In 1846, a 34-year-old poet named Robert Browning swooped like an eagle into the desolate world of Elizabeth Barrett and snatched her away forever. She was 39 years old, had never loved a man, had been disabled most of her adult life with excruciating spinal and cranial pain, and was currently struggling with chronic tuberculosis.

As if matters could possibly be made worse, Ellizabeth had been forbidden (along with all ten of her surviving siblings) ever to marry, by an imperious, eccentric father who was obsessed with preserving the Barrett family’s plantation empire. (Don’t look to me for an explanation of the logic of that.)

So the two of them eloped. Nothing was going to stop it. They had been courting by correspondence for more than two years and, during that time, over 500 letters had been exchanged.

In September of that year, Robert smuggled her away to London. There they were secretly married in the St. Marleybone Parish Church, then fled across the Channel to Paris, and ultimately Florence, where they lived for fifteen years (in Casa Guidi) until her passing in 1861.

Enraged by the elopement, Elizabeth’s father immediately disowned her and never spoke to her again.

But that elopement was a wondrous stroke of deliverance for Elizabeth Barrett; as almost any of her Sonnets from the Portuguese ¹ will attest. Sonnett #7 is an excellent example: its theme is the life-changing impact of the advent of this man. (There are a few challenging lines here, so I hope the footnotes help).

Sonnets from the Portuguese #7
   Elizabeth Barrett Browning

The face of all the world is changed, I think,
Since first I heard the footsteps of thy soul
Move still, oh still, beside me, as they stole
Betwixt me and the dreadful outer brink
Of obvious death, where I, who thought to sink,
Was caught up into love, and taught the whole 
Of life in a new rhythm. The cup of dole 2
God gave for baptism3, I am fain 4 to drink,
And praise its sweetness, Sweet, with thee anear.
The names of country, heaven, are changed away
For where thou art or shalt be, there or here;5
And this...this lute and song...loved yesterday,6
(The singing angels know) are only dear
Because thy name moves right in what they say. 

By the way, within just a few years after their elopement, Elizabeth’s health, incredibly, improved. There was something about the mere presence of this man, who had come to “stand betwixt” her and that “dreadful outer brink.” She couldn’t help but celebrate it. The Sonnets were the result. 

Elizabeth had actually written all of them years before Robert ever saw them. She had tucked them away and kept them secret because Robert had once verbally frowned upon the practice of “putting love into our verse”. But now, with her health and strength much restored, she no longer wished to conceal them: “Do you know I once wrote some poems about you? Here they are, if you care to see them.” And so “Browning learned for the first time of Sonnets from the Portuguese.”⁷ 

For Robert, the Sonnets had arrived at precisely the right moment. It was 1849 when she placed the manuscripts into his hands. They were three years into their marriage, but that year Robert had been battling a serious health problem and even some depression that came in the wake of it.  The collection left him deeply moved. It lifted his spirits. It’s been doing that for readers ever since.  

By the way, the title of the Sonnet collection has nothing to do with the Portuguese language. It refers to an affectionate name that Robert had adopted for Elizabeth. “My little Portuguese”, he had begun calling her, ever since she had written a poem about Catarina, the faithful lover of the Portuguese poet Camoens.  Robert had been very touched by that poem. He saw a likeness to Elizabeth in its heroine: “You are Catarina,” he had told her once, and the affectionate name—“my Portuguese”— took hold.

Much easier for the reader, and thus making it the most popular of the 44 Sonnets, is number 43: a favorite in many anthologies.  It requires no footnotes at all: 

Sonnets From The Portuguese #43
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height 
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace. 
I love thee to the level of everyday’s 
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light. 
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise. 
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints,—I love thee with the breath, 
Smiles, tears, of all my life!—and, if God choose, 
I shall but love thee better after death.

One of those “lost saints”, by the way, had to be her father.  What had become of the rift between the two? Well, she had always loved her father.  Just months before Robert Browning came into her life, she had dedicated her 1844 collection of poems to her father, with an endearing inscription. (Her mother had passed away just a few years before that).  
Even after the cruel estrangement, Elizabeth yearned for her father’s approval. Year after year, she wrote to him faithfully, expressing her deep affection and pleading for reconciliation. She never relented.  Those beautiful letters of love to her father have not survived—Robert had them destroyed—but the story of them lives on.... 

Her father never once replied; and biographers and historians both attest to the fact that, one day, after many years, she finally received a package at the door of Casa Guidi, the Browning home in Florence. How thrilled she must have been to discover that the package was addressed from her childhood home! That had to mean her father! When she opened it up, there were all her letters to him, tied together in bundles...

...and not a single one of them opened.8

No, it is not at all hard to sense how truly grateful and exuberant this dear soul must have felt, to have a Rescuer—this Protector from the “brink”—in her life; which for me at least, cannot fail to bring to mind a greater Rescuer yet, Who has come to snatch us all from our woes.

Footnotes

1. “…from the Portuguese”: the title is assumed to have come from Robert’s affectionate nick-name for Elizabeth. He frequently refered to her as: “my little Portuguese.” Most of the 44 Sonnets in this collection are written directly to her husband, and always with the exuberance of their relationship together. By the way, for the technically—minded: these are Italian Sonnets, (or Petrarchan) iambic pentameter with a rhyme scheme of ABBA ABBA CDCDCD.

2. “the cup of dole”: the doleful trials and physical sufferings she had been born to endure. Having been so wonderfully rescued, even her trials are “sweetened” by her husband’s presence.

3. “for baptism”: Elizabeth Browning had an excellent grasp of the Scriptures. Here she alludes to the “cup” and the “baptism of sufferings” that Jesus mentioned to His disciples in Mark 10:38. She was also fluent in Greek, knowing that the word ” baptize” (βαπτιζω) simply means “to immerse” “to plunge”; for which it should probably be taken here. “The cup of dole that God has ordained for me to be plunged into.” It’s a bit of a mixed metaphor, but even Jesus blended the two in the passage in Mark.

4. fain: willing

5. “the names of country, heaven, are changed for where thou art…” Having lost her native land with her elopement, she declares that now the very concepts of ‘country,’ and even ‘heaven’ itself, have been changed to signify wherever he might be, no matter where that is.

6. “this…this lute and song…”: the troubador’s tools, referring to her own gift for poetry. Elizabeth had been well-published and very popular for years before she met Robert. At one point, she was actually a contender with Alfred Lord Tennyson for the honor of being England’s Poet Laureate. But that gift, so well-loved “yesterday”, is now only “dear” to her because he has become the central theme.

7. Markus, Julia Dared and Done: the Marriage of Elizabeth and Robert Browning, Alfred Knopf, New York, 1995, p. 164.

8. Angela Leighton, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Indiana University Press, 1986, p. 23-24. Note: Ms Leighton has been a Senior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, and Professor of English Literature at University of Hull. In March of this year, I had the rare privilige of communicating with her by email, in an effort to verify this remarkable story, and to enquire as to the disposition of those letters now. She very graciously responded: “The story about her receiving the bundle of unopened letters is certainly true. Whether or not they have been published since, I am not quite sure.” She then forwarded my query to Mr. Daniel Karlin, Professor of English Literature at University of Bristol “who has done much more work on the letters than I have, in case he has the answer to your second query.” Prof. Karlin immediately joined the discussion with a follow-up email: “I can confirm that the story of the letters being returned to her unopened is true. What happened to them after that is not known; they have certainly not been published.” Prof. Karlin went on to suggest that, after Elizabeth’s death, Robert probably had the letters destroyed since the incident “was deeply wounding and humiliating to her.” (personal email 3-31-23) I am very grateful to Ms Leighton and Mr Karlin for the generous gift of their time and expertise!