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The British poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861) enjoyed great admiration during her lifetime. The work that made her beloved to poets and critics as diverse as Emily Dickinson and John Ruskin was Sonnets from the Portuguese. Published in 1850, this collection featured a sequence of forty-four meticulously crafted love poems that Browning had written in adoration of her husband. The subject matter of the Sonnets reflected a crucial turning point in her life. Browning grew up in a household that gave her privileged access to a liberal education. Yet she also came of age under a tyrannical father who forbade his children from marriage. At the age of thirty-nine, Browning met and fell in love with Robert Browning and eloped with him to Italy, where she lived without her father’s approval for the rest of her life. Browning’s Sonnets therefore represents a double declaration: both of Browning’s independence and of her vocation as a poet. Though in a fictionalized form, Browning’s artistic development would later become the subject of in her great verse novel of 1857, Aurora Leigh. Often compared to William Wordsworth’s autobiographical poem, The Prelude (1850), Aurora Leigh is the work that interests most critics of our current day.

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