Criticism > Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism > Aurora Leigh, Elizabeth Barrett Browning - Henry Fothergill Chorley (review date 1856)

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Henry Fothergill Chorley (review date 1856)

SOURCE: Review of Aurora Leigh, in The Athenaeum, No. 1517, November 22, 1856, pp. 1425-7.

[In this review, Chorley praises Browning's style and intent but claims that the plot of Aurora Leigh is "in its argument unnatural, and in its form infelicitous."]

Our best living English poetess—our greatest English poetess of any time—has essayed in Aurora Leigh to blend the epic with the didactic novel. The medium in which the story floats is that impassioned language—spotted and flowered with the imagery suggested by fancy or stored up by learning,—which has given the verse of Mrs. Browning a more fiery acceptance from the young and spiritual, and her name a higher renown than any woman has heretofore gained.

We dwell on the sex of the author of Aurora Leigh in no disrespectful spirit of comparison, but simply because to overlook it is rendered...

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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