[1] Men and Women was Browning's first published work after a five-year hiatus, and his first collection of shorter poems since his marriage to Elizabeth Barrett in 1846.

His reputation had still not recovered from the disastrous failure of Sordello fifteen years previously, and Browning was at the time comprehensively overshadowed by his wife in terms of both critical reception and commercial success.

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.

[2] Thirteen years after the publication of Men and Women, Browning revisited the first edition, and made a reclassification of it.

He separated the simpler rhymed presentations of an emotional moment, such as Mesmerism and A Woman's Last Word, or the picturesque rhymed verse telling a story of an experience, such as Childe Roland and The Statue and the Bust, from their more complex companions, such as Cleon, Fra Lippo, and Rudel.