Sonnets from the Portuguese

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861) was born in County Durham to a wealthy family whose fortune derived from Jamaican sugar plantations, and began publishing poetry as a teenager; a spinal injury and lifelong invalidism, compounded by opium taken for the pain and grief over a brother's drowning, left her largely confined to her room in her father's London house through her thirties, writing prolifically and gaining real critical standing with Poems (1844). That volume drew a letter of admiration from the younger poet Robert Browning, and the courtship that followed was conducted mostly in secret and in writing, since her domineering father forbade any of his children to marry; the couple eloped to Italy in 1846, and he never spoke to her again. Sonnets from the Portuguese, forty-four love sonnets written during their courtship and first published in her 1850 collection Poems under a title meant to disguise their autobiographical nature as a translation, are now read as a direct record of that courtship, including the well-known "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways." She lived the rest of her life in Florence, increasingly active in Italian politics, and died there at fifty-five.