ABSTRACT
Recent feminist criticism has attributed a pioneering role to Elizabeth Barrett Browning in the nineteenth-century revival of the amatory sonnet sequence. Eminent scholars such as Angela Leighton, Alison Chapman and Dorothy Mermin agree that the Sonnets from the Portuguese, in Chapman's words, 'translates the amatory discourse of Petrarchanism into a vehicle for a female poet speaking from an active subject position'. Desperate to get rid of the sugared tales of meekness and mortification that had clung to the sequence throughout most of the twentieth century, precipitating its disappearance from the literary canon, critics of the last decades generally translated Barrett Browning's sonnet choice into a story of bold resistance. Most of these critics more or less explicitly admit that their interpretations still occupy a marginal position compared with the general disdain manifested by their colleagues on the one hand and the larger reading public's undiminished love for the Sonnets' sentimental Victorianism on the other.
