Easily one of the best books I've read this year. I knew nothing about Elizabeth Barrett Browning going in; I had a vague impression that she wrote love poetry. But she was so much more! In Sampson's telling, she comes across as ahead of her time, almost modern. 

How was she awesome? Let me count the ways. 

She overcame a somewhat smothering childhood as an invalid and eventually broke free of her father's iron fist, something many of her siblings never managed to do. 

She challenged her own family's championing of the slave trade and then developed a surprisingly sophisticated critique of colonialism. 

She considered herself a serious artist long before she met her husband. In fact, she met him because he admired her art. 

She couldn't quite bring herself to support Florence Nightingale because she worried that Nightingale's fame would increase the perception that women were natural caregivers and belonged in traditional roles. (Find the lie.) 

Browning was much more political and devoted to her art than I had imagined; she was deeply in love with her husband but I think she would be horrified to realize that she is today remembered largely for that. I now find myself itching to read Aurora Leigh, a nine-book blank verse epic poem about a woman writer -- I am not a poetry person, so that is saying quite a lot.