Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)
Autograph poetry manuscript, the printer’s copy of ‘A Lament for Adonis’, [c.1850]
5 pages, 185 x 110mm, on three bifolia sewn together, the first leaf of the outer bifolium serving as a cover wrapper, titled twice (on wrapper and at head), paginated and corrected once in autograph, autograph instruction to the printer on the final page (‘now print “A Vision of Poets” from 2^nd vol of Poems’), two annotated instructions in the hand of Robert Browning on the wrapper and verso of the final leaf relating to the placement of the poem in the forthcoming edition, annotated by the printer at the top of p.1. Provenance: Sotheby's, 20 & 21 July 1981, lot 446.

The manuscript of ‘A Lament for Adonis’ used by the printer for the ‘new’ edition of the Poems (1850); marked up for publication by Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning. EBB’s translation of ‘A Lament for Adonis’ from the Greek of Bion of Smyrna first appeared in the ‘new edition’ of her Poems published in 1850, which was also enlarged with ‘Prometheus Bound’. ‘A Vision of Poets’ had previously appeared in the 1844 edition, as her note on the final page indicates, at the beginning of volume II. EBB was a scholar of Greek from an early age: in 'Glimpses into my own life and literary character', written principally when she was fourteen, she records how, at eight, she was enraptured by Pope's translations of Homer; at ten she began to study Greek with a tutor; and at eleven she began writing her own Homeric epic The Battle of Marathon (later privately printed in 50 copies by her father). A passion for Greek literature was one of the many shared interests on which her initial bond with Robert Browning was based and she won praise for her masterful 1845 translation of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, included after the present poem in the 1850 edition.