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Elizabeth Barrett Browning, a prodigy of learning and poetry, published her first volume of verse
when she was thirteen and in her thirties established herself as an authority on the Greek
Christian poets. Her collected works include translations of Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound
(1833) and Bion's "Lament for Adonis" (1833) as well as selections from other Classical authors.
Enormously admired for her learning and her passionate moral and political commitments,
Barrett Browning, whose fame much surpassed that of her husband during her lifetime, achieved
More than any other major Victorian poet, she explicitly and directly confronts political
issues, particularly those concerning women. Like Tennyson, her husband, and many other
contemporaries, she began as a disciple of Shelley who found the Romantic visionary mode
compelling, and like them, she later developed poetry of social, moral, and political commitment.
Part of her sense of the poet's responsibility appears in her many early religious poems, but it
appears even more as an attachment to themes involving domestic, international, and sexual
politics. Her concern with English political and social conditions, which creates a poetry of
political protest like Thomas Hood's, Song of the Shirt (1843), appears in, The Cry of the
After settling in Florence after her elopement with Robert Browning in 1846, she took up
the cause of Italian nationalism, and this subject produced, Casa Guidi Windows (1851) and
Poems before Congress (1860). Mother and Poet (1862), which bears the subtitle, “Turin, after
News from Gaeta, 1861," a lyric spoken by the Italian poet and patriot Laura Savio upon
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learning that both her sons have died in the cause of Italian liberty. Combining her interests in
the fate of women, the role of the female poet, and the events of the Risorgimento, this poem
Her concern with women's issues, particularly the dilemmas facing writers, inspire her
two poems In Praise of George Sand (1844) as well as her tributes to other women authors. Such
concern also lies at the heart of her masterpiece, Aurora Leigh (1857). This poetic narrative, a
woman's version of The Prelude (1850), tells the story of the young poet, Aurora Leigh, who
lives in England with an unsympathetic aunt after the death of her Italian mother and English
father. The poem's main action begins at the point her cousin Romney, a wealthy philanthropist
and social activist, asks her to marry him. Denying that women have either the innate capacity or
the position in society necessary to write important poetry, Romney clumsily tries to convince
her to join his worthy cause. Barrett Browning's heroine rejects her cousin's proposal, succeeds
as a poet, and observes events as he makes a fool of himself attempting to play Pygmalion and
marry Marian Earle, a poor seamstress. After a series of melodramatic incidents, including the
blinding of Romney, the two lovers unite and marry, both having learned the proper role of
Aurora Leigh takes the form of novel-poem, a composite genre that drew upon the one
literary form in which women authors excelled. According to Virginia Woolf, Barrett Browning
"was inspired by a flash of true genius when she rushed into the drawing-room and said that
here, where we live and work is the true place for the poet." The novel-poem set in the
contemporary world was adopted by many others including her husband in The Ring and the
Book, The Inn Album (1875), and Red Cotton Nightcap Country (1873), and Arthur Hugh
Clough (1819-1861) in Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) and Amours de Voyage (1862). But
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few attempts to base a long poetic narrative upon the novel met with the artistic or critical
Barrett Browning's poem employs a contemporary setting and contemporary social issues
as a context for an inquiry into the relation between gender and genre. The poem, which explores
the Woman Question, as it was called by contemporaries, dramatizes the modern woman's severe
need for mothers — for, that is, nurturing political and literary female ancestors. In examining
the growth and development of a woman poet, Aurora Leigh shows that women cripple
first rejects her arrogant beloved, her rejection does not free her from the grip of interiorized
male constructions of women, for she merely displaces Romney from the center of power, speaks
about herself with images of male power, and feminizes him. Only when both can break free
from the conceptual structures that oppress them can she fully become the woman, wife, and
In presenting her heroine's path to poetic and personal maturity, Barrett Browning not
only explored the Victorian relation between gender and genre but she also created a female
literary tradition by alluding to her predecessors. Her work draws upon novels written by
women, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847) being one major source: the female protagonist's
status as an orphan, the figure of a cruel aunt, the proposal by St. John Rivers, and Rochester's
thus substitutes female, rather than male, types from the Old Testament and even when
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describing men uses female figures from myth as the source of analogy. These analogies and
images, which are driven by the poem's most serious concerns, represent an important
Work Cited
Browning, Elizabeth B, and Kerry McSweeney. Aurora Leigh. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1998. Print