Virginia Woolf called it "a masterpiece in embryo". "I love her for her smile-her look-her wayīarrett Browning's long narrative poem Aurora Leigh is the story of the eponymous heroine's life, and is, according to its author, "the one into which my highest convictions upon Life and Art have entered". If thou must love me, let it be for nought
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"A writer in Fraser's magazine immediately appreciated their distinctive quality: 'From the Portuguese they may be: but their life and earnestness must prove Mrs Browning either to be the most perfect of all known translators, or to have quickened with her own spirit the framework of another's thought, and then modestly declined the honour which was really her own'." According to the Poetry Foundation, the title Sonnets from the Portuguese was selected the Brownings "in order to make it appear that the poems had no biographical significance … as if they were translations". Here's another love poem from the Portuguese cycle, too, 14. My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight F I love thee to the depth and breadth and height "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. The victim of a thousand wedding readings, it is part of her Sonnets from the Portuguese cycle, and was written during her courtship with Robert Browning. " How Do I Love Thee?" (Sonnet 43) is probably Barrett Browning's most famous poem today.
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But what about the poems? Her work has, arguably, endured better than that of her husband (" Home Thoughts from Abroad" and its "gaudy melon-flower" excepted). She was incredibly well-read, though according to her husband and fellow-poet Robert Browning she was "self-taught in almost every respect", and became the first female poet ever to be considered for poet laureate – though Tennyson was chosen to follow Wordsworth instead. She was an extraordinary woman who fiercely opposed the slavery on which her family's fortune was founded, while struggling with lifelong illness. A Google doodle brings Elizabeth Browning to mind this morning on what would have been her 208th birthday.