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Affecting authenticity: Sonnets from the Portuguese and Modern Love.

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From: Studies in the Literary Imagination
Date: 20020922
Author:Houston, Natalie M.

The title of this essay should be read in two ways: as both Victorian and contemporary critics have acknowledged, both Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and George Meredith's Modern Love (1862) has a powerful emotional effect on readers. This emotional power seems to derive from authentic human experiences and feelings, a power that in Victorian criticism often was linked to the person of the writer: Barrett Browning's sequence was said to contain "genuine utterances right from her own `brain-lit heart'" (Rev. of Poems, qtd. in Donaldson 49), and ...

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