Emily and Elizabeth Browning have been my lifelong poetry heroines. Settling on the window seat, I switched on a light and saw that I was holding a book of love poems from Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s deeply disturbing 1847 poem about a woman escaping slavery and killing her child was written to shock its intended white female readership to the abolitionist cause.

To mark World Poetry Day, we’ve collected the stories ... First published in 1850, it is Browning’s love letter to husband Robert Browning, who saved her from a life of near solitude in ...