Sonnets from the Portugese and Other Love Poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) was one of the most respected poets of the Victorian era. She is generally considered one of the great English poets. Her works address a wide range of issues and ideas, including slavery in America, Greek and Italian nationalism, women's rights, and the role of art in society. She was learned and thoughtful, influencing many of her contemporaries, including Robert Browning. Her life's experiences, combined with her moral and intellectual strength, made her the champion of the suffering and oppressed. Her gift was both narrative and lyrical, ranging from sonnets to a verse-novel intentionally 2000 lines longer than Milton's Paradise Lost. Some would say that her work tends to be overly sentimental. Her most famous work is Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850), a collection of love sonnets. The verse-novel Aurora Leigh, her most ambitious, and perhaps the most popular of her longer poems, appeared in 1856. It is the story of a woman writer making her way in life, balancing work and love.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning was born in 1806 in northern England in an estate house, the firstborn child. When she was three, the family moved to Herefordshire, near Wales, to Hope End, a smaller house in a family that grew to be eleven children.. An early reader, she was given permission to browse in her father's library, and by 14 she was a published poet. At 22, her mother died, and four years later, when her father was forced to sell Hope End, they all moved to London. At 32, she did inherit enough to live on, a bequest from her Uncle Samuel Barrett. Her own health had not been good for years, though she persevered with poetry, attaining acclaim at age 38, which led to letters exchanged with Robert Browning, a younger and still struggling poet. She encouraged him when critics panned a work of his, and two years later they secretly married and left for Italy. For her this was an important act of self-expression against her father's forbidding, knowing that this would cut her off from any inheritance. Thriving in this new environment, she began traveling, and at the age of 43 had a child, Robert Barrett Browning. The same year, she was nominated (but did not achieve) the title of Poet Laureate of England. All these sites play a part in Aurora Leigh, as well as her passion for poetry, which is a central theme of the book. She died at 55 years of age, one year after the publication of Aurora Leigh.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780385416184 |
| ISBN 10 | 0385416180 |
| Title | Sonnets from the Portugese and Other Love Poems |
| Author | Elizabeth Barrett Browning |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Inc |
| Year published | 1990-08-01 |
| Number of pages | 103 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |