In her youth Miss Barrett became an invalid through an injury to her spine, an accident occurring while she was fixing the saddle of her riding horse. As she grew older she was confined to her room. To move from a bed to a sofa seemed a perilous adventure requiring a family discussion. Her father was a strange unaccountable man, selfish and obstinate, and passionately jealous of the affection of his children. In the meantime Miss Barrett had written poetry that attracted the attention of a kindred spirit. Robert Browning in 1845 wrote to her saying that he had once nearly met her and that his sensations then were those of one who had come to the outside of a chapel of marvelous illumination and found the door barred against him. A little later he suggested that he would like to call on her. This commonplace and altogether natural suggestion threw the invalid into a state of tremulous disapproval. With robust insistence Robert replied, "If my truest heart's wishes avail, you shall laugh at east winds yet as I do." Miss Barrett replied, "There is nothing to see in me nor to hear in me. I never learned to talk as you do in London, although I can admire that brightness of carved speech in Mr. Kenyon and others. If my poetry is worth anything to any eye, it is the flower of me. I have lived most and been most happy in it, and so it has all my colors. The rest of me is nothing but a root fit for the ground and dark." A reply such as this would be construed by any gentleman as a challenge. The substance of Browning's reply was, "I will call at two on Tuesday." On May 20, 1845, they met. In September, 1846, Miss Barrett walked quietly out of her father's house, was married in a church, and afterwards returned to her father's house as though nothing had happened. Between the marriage and the elopement Robert Browning did not call at the Barrett house on Wimpole Street. One of his biographers says that this absence was due to an inability of Browning to ask the maid at the door for Miss Barrett when there no longer was a Miss Barrett whom he wished to see.