A woman resigned to illness and solitude finds love arriving like an interruption she cannot refuse, and forty-four sonnets trace the arc of that astonishment. Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote them during her secret courtship with Robert Browning, publishing them in 1850 under a title disguising their intensity as translation. The disguise fools no one; these are among the most nakedly personal love poems in English. Barrett Browning moves from disbelief to surrender to a love so large it encompasses death, writing in a Petrarchan form she bends to hold her fierce intelligence. She had been an invalid, a recluse, her father's captive. The sonnets record not romance but resurrection, a self returning to life through the gravity of another.