Sonnets from the Portuguese

'How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.' In forty-four sonnets, Elizabeth Barrett tells the story of her courtship by the poet Robert Browning: her disbelief that she, an invalid nearing forty who rarely left her room, could be loved; her fear of becoming a burden to him; and her slow, joyful surrender to a love she compares to a new life.

The sonnets were written during the courtship, which ended in 1846 with a secret marriage and flight to Italy, away from her tyrannical father. She showed them to her husband only later, and they were published in 1850 under a title meant to disguise them as translations; Browning's pet name for her was 'my little Portuguese'. Readers who enjoy it often go on to Robert Browning's The Pied Piper of Hamelin.