[In the following review, Angier describes Elizabeth Barrett Browning as a myth-dispelling biography, and speculates on Forster's attitude toward her subject.]

This is the most exciting sort of biography to read, or to write: the myth-dispelling biography, which overturns an old story, and does so most convincingly.

There are two main mythological figures here [in Elizabeth Barrett Browning]: Edward Moulton-Barrett, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's father, and Elizabeth herself. Their roles are simple, as mythical roles must be: oppressor and oppressed, tyrant and victim. Margaret Forster sets out to show that the truth is more complicated than this mythical fiction.

First she suggests that Edward Barrett was not the monster and despot he has been made out to be. She sketches his youthful exuberance (in building the Barretts' eccentric minareted home, Hope End), his tenderness and approachability as a young father. But this half of her campaign is only a limited success. It is clear that at best, when his wife was alive and his family young, Edward was a benevolent despot; with age, religion and isolation he becomes here as tyrannical a devourer of his children as myth has made him. None of them was to marry, and when they did he disinherited them; his favourite, Elizabeth, he never forgave. Margaret Forster won't change anyone's mind about Edward Barrett; she merely confirms his awfulness.

With the other mythological figure, however, she is completely successful. The legendary Elizabeth Barrett Browning is oppression incarnate: weak, ill and lonely from childhood, until she is miraculously rescued by Prince Charming, Robert Browning. Forster shows that this is almost all wrong, from its smallest detail to its largest meaning.

Elizabeth was the happy, healthy bossy eldest of 11 children until she was 15 years old; she never fell from a horse or had TB; she was the adored, admired favourite of her parents from the beginning. When she did become an invalid it was not so easy to say who suffered and who benefited. Elizabeth didn't choose to become ill, and her sufferings were real. But Margaret Forster makes it very clear that she used her illness. She exploited it—and every other aspect of her imprisonment—to get what she wanted: distinction, leisure, the chance to pursue fame and immortality.

The myth depends on inequality: the all-powerful father, the utterly powerless daughter. That was true in practical terms only. The real truth was far more interesting: two giants fought, equal in determination and deviousness; and in the end the tougher and more ruthless won. Elizabeth Barrett Browning got her fame and immortality—and freedom and a husband too.

Along the way Margaret Forster offers much interesting discussion and investigation. Victorian medicine emerges as the villain of the piece quite as ignorantly cruel as Mr. Barrett. Cupping, leeches, setons, the dreadful spine crib—Elizabeth suffered them all, quite uselessly. In general, medicine seems to have been a respectable way of keeping women down, and not just for Edward Barrett. “From the onset of menstruation, middle class women were encouraged to regard themselves as delicate creatures who must take great care of themselves,” Margaret Forster writes. The prescription for all female illness was total inactivity—which produced the weakness it was designed to cure. “Women quite literally went mad with boredom (and it was boredom which had caused half their problems in the first place).”

What were Elizabeth's illnesses? About the first one, at the age of 15, the mystery remains. The symptoms sound like anxiety, and Margaret Forster suggests periods of anorexia; as she also suggests that Mr. Barrett looked 20 years younger than he was, which was 20 years older than Elizabeth, she makes us wonder whether their love for each other might not be at the root of Elizabeth's troubles in more ways than one.

As to the later, lifelong illness, Forster suggests chronic bronchitis, made lethal by a combination of “cures”—not just inactivity but opium, to which Elizabeth became permanently addicted—and Elizabeth's own hyperintensity and depression.

She also rewrites the myths of Elizabeth's later life, as wife and mother. It's not true, we hear, that she wanted a girl and tried to turn her son, Pen, into one; she merely fought against sex stereotypes 100 years before her time. Robert's ideas were different; but he did not—Margaret Forster insists—“seize his son and brutally cut off his curls” in rebellion or revenge the moment Elizabeth was dead. (No evidence here, though, and I wasn't entirely persuaded. Elizabeth's desire to keep Pen “neuter” until he was 12 sounds pretty sick to me.)

Altogether, then, this reversal of a myth is just as dramatic as the myth itself, and—because it's truer—much more interesting. But there is one problem. I never much liked the Elizabeth Barrett Browning of legend: she was such a wimp, and (except in the moment of flight) really rather dull. It's easier to pity the real woman: to see how crippled she was by insecurity, illness, the long battle with her father. But, alas, it's no easier to like her.

Margaret Forster tries very hard to find her good points and praise them—her sensitivity, her care for the oppressed, her selflessness towards Robert in the last years. And she bravely and fully explores all the bad ones. Elizabeth reduced herself to a quivering wreck by her imaginative empathy with others, but faced with a real suffering person she could rarely produce a kind word. She preached and pontificated a theoretical republicanism, but treated her own most loyal servants with autocratic lack of compassion. She spoiled her dog and her son ludicrously; anything she identified with was perfect, and to be perfectly loved. She wouldn't let Robert help or nurse anyone but her; she had to come first, always. At the end, with her sister Arabel and her niece Mary, she became as great a bully and tyrant as her father.

At least she knew it, Forster says. But is that good enough? No. I came away from this biography disliking its subject, and guessing that Margaret Forster dislikes her too. Does she like her? Does she even like her poetry, a new edition of which—Selected Poems, Chatto & Windus—she edits? She misreads one poem (A Man's Requirements), possibly two. I have an uncomfortable feeling that the answer may be no.