She was lying on the bed, her husband close beside her. He stroked her forehead as if it was china. ‘Knowledge by suffering entereth,’ she said, deliriously quoting her own poetry, ‘And life is perfected by death.’

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, her husband cradling her body, was experiencing the last morning of her life. It was, by all accounts, an appropriate end to one of the world's great poets and to one of the world's more interesting love affairs. The illness that would take her life was no stranger; in fact most of Elizabeth's life was divided into repeating stanzas of accident and disease; it wasn't until she met her husband, Robert, that she received any respite from the various aches and pains life threw her way.

The place where Elizabeth suffered her inaugural trauma was also the center of her universe – her family home. One of 11 children, she grew up in a rich English household, dominated by an imperious father. She had been schooled there, learning to read and write in Greek, Latin, Italian, German and Hebrew.

Elizabeth fell from a horse at the age of 15. The spinal injuries she received made her a virtual shut-in. Her father, already repressive and overbearing, became the jailer in what was essentially a gentrified prison. She would be sentenced to the confines of her house for 16 years.