Robert Browning was the son of a bank clerk. He had one sister and lived with his parents until he married. Browning attended a boarding school and spent a short time at the University of London, but was educated primarily through private tutoring. He initiated an intense correspondence with Elizabeth Barrett Barrett in 1844 after reading her Poems of that year. Two years later they secretly married and went to live in Italy. There they lived happily and wrote much, largely supported by Elizabeth Barrett Browning's independent income, until her death in 1861; they had one child.
As a poet, Browning did not meet with a great deal of commercial success,
especially in his earlier attempts at drama, but his work gradually garnered
respect. In Men and Women (1855) and Dramatis Personae (1864),
his use of the dramatic monologue to represent the inner workings of characters'
minds, often in extreme situations, results in some of his finest work. His
epic-length treatment, in the form of dramatic monologues, of a murder trial
in Renaissance Rome, The Ring and the Book (1868-69), is considered
one of the greatest Victorian poems. He lived to see the founding of the
Browning Society in 1881, and by the end of the century, his reputation had
eclipsed that of his wife.