Since her death in 1861, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s work has received increased critical attention and approbation. As Julia Markus notes in her 1995 study of the Brownings’ marriage Dared and Done, Barrett Browning’s first critical rave came from her future husband, who began his first letter to her with the statement “I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett” and who later prompted her to have the Sonnets from the Portuguese published because its poems constituted (in his opinion) the greatest sonnet sequence since Shakespeare’s. Many critics agree with the assessment of Dorothy Mermin, who (in her 1989 study Elizabeth Barrett Browning: The Origins of a New Poetry) calls Barrett Browning “the first woman poet in English literature.”

As Margaret Foster points out in her 1988 biography Elizabeth Barrett Browning, however, many of the poet’s contemporary critics attacked Barrett Browning’s poems for their “obscurity, strange images, faulty rhymes and affectation.” Some modern critics have concurred with these reviews. In her 1988 work, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Woman and Artist, Helen Cooper quotes Althea Hayter’s Mrs. Browning: A Poet’s Work and Its Setting (1962), in which Hayter argues that the poems in Sonnets “are not enough removed from personal relationship to be universal communication.” Similarly, Cooper also quotes Lorraine Gray’s 1978 essay, “The Texts of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese: A Structural Reading,” in which Gray faults the poems for failing to “express the universal wisdom expressed in the love sequences of Dante, Petrarch, Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare and Meredith.” Finally, in her 1986 book Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Angela Leighton refers to Feit Deihl’s 1978 essay, “‘Come Slowly—Eden’: An Exploration of Women Poets and Their Muse,” in which Deihl dismisses the poems as “often sentimental” and “overly self-deprecating.”

Such opinions, however, are those of the minority, for Sonnets from the Portuguese is widely admired. The aforementioned Dorothy Mermin argues (again in her Elizabeth Barrett Browning: The Origins of a New Poetry) that the power of the Sonnets lies in Barrett Browning’s taking up “the male poet’s place”: she is both the “object of a poet’s courtship” and “the sonneteer.” Mermin specifically praises “Sonnet XXIX” for its portrayal of how “desire can conceal the object it transforms” and how the sonnet urges Browning to “break free of her entwining imagination.” (She also applauds the poem’s “joyously erotic” tone.) In her feminist study, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1972), Mary Jane Lupton argues that the poems “capture those insecurities and selfdoubts common to many women as they prepare for marriage.” In the same vein, the aforementioned Helen Cooper (also in her Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Woman and Artist) argues that the fact that Barrett Browning did not write the poems for publication “empowered her voice” and allowed her to use the poems as a “process of discovery.” According to Virginia L. Radley (author of the 1972 study Elizabeth Barrett Browning), the poems treat the challenge Barrett Browning faced of “how to cope with love” after she had resigned herself to an early death. Ultimately, for both aesthetic and biographical reasons, most critics concur with Julia Markus, who (in her Dared and Done) calls Sonnets “the deepest and at times the darkest thoughts of a woman of genius, in grave health, who finds in middle life not the death she waits for but the love she never expected.”