Browning's Men and Women consists of fifty-one poems, all of which are monologues spoken by different narrators, some identified and some not; the first fifty take in a very diverse range of historical, religious or European situations, with the fifty-first – "One Word More" – featuring Browning himself as narrator and dedicated to his wife. The title of the collection came from a line in her Sonnets from the Portuguese. Browning himself was very fond of the collection, referring to the poems as "My fifty men and women" (from the opening line in One Word More), and today, Men and Women has been described as one of Victorian England's most significant books.
Robert Browning (7 May 1812 – 12 December 1889) was an English poet and playwright whose dramatic monologues put him high among the Victorian poets. His verse was noted for irony, characterisation, dark humour, social commentary, historical settings and challenging vocabulary and syntax.