Aurora Leigh, Elizabeth Barrett Browning - Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (essay date 1979)
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (essay date 1979)
SOURCE: "The Aesthetics of Renunciation," in The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, Yale University Press, 1979, pp. 539-80.
[In the excerpt that follows, Gilbert and Gubar claim that Aurora Leigh "may well have been the most reasonable compromise between assertion and submission that a sane and worldly woman poet could achieve in the nineteenth century."]
Elizabeth Barrett Browning also made most of her finest poetry out of her reconciliation to that graceful or passionate self-abnegation which, for a nineteenth-century woman, was necessity's highest virtue. But because she had little natural taste for the drastic asceticism [Christina] Rossetti's temperament and background seem to have fostered, Barrett Browning ultimately substituted a more familiar Victorian aesthetic of service for the younger woman's somewhat...
[The entire page is 2342 words long]
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