Elizabeth Barrett Browning was born in 1806 into a prosperous family. She grew up at the family home near Hereford, until the family moved to London in 1838. She was well educated at home, and her abilities were encouraged by her protective and authoritarian father, who paid for the first publication of her poetry when she was fourteen. From an early age she suffered from ill health, aggravated by an injury to her spine, and she lived a confined life as an invalid, though she became a well-known and admired poet. A correspondence with Robert Browning, who had written to her after the publication of her Poems of 1844, led to their secret marriage and elopement to Italy in 1846. Elizabeth Barrett Browning lived for the rest of her life in the Casa Guidi in Florence, where she found a new personal freedom and witnessed the struggle for Italian independence from Austrian control. She died in Florence in 1861.