Meet Anne Baird

The writer of one of my favorite love poems, A Birthday, was Christina Rossetti ~ a Victorian spinster. What was it about Victorian spinsters that inclined them toward poetry, and a passionate inner life? Truly, they were singing birds! They sang their hearts out despite the cages in which they were often confined by the repressive, male-dominated mores of their day. 

First came Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whose poetry was celebrated in the 1830's. She lived until she was 40 as a reclusive semi-invalid, a virtual prisoner in her father's house in Wimpole Street, London. Then, she met and fell in love with Robert Browning.

Browning was a dashing poet and adventurer, six years younger than she. But he adored Elizabeth's poetry, and persuaded the frail, frightened poet that he loved her too. Her beautiful collection of poems, Sonnets from the Portuguese, chronicle her love affair with Robert, from her initial doubts and fears to her final triumphant declaration, "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways..."

A year after they met, the lovers secretly married and eloped. They fled Elizabeth's prison, never to return. Her enraged father disinherited her, but she refused to re-enter the gilded cage.

At 43, the former invalid bore her first and only son, Robert Weidman Browning. She died in her husband's arms at 55, leaving behind a collection of exquisite love poems, and an inspiring story of love triumphant in an age when respectable women seldom got to sing the music that was in them.

Christina took up Elizabeth's mantle as England's favorite poetess after her predecessor died in 1846. But unlike Elizabeth, the love affairs she began were never consummated in "Real Life." Instead, she expressed her deepest desires and yearnings through her poetry.

She fell in love and was engaged twice, once to an artist, James Collinson, and once to linguist Charles Colley. Her devout Anglican faith caused her to break off both engagements, however.  She abandoned James because he reverted to Catholicism, and Charles, because she decided he was not a Christian.

Rejecting the path of sexual fulfillment, marriage and motherhood, she stayed home with her mother, writing poetry and enjoying an intimate circle of artistic friends, including her brother, the famous Pre-Raphaelite painter, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Her main contact with the world beyond her safe, closed social circle was volunteer work with prostitutes at the St. Mary Magdalene Penitentiary in Highgate. (The Victorians, a lusty crew, were obsessed with rehabilitating "fallen women!")  She died in 1894, leaving no husband or children, but a flock of singing poems that expressed her passionate heart.