Famous British poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning dies in Italy after a lingering illness

Elizabeth Barrett Browning was born in northern England in 1806, the daughter of a Jamaican slave-holding plantation owner.  She began to compose poetry and became a leading English poet, popular both at home and in the United States. She is famous for her elopement with the poet Robert Browning, for which she was disowned. They had one child, a son.  Sickly all her life, Elizabeth died in Italy of pulmonary illness and is buried in the English Cemetery in Florence.  She was fifty-five years old.  (By John Osborne)