Publisher's Synopsis
Sonnets from The Portuguese By Elizabeth Barrett Browning Sonnets from the Portuguese, written ca. 1845-1846 and first published in 1850, is a collection of 44 love sonnets written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The collection was acclaimed and popular in the poet's lifetime and it remains so today. Barrett Browning was initially hesitant to publish the poems, believing they were too personal. However, her husband insisted they were the best sequence of English-language sonnets since Shakespeare's time and urged her to publish them. To offer the couple some privacy, she decided to publish them as if they were translations of foreign sonnets. She initially planned to title the collection Sonnets from the Bosnian, but Robert proposed that she claim their source was Portuguese, probably because of her admiration for Camoes and Robert's nickname for her: "my little Portuguese." The title is also a reference to Les Lettres Portugaises (1669).
