On the wonders of Wimpole Street

I did not like Rome, I think I confessed to you [...] I lost several letters in Rome, besides a good deal of illusion. (Elizabeth Barrett Browning)

Ow, eez, y@-ooa san, is e? Wal, fewd dan y' d@-ooty bawmz a mather should, eed now bettern to spawl a pore gel's flahrzn than ran awy athaht pyin. Will y@-oo py me f'them? (Liza Doolittle / G B Shaw)

I was reading Betty Miller's biography of Robert Browning when I discovered that there is a connection between his wife, Elizabeth, and her almost total antithesis, Liza Doolittle, a creation of G B Shaw in Pygmalion. Namely, both of them spent formative years on Wimpole Street (map). Browning met Elizabeth Barrett for the first time in 1845 in a room at 50 Wimpole Street specially adapted to Elizabeth, who spent most of her time in there since 1840, only to elope to Italy with Browning and live a fuller life pursuing a literary career of her own. Professor Henry Higgins, according to Shaw, lived at 27A Wimpole Street, where (E)liza Doolittle spent six months at the end of which the former flower girl emerged passing for a duchess to win Higgins's bet. The play dates from 1912. One cannot help but wonder whether by putting Higgins's laboratory on Wimpole Street Shaw made a deliberate allusion to a subordinated invalid woman who -- giving in to Browning's imploration -- took the reins in her hands, and showed that crossing from being dependent to being in control was possible for a woman in the (post-)Victorian era...?