Aurora Leigh, Elizabeth Barrett Browning | Linda H. Peterson (essay date 1999)
Linda H. Peterson (essay date 1999)
SOURCE: Peterson, Linda H. “‘For My Better Self’: Auto/biographies of the Poetess, the Prelude of the Poet Laureate, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh.” In Traditions of Victorian Women's Autobiography: The Poetics and Politics of Life Writing, pp. 109-45. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999.
[In the following essay, Peterson treats Aurora Leigh as an autobiography, emphasizing the literary influences of Wordsworth's Prelude and Letitia Elizabeth Landon's biographical sketches.]
Aurora Leigh is not, by any strict definition, the autobiography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Unlike her eponymous heroine, Elizabeth Barrett was not born in Italy of an English father and a Florentine mother; she was not orphaned at age thirteen, raised by a spinster aunt, or (so far as we know) proposed to by a wealthy English cousin. To pursue her career...
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