“HOW DO I LOVE THEE? LET ME COUNT THE WAYS”: AN IMPORTANT EDITION OF ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING'S POEMS, INCLUDING HER SONNETS FROM THE PORTUGUESE
BROWNING, Elizabeth Barrett. Poems. Fourth Edition. London: Chapman & Hall, 1856. Three volumes. Octavo, contemporary three-quarter teal calf, elaborately gilt-decorated spines, raised bands, marbled boards and endpapers, top edges gilt.
Important fourth edition, carefully revised by Browning with several previously unpublished poems added and expanded to three volumes for the first time, handsomely bound.
"The strange courtship of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, morally chained to a monstrous father, and their subsequent elopement, is one of the most romantic stories in 19th-century literature. What Browning did not know is that while Elizabeth was lying on that famous sofa in her father's house on Wimpole Street she was pouring out her heart in some of the most remarkable love poetry ever written by a woman. One morning some time later, when they were living in Pisa, Elizabeth Browning pushed a packet under her husband's arm, asked him to read the sonnets it contained and, should he disapprove, destroy them. Then she rushed from the room. Browning sat there and read with ever-growing wonder. Even before he had finished he hurried to his wife and demanded their publication. To shelter her feelings it was pretended that the sonnets had been translated from the Portuguese" (Great Books and Book Collectors, 239). This edition is "a book of some importance. Many of the poems were again revised, and the whole of 'Casa Guidi Windows' was added, together with the following new pieces": "A Denial" ("We have met late— it is too late to meet?"); "Proof and Disproof" ("Dost thou love me, my beloved??"); and "Question and Answer" ("Love you seek for, presupposes?"). "In this edition, 'Future and Past' was removed from its original position and placed among the 'Sonnets from the Portuguese,' where it became No. xlii, thus raising the number of Sonnets embodied in that series to 44" (Wise 9.) This edition contains the third printing of her famous love poems to her husband, "Sonnets from the Portuguese," which appeared for the first time in the two-volume 1850 second edition of the Poems. With all half titles. Barnes EB10.
Light foxing to interiors, mild toning to spines. A near-fine copy.