he expression of frustration could have been sent from any tier in travel-restricted Britain: “Where do you go in July? For me, I cant answer. I am longing to go to London, & hoping to the last. That is all. For the present, ... certainly the window has been opened twice – an inch – but my physician shakes his head or changes the conversation (which is worse) whenever London is mentioned. But if it becomes possible, I shall go – will go! Putting it off to another summer is like a never.” In fact, it was mailed from Torquay in June 1840, by someone who had already spent two years in virtual lockdown there. Its recipient was Richard Hengist Horne, a literary man about town. Horne has since fallen into obscurity, but the letter writer would go on to become world famous as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, author of many pioneering works, including one of the best-known poems ever written, “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways”. For now, though, she was an emerging talent struggling to keep any sense of herself as a writer alive. The success of her The Seraphim and Other Poems two years earlier had been eclipsed by the onset of severe illness that prompted her medical evacuation from the polluted capital. As a result she was feeling isolated, and left behind. As she confided to another friend: “What claim had I in my solitude & sadness & helpless hopeless sickness upon a literary man overwhelmed with occupation & surrounded by friends & fitnesses of all sorts in London?” In fact, she wasn’t alone in her isolation. Bad health was good business for 19th-century Torquay. Wealthy invalids flocked to the south Devon town for its sunshine and sea air. Local landlords and tradesmen profited from the absence of any effective cure for illnesses as various as gout, tuberculosis and plain old asthma. So did doctors, whose quack remedies included cupping, bleeding and herbal decoctions. The 34-year-old was among many incomers settling round its picturesque harbour. Here she shared a family “bubble” with an aunt, sister and favourite brother, all “quenching the energies of their lives” in this frustratingly limited existence; her wider social and professional life would remain entirely virtual for years. In 1845 she would still be writing to Robert Browning, “As for me, I have done most of my talking by the post of late years – as people shut up in dungeons, take up with scrawling mottos on the walls.” Elizabeth had lived with chronic illness, self-isolating on and off, for much of her adult life. The emergency that precipitated her flight to Torquay was coughing up blood. Unlike John Keats, however, she seems to have had not tuberculosis, but bronchitis and asthma that, without modern clinical treatments, eventually merged into pneumonia, to kill her at 55. For this brilliant woman, who was writing poems at six and French dramas at 10, and whose first book was published at 14, “the straitness of my prison” was becoming intolerable. As a robust, outdoorsy child she had planned (in no particular order) to become the greatest female poet ever, to help liberate Greece from Ottoman rule, and to become Lord Byron’s girlfriend. But when she was 15, she and her sisters caught an undiagnosed illness, quickly followed by measles, which in Elizabeth turned to months of headaches and whole-body muscular spasms. Today, her diagnosis would probably be viral illness and post-viral syndrome. Unfortunately, medicine of the time used the spine as a metonym for any systemic illness – and treated it accordingly. The teenager was confined to a spinal sling for nine months. She emerged scarcely able to walk, and her health never fully recovered. In 2018, when I started writing the first biography of Barrett Browning in three decades, a mysterious respiratory illness that clinicians were helpless to understand or alleviate appeared remote, colourfully old-fashioned. And she seemed a most unlikely role model. I’d absorbed the cultural cliche of the neurasthenic poetess in The Barretts of Wimpole Street, Rudolf Besier’s Broadway hit that spawned three films and seven TV dramas. Now I found myself wading through theoretical and fictional speculation about psychosomatic symptoms, a feminist retreat to the couch, or all-round privileged weediness. Just like the pandemic conspiracy theories that were beginning to crop up on my social media, these speculations seemed obsessed with avoiding the brutal truth of human vulnerability: denying the fact of illness which, though today clinically manageable in the west, still kills millions in the absence of, for example, antibiotics or steroid inhalers. By 2020, as I continued to track her lifelong search for the clean, warm air that would let her breathe, Barrett Browning’s struggle for life took on an ugly new meaning. It became increasingly hard to spend days thinking about someone racked with coughing, fighting for breath and profoundly frustrated in all she wanted to do, when every time I stood up from my work table it was to hear more of the same. Her oscillation between frustration and fear became comprehensible, immediate and at times almost overwhelming. To write biography is after all to take on your subject on her own terms – and, like all writing, that means putting your self in the frame, whether you mean to or not. Yet the same material was also offering me a fascinating insight into how to cope with what was going on in my own world. Elizabeth was one of the first cultural influencers to understand how a virtual existence offers escape from daily life, “The escape from pangs of heart & bodily weakness ... when you throw off yourself … what you feel to be yourself … into another atmosphere & into other relations, where your life may spread its wings out new,” as she explained it to Browning. She escaped via paper rather than a screen, of course; but her grasp of self-invention through a kind of “second life” reminded me of all the friendships we were suddenly reconfiguring on Zoom. I also realised how closely her practice prefigured today’s digital communicators: not just the teenagers and geeks, bloggers and TikTok stars, but citizen journalists, activists and those policed by authoritarian regimes too. For in creating this virtual presence Barrett Browning went further than just building a form of personal freedom. In 1844 she published Poems, the book that consolidated her reputation and would lead to her nomination for poet laureate (though it took Britain another century and a half to actually appoint a woman). It also ushered in her modernising style, with its conversational language, story-telling drive – and ethical imperatives. Together with Alfred Tennyson and, later, Browning, she was signalling the end of Romanticism and the start of a distinctively Victorian way of writing for a new, mass audience. Changing the course of literary history, from this point on she would achieve international celebrity, and influence writers as varied as Emily Dickinson, John Ruskin, Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling and Virginia Woolf. Key to her new way of writing was its use of influence. Barrett Browning might be confined to her room but, like Charles Dickens, she deployed her fame, and rapidly widening readership, to advocate against key injustices of her day. Her still-shocking “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point” was published in an abolitionist fundraiser in 1848; she also wrote fundraiser poetry for the Ragged Schools movement giving poor kids an education, and had published an impassioned condemnation of child labour, “The Cry of the Children”, in the mass-circulation Blackwood’s Magazine. In “The Runaway Slave” and in Aurora Leigh she condemned rape and forced prostitution – rather than their victims. Finally, “Casa Guidi Windows” and other late poems forced the Italian anti-imperial struggle on the attention of British readers, and it’s for this that she would receive a hero’s funeral in Florence. Elizabeth’s life story isn’t just a useful guide to working around isolation, though. There was, eventually, an end to lockdown. Poems (1844) had also inspired the young Robert Browning to contact her. When the pair eventually married, it was to Italy that they ran away together. The next 15 years, though latterly marred by the recurrence of Elizabeth’s ill-health, were a period of glorious nomadism. Working from abroad and searching about to create their ideal lifestyle, first in Pisa and then in Florence – with stays in Rome, Paris, London and Le Havre – the Brownings lived the life of perpetual adventure that today’s digital nomads have rediscovered. From the first moment, “it was all glorious, & past speaking of”. A southern climate, fresh air and fresh food allowed Elizabeth to get really well for the first time in her adult life. The couple stayed in a medieval collegio, in spa towns and Tuscan villas, eventually settling on the first floor apartment in a palazzo near Florence’s Boboli Gardens that Elizabeth would name Casa Guidi. They adopted Italian habits including the evening passeggiata, while tapping into the expat community’s local knowledge. Food was a particular revelation: “We dine our favorite way on thrushes & Chianti with a miraculous cheapness – It is a continental fashion, which we never cease commending. Then at six we have coffee & rolls of milk – made of milk, I mean: & at nine, our supper (call it supper, if you please) of roast chesnuts & grapes – ” British visitors have embraced the Med since the days of the grand tour. What differentiated the Brownings was that they continued to send work back to publishers in London and the US; and to keep up with fellow writers and artists through mail and visits. Elizabeth proved as determined to sustain her writing life as she had been to carve it out. In the model she created in Florence – of a home from home, in which to work from home – I think she found the perfect response to her lockdown life. Necessary as that had been, it taught her actively to embrace the freedom to travel when it came: something I recognise in the travel plans friends are sharing now for “when this is all over”. Besides, the shadow cast by those years of isolation was surely what made her pay such passionate attention when she found herself in Italy, and campaign so hard for the country’s future: rather as we debate organising society differently from now on. When our lockdown ends, I’ve realised, we could do worse than throw ourselves into campaigning for change, whether for social justice or the planet we find ourselves on. Just like that remarkable pioneer Elizabeth Barrett Browning.