sonnets from the portuguese by elizabeth barrett browning

Her poems against slavery chronicled her abhorrence of the basis of the family wealth. Despite this she continued to write and became increasingly popular both in England and in the United States. Shortly thereafter Elizabeth became afflicted with an unknown disease and became addicted to morphine. However by age 20 the family’s fortunes were to decline, but never below comfortable, after losing a lawsuit over their plantations. This wealth allowed her to publish poems from an early age.

Family wealth was derived from sugar plantations manned by slaves in Jamaica and enabling them to also purchase a 500 acre estate in Herefordshire. 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.Elizabeth Barrett Moulton Barrett was born on 6 March 1806, in Coxhoe Hall, County Durham, the eldest of twelve children. 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.

Sonnets from the portuguese by elizabeth barrett browning