Despite his wife's declining health, Elizabeth's gentle death in his arms in the middle of the night on 29 June 1861 had come as a complete shock to Browning. He knew he could not remain in Florence and brought his son, Pen, back to England to be educated. But for all of the uncertainty of life without Elizabeth he saw himself as irrevocably connected to her. ‘My life is fixed and sure now,’ he wrote to his sister, Sarianna. ‘I shall live over the remainder in her direct influence, endeavouring to complete mine, miserably imperfect now, but so as to take the good she was meant to give me.’ And to Euphrasia Flower, a friend of his youth, he predicted: ‘I shall grow, still, I hope – but my root is taken and remains.’ Just how far he was still rooted in Elizabeth, both as a man and as a poet, was a question that would trouble him over the nearly thirty years that he survived her.

He signed a lease on a new home in Maida Vale, London, in May 1862. He went for long walks on the dreary Paddington side of Regent's Canal and, initially, avoided all company except that of Isa Blagden, his and Elizabeth's friend from Florence who loyally stayed in London for a time, and Arabella Barrett, Elizabeth's sister. His principal concern, apart from getting Pen settled, was to see into publication the volume of Elizabeth's Last Poems, which came out in March 1862, followed a year later by her essay The Greek Christian Poets and the English Poets.

As a young man in London, Browning had been an active diner-out, noisy, opinionated and desperate to prove himself. Now, though hostesses were keen to have him at their dinner tables, he hesitated. In February 1862 he joined the Athenaeum, the best place in London for meeting his intellectual peers. A year later he began to accept a few invitations but told his old friend in Rome, William Story, that he got very little pleasure from them. In company he put on his party face with a loud, good-natured stream of vivid talk and amusing anecdote.