Elizabeth Barrett Browning was one of the most celebrated English poets of the Victorian era, admired in her lifetime on both sides of the Atlantic. The 44 sonnets of Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) trace the private courtship that led to her marriage to fellow poet Robert Browning; she framed the deeply personal sequence as if it were translated verse to soften its intimacy. Sonnet 43 became her most quoted work and one of the best-loved love poems in the language.