Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Elizabeth Browning Completes Aurora Leigh, Poets and Poetry at Aspirennies.com

The Brownings then left for Pisa. (When Barrett died in 1856, Elizabeth Barrett Browning was still unforgiven.) While in Pisa she wrote “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point” (Boston, 1848; London, 1849), a protest against slavery in the United States. The couple then settled in Florence, where their only child, Robert Wiedemann Barrett, was born in 1849. In 1851 and in 1855 the couple visited London; during the second visit, Elizabeth Barrett Browning completed her most ambitious work, Aurora Leigh (1857), a long blank-verse poem telling the complicated and melodramatic love story of a young girl and a misguided philanthropist. This work did not impress most critics, though it was a huge popular success.

During the last years of her life, Mrs. Browning developed an interest in spiritualism and the occult, but her energy and attention were chiefly taken up by an obsession, to a degree that alarmed her closest friends, with Italian politics. Casa Guidi Windows (1851) had been a deliberate attempt to win sympathy for the Florentines, and she continued to believe in the integrity of Napoleon III. In Poems Before Congress (1860), the poem “A Curse for a Nation” was mistaken for a denunciation of England, whereas it was aimed at U.S. slavery.

In the summer of 1861 Elizabeth Barrett Browning suffered a severe chill and died. --Encyclopedia Britannica