'A much-needed reassessment': Fiona Sampson restores Elizabeth Barrett Browning to her proper place Credit: Stock Montage/Getty When Wordsworth died in 1850 and the post of Poet Laureate became vacant, one name that was widely canvassed in the press as his replacement was that of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. In the end, the honour went to Tennyson; it would take until 2009 for the first woman, Carol Ann Duffy, to fill the post. That Barrett Browning was in the running says much about her status in her lifetime, though her literary reputation declined after her death. Her only poem that remains widely known today is the lyric “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways”; her magnum opus of 1856, Aurora Leigh, a book-length verse narrative about the life of a fictional woman writer, is largely unread except by academics. During the 20th century, she was sentimentally repackaged in the play The Barretts of Wimpole Street, which inspired more than one Hollywood treatment. It painted her as a delicate flower escaping from her overbearing father into the arms of her fellow poet Robert Browning.