Brain Snacks: Tasty Tidbits of Knowledge
During his marriage, Robert Browning often took a back seat to his much more famous wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whose verse novels Aurora Leigh and Sonnets from the Portuguese catapulted her to fame. Some Victorian readers even referred to Robert as "Mrs. Browning’s husband." (Source)
"My Last Duchess" is often compared to another of Robert Browning’s poems, "Porphyria’s Lover," another dramatic monologue in which a psychopathic speaker explains what drove him to murder his significant other. (Source)
In 1889, Robert Browning was recorded reciting his poem "How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix" – and forgetting some of the words. This recording is one of the first audio recordings of any human voice. (Source)
Robert Browning is the author of one of the most famous English-language versions of the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. (Source)