Aurora Leigh, Elizabeth Barrett Browning - Martha Hale Shackford (essay date 1935)
Martha Hale Shackford (essay date 1935)
SOURCE: "E. B. Browning: Aurora Leigh," in E. B. Browning; R. H. Home: Two Studies, The Wellesley Press, Inc., 1935, pp. 5-27.
[In the following essay, Shackford discusses Aurora Leigh in the context of Browning's other works and her literary interests, as well as in relation to other narrative poems.]
The manuscript of Aurora Leigh is a green-bound octavo notebook of about four hundred pages, written in a small, cramped, delicate hand. A reader needs a magnifying glass in order to decipher the text, where corrections, emendations, and amplifications, written at various angles, give many pages some resemblance to a literary spider's web. In this first draft the heroine's name was Aurora Vane; minor differences between the manuscript and the printed versions offer an interesting study of Mrs. Browning's critical judgment. Aurora Leigh was first published early in January,...
[The entire page is 8730 words long]
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