"Among all female poets of the English-speaking world in the 19th century, none was held in higher critical esteem or was more admired for the independence and courage of her views than Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
The many journals which reported Browning's untimely death all spoke of her as the greatest woman poet in English literature. The highly respected Edinburgh Review expressed the prevailing view when it said that she had no equal in the literary history of any country: 'Such a combination of the finest genius and the choicest results of cultivation and wide-ranging studies has never been seen before in any woman', and the esteem in which she is held has never dimmed with her poetry still widely studied and admired today. Collected here are 16 of her most beautiful, haunting, and renowned poems.
- Goblin Market
- A Musical Instrument
- Aurora Leigh
- Sonnets From the Poruguese
- The Cry of the Children
- Runaway Slave at Pilgrims Point
- To Flush My Dog
- Sonnet 1
- Sonnet 2This audiobook is fully indexed. Once downloaded, each poem will be listed so you can easily navigate to the individual section."
"Sonnets from the Portugese chronicles one of the most famous romances in history. The renowned Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett wrote the sonnet sequence during her courtship by Robert Browning, and later presented them to him as a wedding gift. Robert was astounded by the quality of the poetry, and encouraged her to publish, but Elizabeth objected on the grounds that the content was too personal. At last, Robert prevailed, and Elizabeth published her sonnets.
The title of the book comes from a joke between Robert and Elizabeth Browning. Elizabeth was too embarrassed to publish the sonnets as a personal chronicle, so she decided to pretend they were a translation from a foreign language. Robert’s nickname for her was “My Little Portugese” due to her dark hair and olive complexion, and so the sequence was forever known as “Sonnets from the Portugese.”"
"Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) and Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) were both regarded as the female poet laureates of their time, and between them their writings spanned almost the entire Victorian age, from the end of Romanticism to the beginnings of Modernism. This selection of their shorter works contains all the major themes that animated them - social justice, faith, love and mortality - and some of the best-loved poetry in English, including In The Deep Midwinter and How Do I Love Thee? These poems reflect the changing world in which they were composed, but they also reflect the complex passions of two extraordinary women."
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