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Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Sonnets from the Portuguese is the collection of love poems written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning in the time leading up to her marriage to Robert Browning. Elizabeth hesitated in publishing the poems, as they were so personally revealing, but her husband persuaded her of their high worth. She decided to pass them off as translations, in order to obscure her authorship, and so the title of the collection came about. They were, and remain,
...When Robert Browning first met the ailing Elizabeth Barrett in 1845 it must have seemed to him like something from a gothic novel. All but a prisoner to her strict, disciplinarian father, (who had forbidden all twelve of his children from marrying and disinherited any who disobeyed him), Elizabeth had recently published a book of poems that had made her one of the most lauded writers in the land. Robert, enamored by Elizabeth's poems sought out
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