This is the year that Sonnets from the Portuguese was officially published. Elizabeth had written them a few years prior during her courtship with Robert in 1845 to 1846, but it wasn't until after they were married that she felt comfortable sharing them with him. His mother had passed away in 1849, and Elizabeth was able to empathize with the grief he was feeling by sharing these poems she wrote after her own extreme time of grieving over the deaths of her brothers in 1840, and he quickly encouraged her to publish them. When they were first published, she ended up pretending that they were her translations of Portuguese sonnets she had come across, mostly out of fear of how the public would recieve such personal and emotionally-charged works coming from her.