“I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett …” writes Robert Browning and so begins the first love letter to his future wife Elizabeth Barrett. And, Barrett writes, after meeting Browning, “How Do I Love Thee? Let me count the ways.” - A poem I first read at University and it has remained with me ever since (see entire sonnet below).
This, and another 43 poems became Sonnets from the Portuguese written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Robert Browning often called his wife "my little Portuguese", because of her dark complexion and thus the title.
After more than a year of almost daily letters between them, the couple married in secret in September 1846, defying her father’s prohibition against her ever marrying. They fled from London to Italy, where doctors had told Barrett her health might improve. Her father disinherited her and never spoke to her again.
Now, their famous love letters are available online (see link below) where readers can see them just as they were written with creased paper, fading ink, quill pen cross outs, and even the envelopes the two poets used. The digitization is a collaboration between Wellesley College and Baylor University in Waco, Texas, which houses the world's largest collection of books, letters and other items related to the Brownings.
Readers can see for themselves how they fall in love, while corresponding about other writers, philosophy and their own work.
http://digitalcollections.baylor.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection/ab-letters
Sonnets from the Portuguese, #43
by Elizabeth Barrett-Browning (1850)
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