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Robert Browning
Browning's dramatic poem The Ring and the Book narrates the trial of a Roman for the death of his wife and her parents. He suspected his wife of having an affair with a cleric. The man appeals his sentence, though unsuccessfully. The poem is narrated by many different voices, each adding their version of events to the whole in a series of monologues.
When Robert Browning first met the ailing Elizabeth Barrett in 1845 it must have seemed to him like something from a gothic novel. All but a prisoner to her strict, disciplinarian father, (who had forbidden all twelve of his children from marrying and disinherited any who disobeyed him), Elizabeth had recently published a book of poems that had made her one of the most lauded writers in the land. Robert, enamored by Elizabeth's poems sought out
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