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Kathleen K. Hickok (essay date 1980)

SOURCE: "New Yet Orthodox: Female Characters in Aurora Leigh," in International Journal of Women's Studies, Vol. 3, No. 5, September/October, 1980, pp. 479-89.

[In the following essay, Hickok explores Browning's feminist inversion of conventional literary and social norms in Aurora Leigh.]

I

Interest in Aurora Leigh, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, has revived during the last few years, chiefly because of the feminist perspective from which this remarkable "verse novel" examines nineteenth-century England. In turn, renewed interest in Aurora Leigh has led to re-evaluation of Barrett Browning's¹ other poems, especially those depicting female figures, a process rewarded with rediscoveries of numerous of her poems long ago allowed to disappear from the literary canon of Victorian poetry.² We must not forget, however, that just as Aurora Leigh...

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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