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Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi (essay date 1981)

SOURCE: "Aurora Leigh: The Vocation of the Woman Poet," in Victorian Poetry, Vol. 19, No. 1, Spring, 1981, pp. 35-48.

[In the essay that follows, Gelpi sees Aurora Leigh as a metaphorical investigation of Browning's changing attitudes toward herself her profession, and womanhood in general]

In recent years Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh has reemerged, after more than half a century of neglect, as a strikingly important Victorian poem, historically significant in its interaction with the works of other Victorian writers and immediately relevant in its depiction of a feminist consciousness. Cora Kaplan's essay on the poem uses the earlier insights of Ellen Moers and Patricia Thomson to bring both these aspects of the poem together.¹ She demonstrates that the plot of Aurora Leigh, far from being a pastiche of those scenes and characters from other...

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1. Introduction
2. Criticism
   1. Henry Fothergill Chorley (review date 1856)
   2. Coventry Patmore (review date 1856/57)
   3. William Edmondstoune Aytoun (review date 1857)
   4. George Eliot (review date 1857)
   5. W. C. Roscoe (review date 1857)
   6. C. C. Everett (review date 1857)
   7. Algernon Charles Swinburne (essay date 1898)
   8. Martha Hale Shackford (essay date 1935)
   9. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (essay date 1979)
   10. Kathleen K. Hickok (essay date 1980)
   11. Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi (essay date 1981)
   12. Dorothy Mermin (essay date 1986)
   13. Angela Leighton (essay date 1986)
   14. Margaret Reynolds (essay date 1992)
3. Secondary Sources:
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright