Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Part 3

What began as a stranger's fan letter became one of literature's most legendary romances. In these letters from June to September 1846, Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning (then still Elizabeth Barrett Moulton-Barrett) are deep in the full flood of their impossible love. She is a celebrated poet confined to her father's house in Wimpole Street, her life narrowing by the year. He is the ambitious younger poet who saw something in her verses and wrote to tell her so. Two years into their correspondence, their letters now burn with a passion that defies every obstacle: her tyrannical father, her fragile health, the social codes that forbid such a match. We watch them plan their elopement, swap manuscripts, argue about Dante, and trade confessions too intimate for public words. These are not the letters of strangers. They are the raw, urgent, extraordinarily eloquent documents of two souls choosing each other against all odds, the correspondence that gave us 'How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.' For anyone who believes love letters are a lost art, here is its greatest exemplar.