She only showed him the poems in 1849, three years after their marriage and elopement, and published them, at his insistence, in her 1850 collection of Poems. Only in the past dozen years have feminist critics re-evaluating Sonnets from the Portuguese discovered within its self-deprecating stanzas an “enterprise of heroinism” asserting a woman's “right” to be the active subject of both poetry and feeling rather than their passive object.Analysis of Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portugueseīy NASRULLAH MAMBROL on FebruĮlizabeth Barrett Browning wrote this wildly popular sonnet sequence, most famous for its penultimate sonnet- “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways” (sonnet 43)-during Robert Browning’s courtship of her in 18. Neither these nor any other nineteenth- or early twentieth-century critic saw anything revolutionary in the sequence. Twelve years later Edmund Gosse spoke of the cycle's “noble dignity,” “stainless harmony,” and “high ethical level of distinguished utterance” (11, 21). Hall Caine called them “essentially feminine in their hyper-refinement, in their intense tremulous spirituality” (310–11), while Eric Robertson wrote that “no woman's heart indeed was ever laid barer to us, but no heart could have laid itself bare more purely” (281).
Victorian readers saw nothing shocking or immodest about the sonnets and actually admired them a great deal, particularly because they seemed, oddly enough, to uphold an idealized model of devout and reticent femininity.
The radical nature of the work, however, seems to have been lost on its nineteenth-century audience. Certainly a speaker like the narrator of Barrett Browning's sonnets, loudly proclaiming her right to adopt postures of adoration and unworthiness toward a male love object, had never before disturbed its rarefied spaces. The genre, which had always required its female inhabitants to maintain an aloof and icy silence, was not accustomed to female voices. As the first love sonnet sequence written by a woman in English, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese challenged the conventions of amatory poetry when it was published in 1850.
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