Criticism > Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism > Aurora Leigh, Elizabeth Barrett Browning - Algernon Charles Swinburne (essay date 1898)


Aurora Leigh, Elizabeth Barrett Browning - Algernon Charles Swinburne (essay date 1898)

Algernon Charles Swinburne (essay date 1898)

SOURCE: A Prefatory Note to Aurora Leigh, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, William Heinemann, Ltd., 1898, pp. 3-8.

[In the following essay, Swinburne recalls his first reading of Aurora Leigh, and claims that the book pays adequate tribute to the genius of its author.]

Coventry Patmore, in a letter to poet William Allingham, February 18, 1857:

Aurora Leigh is a strange book for a modest sensible little woman like Mrs. Browning to have written. It is full of "fine things" of course; but I am inexpressibly sick of such under such conditions. . . .

Coventry Patmore, in Memoirs and Correspondence of Coventry Patmore, by Basil Champneys,Vol. II, George Bell and Sons, 1900.

The hardest task to which a man can set his judgment is the application of its critical faculty to the...

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