors'' Choice Non-Fiction TitleLonglisted for the 2022 PEN / Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography''Brilliant, heart-stopping ... reads like a thriller, a memoir and a provocative piece of literary fiction all at the same time ... magical and compelling'' Washington Post''How do I love thee? Let me count the ways,'' Elizabeth Barrett Browning famously wrote, shortly before defying her family by running away to Italy with Robert Browning. But behind the romance of her extraordinary life stands a thoroughly modern figure, who remains an electrifying study in self-invention.Elizabeth was born in 1806, a time when women could neither attend university nor vote, and yet she achieved lasting literary fame. She remains Britain''s greatest woman poet, whose work has inspired writers from Emily Dickinson to George Eliot and Virginia Woolf. This vividly written biography, the first full study for over thirt
