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.

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 as a writer, she did not move to London, take up residence in an attic garret, “a chamber up three flights of stairs,” or write “with one hand for the booksellers” to keep body and soul together.¹ Nonetheless, critics of all persuasions have read Aurora Leigh, at least in part, as an autobiographical work—in Herbert F. Tucker's formulation, “a veiled autobiography, a reluctant novel, and an aspiring epic.”² They have done so not from critical naiveté but from a consciousness of the poem's deliberate exploitation of autobiographical conventions, from its fundamental use of first-person narrative and self-reflection to its shrewd alternation of “the standard, postmortem mode of autobiographical finish and the serial mode of the diarist shaping forth a life in running installments.”³

In this chapter I read Aurora Leigh as an autobiography of the English woman poet—not so much analyzing the narrative conventions or techniques on which such readings usually depend, but rather considering the work in its literary and historical contexts as a rewriting of the auto/biographies, fictional and historical, of two major Romantic figures. The first, Laetitia Elizabeth Landon, or “L. E. L,” was one of Barrett Browning's most important female predecessors, perhaps the most prolific maker of biographical portraits of the poetess. The second, William Wordsworth, was the major (male) poet of the century, the author of its most important autobiography tracing the “Growth of a Poet's Mind” and the nineteenth-century predecessor against whom Barrett Browning measured her achievement—“a great poet and true,” as young Barrett declared to Mary Russell Mitford.⁴ My contention is that, in the opening books of Aurora Leigh, Barrett Browning self-consciously revises and corrects the myth of the poetess constructed in L. E. L.'s History of the Lyre (1829), as well as in the spate of biographies of Landon published after the poetess's mysterious death in 1838. In the opening books of Aurora Leigh, moreover, as in the poem's resolution, Barrett Browning grafts onto this feminine tradition a masculine tradition of poetic autobiography represented by Wordsworth's Prelude, published just six years before Aurora Leigh. In both cases, the point is not simply literary allusion or allegiance. Barrett Browning treats the life writing of Romantic poets as preliminary to her own—that is, as “toil co-operant” unto her greater end, as preparing the way, historically and literarily, for the work of the modern poet. In both cases she corrects Romantic paradigms of poetic development, in the process redefining and expanding the woman poet's place and purpose in Victorian literature and culture.

For half a century after Mary Robinson published her Memoirs (1801), no major woman poet, and arguably no minor one, published an autobiography—perhaps because of the scandal of becoming a public spectacle that autobiography entailed, perhaps because so much lyrical poetry was considered autobiographical anyway, perhaps (and most important) because the feminine poetic tradition addressed itself to the myth of the poetess rather than the development of the individual woman writer.⁵ Autobiographies of women artists and authors necessarily required discussion of professional achievement, of vocation and career—something that early nineteenth-century women poets preferred to avoid. As Marlon B. Ross has argued, “whereas the male romantics [were] anxious to promote the vocational status of poetry-making, the woman poets [were] anxious to suppress the emerging relation between poetic activity and vocation,” preferring instead to envision their writing as a extension of their femininity or domesticity.⁶ Writing archetypal narratives or creating cultural myths of the poetess, whose verse was conceived as natural inspiration rather than achieved vocation, better suited these women's goals—goals that Barrett Browning meant to abandon.

Much Romantic and early Victorian women's poetry relied, nonetheless, on what we might call “autobiographical associations,” on a conflation or confusion of the poet's self with the figure of the poetess who so frequently appeared in her verse. Poetesses and their publishers often encouraged this conflation through prefatory memoirs that linked biographical details of the poetess's life with segments of her lyric verse or through frontispieces that displayed the woman poet in the stereotypic garb of the poetess (as in …, both frontispieces to Landon's work, the first depicting her as Sapphic poetess, the second as medieval woman troubadour). Laetitia Landon, far more than Felicia Hemans, made this conflation the subject of her poetry as well as a tantalizing enigma of her public career. Landon's major works—from The Improvisatrice (1824) with its Sapphic poetess and The Golden Violet (1826) with its female minstrel from Provence to “Erinna” (1826) and “The Lost Pleiad” (1829) with their innocent young poetesses brought to despair or death by thwarted love—all rework the dominant myths of the poetess, rewriting her life history and thus the tradition of women's poetry. In Landon's oeuvre the epitome of this rewriting is A History of the Lyre (1829), which, as its title suggests, presents an archetypal account of the poetess, her verse, and her career.

At the beginning of A History of the Lyre, an unidentified male speaker looks at the portrait of a poetess and meditates on the function of memory and autobiographical self-construction:

'Tis strange how much is mark'd on memory,
In which we may have interest, but no part;
How circumstance will bring together links
In destinies the most dissimilar.
This face, whose rudely-pencill'd sketch you hold,
Recalls to me a host of pleasant thoughts,
And some more serious.—This is Eulalie.(7)

At the beginning of Aurora Leigh, the speaker, now a woman poet, meditates on the function of memory and autobiographical self-construction in a simile alluding to Landon's poem but altering its import:

Of writing many books there is no end;
And I who have written much in prose and verse
For others' uses, will write now for mine—
As when you paint your portrait for a friend,
Who keeps it in a drawer and looks at it
Long after he has ceased to love you, just
To hold together what he was and is.

(1:1-8)

Like Landon, Barrett Browning remarks on the function of memory, which “hold[s] together” the subject, “what he was and is.” Like Landon, too, Barrett Browning analogizes portrait painting and autobiographical writing—with L. E. L.'s “rudely-pencill'd sketch” and its capacity for linking past and present becoming the portrait Aurora Leigh will create in verse to construct a coherent poetic self and a new vision of the woman poet.

Yet these opening passages are significantly different, and in the difference lies the germ of Barrett Browning's reconstruction of the Romantic poetess. In A History of the Lyre, it is the male lover who holds the poetess's sketch and contemplates it for “a host of pleasant thoughts” and the construction of his own history and identity, whereas in Aurora Leigh it is Aurora who writes of herself for her “better self.” She, not her male audience, takes charge of the woman poet's autobiography. Landon's analogy between autobiography and portrait painting is subordinated to a simile (“As when”)—as if Barrett Browning means to subordinate the traditional function of feminine memoirs to the more pressing need of the woman poet. There is a shift, in short, from a male viewer to the female poet, from art produced to satisfy masculine desire to art intended for the development of the woman poet, from a literary tradition of biographical memoirs about women poets to a new tradition of autobiography by women writers (hinted at in the next allusion of Aurora Leigh (ll. 9-13—to Wordsworth's Immortality Ode and Prelude). Barrett Browning corrects Landon's opening statement of purpose—and, more broadly, the plot of A History of the Lyre—by taking auto/biographical forms identified with the Romantic poetess and reconfiguring them to serve the Victorian woman poet. In so doing she revises the developmental narrative of the poetess as it appeared in Landon's works and in biographies about Landon published in the two decades before Aurora Leigh.⁸

Like many of Landon's poems, these biographies reproduced—indeed, they gave credence to—the myth of the Sapphic poetess, the most common early nineteenth-century myth of feminine poetic inspiration and production. As Glennis Stephenson has argued, the Romantic-Sapphic artist invariably associates her work with her body and depicts it “as the intuitive and confessional outpouring of emotion”: “Words like ‘gushing’ and ‘over-flowing’ abound. … These women are … fountains, not pumps. The flow is from nature, not art. Usually the creative woman in these poems is betrayed and abandoned, and finds that with the loss of love the flow dries up.” A poetess like Landon thus came to exemplify a debased or inferior form of Romanticism—“Wordworth's ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ which, rather than being recollected in tranquility, [were] immediately spewed out on the page.”⁹ Angela Leighton has further pointed out that “although L. E. L. insists on art as an overflow of the female body, she also frequently freezes the woman into a picture, a statue, an art object”—something that occurs in A History of the Lyre, where the poetess Eulalie appears first as a “rudely-pencill'd sketch,” finally as a marble monument. “Such frozen postures,” according to Leighton, have “a way of turning the woman into a form of sexual or artistic property for the man.”¹⁰

Landon's myths of the poetess—as improvisatrice, as statue or art object produced for man's pleasure, as abandoned woman—go back at least as far as the first nineteenth-century autobiography of a woman poet, Mary Robinson's Memoirs (1801), discussed in chapter 1. In the Memoirs Robinson, an actress turned author, describes scene after scene in which she dresses up and performs for her audience, usually described as male. Her daughter and editor links her mother's artistic production with improvisation. Maria Robinson recounts, for example, several episodes in which her mother “poured forth those poetic effusions which have done so much honor to her genius, and decked her tomb with unfading laurels”¹¹—poems such as “Lines to Him Who Will Understand Them,” in which Robinson bids farewell to Britain for Italia's shore; “The Haunted Beach,” inspired by Robinson's discovery of a drowned stranger; and “The Maniac,” written, like Coleridge's Kubla Khan, in a delirium excited by opium. And, of course, Robinson was the archetypal abandoned woman, the first of several mistresses of the Prince of Wales, left in the lurch without financial support or social protection when another woman took his fancy.

Robinson's combination of improvisation and performance influenced the next generation of women writers, even if only as a cautionary tale. Generically a chronique scandaleuse, her Memoirs narrates the story of a popular actress who became the prince's mistress and turned professional writer when he abandoned her. Second-generation Romantic women poets, including Landon and Felicia Hemans, sought to avoid the scandal and self-aggrandizement of this form of life writing. They did not publish their own autobiographies, but in good early Victorian fashion let their lives be written for them—by family members, close friends, or other women writers who could testify to their feminine as well as literary virtues.¹²

We can nonetheless detect traces of Robinson's Memoirs in the biographies of Landon—and in just the features that Stephenson and Leighton point to: the poetess as improvisatrice, gushing forth her effusions like a natural spring; the poetess as statue, frozen into an artistic posture before the gaze of the male viewer; the poetess as abandoned woman, achieving fame but losing love. These were poetic myths that Barrett Browning inherited and resisted—not only because she, like Hannah More and Anna Barbauld before her, wished to assume the “sociomoral” role of the woman poet, writing as “the conscience of culture,”¹³ but, more important, because Landon's poetess represents a case of arrested development.

Biographies of Landon as Sapphic poetess began appearing as early as 1839, the year after her death, with Emma Roberts's “Memoir of L. E. L.,” included in the posthumously published “The Zenana” and Minor Poems. According to her friend and fellow writer, “While still a mere child, L. E. L. began to publish, and her poetry immediately attracted attention. … She rushed fearlessly into print, not dreaming for a moment, that verses which were poured forth like the waters from a fountain, gushing, as she has beautifully expressed it, of their own sweet will, could ever provoke harsh criticism.” Laman Blanchard, who brought out The Life and Literary Remains of L. E. L. in 1841, similarly treats her poetry as natural productions, “just as the grass that sows itself.” Like other biographers who would follow, Blanchard associates Landon with the title character of The Improvisatrice, noting that the heroine of that poem was “youthful, impassioned, and gifted with glorious powers of song; and, although introduced as a daughter of Florence … she might be even L. E. L. herself; for what were the multitude of songs she had been pouring out for three years past, but ‘improvisings’?”¹⁴ When William Howitt published his biographical Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets in 1847, he, too, associated Landon with her improvisatrice, suggesting that “the very words of her first heroine might have literally been uttered as her own”:¹⁵

Sad were my shades; methinks they had
                    Almost a tone of prophecy—
I ever had, from earliest youth,
                    A feeling what my fate would be.

(2)

Such associations had, of course, been encouraged by Landon herself, who, after translating the poetical odes of Madame de Staël's Corinne for its English publication, took to appearing in the Sappho-Corinne mode, dressed in Grecian costume with her hair done à la Sappho […], and then continued writing and rewriting the Sappho-Corinne myth, including the version in A History of the Lyre.

The myth of the poetess as improvisatrice gave certain advantages to the woman writer: it linked her to the cult of genius and her work to inspired rather than mechanical or pedantic production. But it had obvious disadvantages: in its emphasis on the poetess's naturalness and her youthful, sometimes even infantile poetic effusions, it tended to restrict her to an immature stage of development and to militate against more mature literary production. All of the major Romantic and Victorian women poets—Robinson, Hemans, Landon, Barrett Browning, and Rossetti—were infant prodigies, young geniuses who could recite hundreds of lines of verse as children (Hemans) or who composed poems and stories almost before they learned to hold a pen (Landon) or who published volumes of ambitious verses in early adolescence (Robinson, Hemans, Barrett Browning, Rossetti). This myth of youthful genius, as Norma Clarke has pointed out, worked against the development of the woman poet's career—and serious treatment of her poetry—once she move beyond youth into middle age.¹⁶

Despite the identification of Landon with the improvisatrice of 1824—and later with Erinna (1826) and Eulalie, the poetess of A History of the Lyre—Roberts and Blanchard both insisted that readers should not simply equate Landon with her imaginary counterparts, particularly not with the tragic Sapphic poetess who achieves fame but is unlucky in love. Roberts, who lived with her at 22 Hans Place, insisted that Landon was not a solitary, melancholy genius but a cheerful, domestic woman: “It may indeed be said, to L. E. L.'s honour, that she retained, to the last moment of existence all the friends thus domesticated with her, those who knew her most intimately being the most fondly attached.” The tales of unrequited love were, in Roberts's view, “the production of a girl who had not yet left off her pinafores, and whose only notion of a lover was embodied in a knight wearing the brightest armour and the whitest of plumes.”¹⁷ Blanchard declared that

no two persons could be less like each other in all that related to the contemplation of the actual world, than ‘L. E. L.’ and Letitia Elizabeth Landon. People would in this, as in so many other cases, forgetting one of the licenses of poetry, identify the poet's history in the poet's subject and sentiments, and they accordingly insisted that, because the strain was tender and mournful, the heart of the minstrel was breaking.¹⁸

On this point they were again taking their cue from Landon, who, in the preface to the volume that includes A History of the Lyre, wittily disclaimed the biographical link that so many of her readers assumed: “If I must have an unhappy passion, I can only console myself with my own perfect unconsciousness of so great a misfortune.”¹⁹

Yet such proclamations of domesticity and disclaimers of Sapphic tragedy, most written after Landon's mysterious death by an overdose of prussic acid and intended to offset rumors of suicide, have the strange effect of reinforcing the third feature of the myth of the Romantic poetess—that of model or statue, of the poetess as a performer who strikes a pose for the pleasure of her audience but to her own detriment. The plot of A History of the Lyre reinforces this conclusion. Like many of Landon's works, it presents an inspired poestess, half-Italian, half-English, who spends her daytime hours in solitude, awaiting inspiration, and her nights in company, performing for her audience and winning great fame. She meets a man who listens and gazes raptly but who, in the end, abandons her for a more conventional, domestic Englishwoman. In A History of the Lyre the Englishman tells the tale of his encounters with Eulalie and of his eventual marriage to Emily. Landon adds the touch of having Eulalie create her own statue, “a sculptured form” that becomes a funeral monument:

“You see,” she said, “my cemetery here:—
Here, only here, shall be my quiet grave.
Yon statue is my emblem: see, its grasp
Is raised to Heaven, forgetful that the while
Its step has crush'd the fairest of earth's flowers
With its neglect.”

(231)

Landon thus recognizes that the poetess sacrifices herself in performance for men: for their erotic pleasure, obviously, but also for their corporate benefit in that she does not interfere with (or intervene in) the patriarchal structures that allow Eulalie to die solitary and Emily, her passive domestic counterpart, to marry and reproduce English culture. In A History of the Lyre, far more than in earlier poems, the poetess becomes complicit in her own death.

Of the early biographers, only Howitt seems to have noticed the element of self-destruction in Landon's life and work. Although he presents it only as a possibility, he speculates that L. E. L. must have seen her fate “from earliest youth” and understood the danger of the poetic myths she was creating:

Whether this melancholy belief in the tendency of the great theme of her writings, both in prose and poetry; this irresistible annunciation, like another Cassandra, of woe and destruction; this evolution of scenes and characters in her last work, bearing such dark resemblance to those of her own after experience; this tendency, in all her plots, to a tragic catastrophe, and this final tragedy itself,—whether these be all mere coincidences or not, they are still but parts of an unsolved mystery.²⁰

Despite the tentative phrasing, Howitt was not a believer in “mere coincidences.” His treatment of Landon's death makes it clear that he found foreshadowings in her poetical and fictional work of her tragic end. He recognized, as I believe Elizabeth Barrett did also, that Landon's self-construction as a Sapphic poetess, a reincarnation of Corinne, destined her for an early end—that Landon more or less wrote herself into a fatal plot.

Elizabeth Barrett was a careful reader (and admirer) of Landon's poetry, and she read carefully as well Blanchard's 1841 biography of the poetess. In a letter to Mary Russell Mitford, she compared Landon with Hemans, concluding that “if I had those two powers to choose from—Mrs. Hemans's and Miss Landon's—I mean the raw bare powers—I would choose Miss Landon's.” Yet Barrett also believed that Landon had not fully realized her promise or power. To Mitford she added, “I fancy it would have worked out better—had it been worked out—with the right moral and intellectual influences in application.”²¹ How might Landon's life or career (the it is ambiguous) have been better “worked out”? Barrett Browning's more sustained commentary on Landon comes, I suggest, in the opening books of Aurora Leigh, where she acknowledges yet rejects the auto/biographies of the poetess who preceded her.²² In these books she gives to Aurora the “right moral and intellectual influences” and then shows, in later books, how the life of the woman poet might look under their sway.

I have already noted that, in allusions to A History of the Lyre and The Prelude, Aurora determines to write an autobiography of her poetic development, as Wordsworth had done and Landon had failed fully to do. Her allusion to Wordsworth's poetry—

I, writing thus, am still what men call young;
I have not so far left the coasts of life
To travel inland, that I cannot hear
That murmur of the outer Infinite
Which unweaned babies smile at in their sleep. …

(1:9-13)

—claims partnership with an undebased Romantic tradition and a masculine form of autobiography.²³ Aurora Leigh is still young enough that she can recollect Wordsworthian joy and usefully trace “the growth of a poet's mind,” providing evidence, to adapt Wordsworth's phrase, that “May spur me on, in [wo]manhood now mature, / To honorable toil” (Prelude, 1:625-26). This turn to a Wordsworthian form of autobiography swerves from Landon's self-construction of the poetess as erotic object and performer for men's pleasure.

In Aurora Leigh Barrett Browning also abandons the model of the female poet as improvisatrice. In book I Aurora admits that she, like other young poets, often wrote spontaneously and effusively:

… Many tender souls
Have strung their loses on a rhyming thread,
As children, cowslips.

(1:945-47)

Although she figures such rhyming as natural, she is not content to remain in this juvenile artistic state:

… Alas, near all the birds
Will sing at dawn—and yet we do not take
The chaffering swallow for the holy lark.

(1:951-53)

In books II and III, taking the lark as her counterpart as other Romantic poets had taken the skylark, nightingale, or redbreast, Aurora traces her development beyond the stage of natural effusions toward mature poetic production.²⁴ Midway through she notes: “So life, in deepening with me, deepened all / The course I took, the work I did” (3:334-35).

In that “deepening” one crucial influence is Aurora's discovery of and immersion in her father's books, “the secret of a garret-room” (1:833), the masculine literary tradition. In this discovery Aurora “chance[s] upon the poets” (1:845), learns the meaning of “imperative labour” (1:880), and determines her vocation. These details more likely derive from Felicia Hemans's life or Barrett Browning's own than from Landon's. Although Landon's biographers insisted on “her devotedness to reading,” which “was only equalled by the readiness with which she acquired whatever she chose to commit to memory, and the accuracy with which she retained whatever she had once learned,”²⁵ Hemans was the Romantic poetess who acquired the reputation for enormous classical learning. Hemans's Victorian biographer William Michael Rossetti, not one given to overpraising women poets, notes: “Her accomplishments were considerable, and not merely superficial. She knew French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and in mature life German, and was not unacquainted with Latin.”²⁶ Barrett added Greek to these linguistic achievements, making herself the equal of the best male classical scholars. Both Hemans and Barrett began their careers with publications in a classical mode, Hemans with The Restoration of the Works of Art to Italy (1816) and Modern Greece (1817), Barrett with The Battle of Marathon (1820). And in the preface to The Battle of Marathon and other early volumes, as Vivienne Rundle has suggested, Barrett addressed her relationships “with her father, with her readers, and with the poetic tradition within which she was attempting to situate herself.”²⁷

Yet in tracing Aurora's career, Barrett Browning avoids reproducing the early phases of Hemans's or her own life, instead deriving the most important details from Landon's literary career. The effect is to treat the life of the Romantic poetess as a stage in the development of the Victorian woman poet—as a case of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny. This tactic allows Barrett Browning to acknowledge the achievements of her predecessors but with the implication that she, representative of the next generation, will progress further.

In book III, for example, Aurora moves to an attic room in London, to “a certain house in Kensington” and “a chamber up three flights of stairs” (3:160, 158).²⁸ Barrett Browning never lived in a writer's garret, but Landon certainly did—at 22 Hans Place, Brompton, in an attic space invariably described in the biographies as a “homely-looking, almost uncomfortable room, fronting the street, and barely furnished.”²⁹ So, too, Barrett Browning makes Aurora a hack writer of prose as well as an aspiring poet. It was Landon, not Barrett Browning, who churned out reviews for the Literary Gazette and whose biographers mention, usually as evidence of her wide knowledge, her enormous prose production.³⁰ Like Landon, Aurora works “with one hand for the booksellers / While working with the other for myself / And art” (3:303-5). Even Aurora's popularity with her readers suggests Landon's early career. The fan mail “with pretty maiden seals” from girls with names like Emily (3:212-13) or the “tokens from young bachelors, / Who wrote from college” (3:215-16) recall both the sweet domestic bride of A History of the Lyre and the anecdote related by Edward Bulwer-Lytton and repeated in virtually all of L. E. L.'s biographies:

We were young, and at college, lavishing our golden years, not so much on the Greek verse and mystic character to which we ought, perhaps, to have been rigidly devoted, as “Our heart in passion, and our head in rhyme.” At that time poetry was not yet out of fashion, at least with us of the cloister; and there was always in the reading-room of the Union a rush every Saturday afternoon for the “Literary Gazette;” and an impatient anxiety to hasten at once to that corner of the sheet which contained the three magical letters “L. E. L.” And all of us praised the verse, and all of us guessed at the author. We soon learned it was a female, and our admiration was doubled, and our conjectures tripled. Was she young? Was she pretty? And—for there were some embryo fortune-hunters among us—was she rich?³¹

Such details in book III not only allude to Landon's life but signal more generally, I think, the determination of Aurora, like other early Victorian women writers, to pursue a professional career. In the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s many women, like Landon and Roberts at 22 Hans Place, Harriet Martineau in Fludyer Street, and George Eliot at 142 Strand, moved to lodgings in London to signal their professional aspirations, and they were not above writing reviews, translating foreign literature, or doing other hackwork to provide the financial means needed to support their literary careers. Aurora's life as a “city poet” represents this new, if not quite glorious, stage in the nineteenth-century woman writer's professionalization.³² It makes visible what the myth of the Romantic poetess hides: the real, hard labor of the literary woman's life.

The differences from Landon's life are also significant, however—most notably Aurora's unsullied reputation and her unwavering commitment, despite early fame, to produce high art. Landon's reputation had come to ruin (or close to it) with rumors of illicit liaisons with William Jerdan, editor of the Literary Gazette; William Maginn, the heavy-drinking Irish journalist associated with Blackwood's and Fraser's; and Daniel Maclise, the painter. Although they name no names, the early biographers acknowledge these “atrocious calumnies,” in Howitt's phrase, invariably to refute them. Nonetheless, the biographers admit that Landon's public persona, “the very unguardedness of her innocence,” and her lack of concern “about the interpretation that was likely to be put upon her words” contributed to the problem.³³ So did her fictions of the poetess. Eulalie in A History of the Lyre confesses that she is more like the “Eastern tulip” with its “radiant” yet short-lived colors than the pure “lily of the valley” with its “snowy blossoms.” In contrast, Aurora declares unequivocally,

                                                            I am a woman of repute;
No fly-blow gossip ever specked my life;
My name is clean and open as this hand,
Whose glove there's not a man dares blab about
As if he had touched it freely.

(9:264-68)

As she begins her career, Aurora self-consciously resolves to live “holding up my name / To keep it from the mud” (3:311-12).

More important to artistic development, Barrett Browning revises Landon's attitude toward fame, work, and sustained poetic achievement. Eulalie, like Erinna before her, laments that she has lost the desire (or perhaps she lacks the ability) to sustain her work:

I am as one who sought at early dawn
To climb with fiery speed some lofty hill:
His feet are strong in eagerness and youth
His limbs are braced by the fresh morning air,
And all seems possible:—this cannot last.
The way grows steeper, obstacles arise,
And unkind thwartings from companions near.(34)

But whereas Eulalie laments that early fame has proved a fatal opium—

I am vain,—praise is opium, and the lip
Cannot resist the fascinating draught,
Though knowing its excitement is a fraud,—

(228)

that she can “no longer work miracles for thee [fame],” and that now “Disappointment tracks / The steps of Hope,” Aurora determines that she will progress beyond simple “ballads,” a form identified with the Romantic poetess, and work her way up through the generic ranks that have long challenged English male poets: from pastoral through georgic to epic. Indeed, one can read the opening monologue of book V as Aurora's response to Eulalie's tragic lament in A History of the Lyre. Aurora presents a counterargument that women poets can indeed “last” as “The way grows steeper, obstacles arise, / And unkind thwartings from companions near.” Significantly, too, Barrett Browning turns Eulalie's admission of inadequacy into Romney's critique of the female poet's limitations (in 2:180-225 and 4:1115-24, 1159-68, 1202-11).³⁵ In Aurora Leigh it is the male critic who denigrates the woman poet's abilities and achievements, not the woman poet who self-destructs.

What Barrett Browning does not alter or avoid is Landon's psychological insight that the woman poet longs for, perhaps even needs, the approval of her male reader. In A History of the Lyre Eulalie performs for large audiences but in particular for the pleasure of the Englishman who follows her about for a year; when he leaves Italy without offering marriage, she more or less “hang[s] [her] lute on some lone tree, and die[s].”³⁶ Aurora confronts the issue of male approval in book V, where she not only lays out her plan for progress up through the generic ranks but also identifies the primary obstacle to her achievement:

                                                            —I must fail
Who fail at the beginning to hold and move
One man—and he my cousin, and he my friend.

(5:30-32)

Aurora fears “this vile woman's way of trailing garments,” yet determines that it “shall not trip me up” (5:59-60).

If Landon framed the issue in erotic or romantic terms, Barrett Browning reframes it to emphasize professional and aesthetic concerns. Aurora admits her loneliness as a woman writer and her envy of male artists who are rewarded with love, whether of a mother or of a wife. But the need for love, we should note, is not peculiar to the woman artist but includes male artists such as Graham, Belmore, and Gage, all of whom rely on domestic affection (5:502-39). Aurora expresses her desire for Romney's approval in rather different terms—that is, in terms of the poet's vocation and specifically the woman poet's terrain: Is her work, contrary to what Romney believes, equal to that of the social activist? Shall the woman poet be confined, as in Romney's view at the end of book IV, to “the mythic turf where danced the nymphs” (4:1161), or shall she treat, in her “imperative labour” (1:880), the whole range of human experience and passion that Aurora details at the beginning of book V? In Barrett Browning's poem it is Aurora's view, not Romney's opinion or Landon's precedent as poetess of lyric love, that finally determines the career of the woman poet—and the plot of the remainder of the poem.

After book V, very little of Landon's life and works informs Aurora Leigh—except, most significantly, that Barrett Browning revises the conclusion to A History of the Lyre, a conclusion some biographers thought Landon had enacted in her life. Eulalie, Sappho-like, dies an abandoned woman; Aurora lives to marry Romney. Eulalie's history is told only after her death by her male admirer; Aurora Leigh's is written at the height of her power by the poet herself. If the marriage ending of Aurora Leigh has been controversial among contemporary feminist critics, primarily for seeming to succumb to the conventions of the marriage plot,³⁷ it looks different in its historical and generic contexts. In the context of women's autobiography, it represents a determination to write one's own life and not let others construct one's self. In the context of biographies of the nineteenth-century woman poet, it represents a writing against tradition, a rejection of Landon's dying for (male) pleasure, and a progression from feminine poetess to woman poet.

Barrett Browning is famous for having written, “I look everywhere for grandmothers and see none.”³⁸ Perhaps Landon, born in 1802, only four years before Barrett, was too close in age to be considered a literary “grandmother.” Perhaps Dorothy Mermin is right that, in making such a comment, Barrett Browning was ignoring “the popular ‘poetesses’ who adorned the literary scene,” as they did not represent “the noble lineage with which she wished to claim affiliation.”³⁹ But perhaps between her statement to Robert Browning in 1845 and the writing of Aurora Leigh a decade later, she owned up to the existence of the women writers who had influenced her, if only (or primarily) as negative examples. Whatever the case, when Barrett Browning came to write her autobiography of the new woman poet, she framed its plot and many of its features in terms of the female literary figures of the preceding generation. If in revising A History of the Lyre she lets Eulalie's lyre stay hanging on a tree and gives Aurora instead a Gideon's trumpet, “a clarion” to press “on thy woman's lip” (9:929), she nonetheless acknowledges, in the scope and density of her allusions, the importance of Landon's work in the tradition of nineteenth-century women's writing.

As Barrett Browning's allusion to “that murmur of the outer Infinite” suggests (1:12), Aurora Leigh also considers the woman poet in relation to her male counterpart and incorporates (as it interrogates) the Romantic masculine model of poetic development best known through Wordsworth's “Self-biography” The Prelude.⁴⁰ Wordsworth was, for young Elizabeth Barrett, the preeminent English poet, the “poet-priest / By the high altar, singing prayer and prayer / To the higher Heavens.”⁴¹ Kathleen Blake has enumerated the many ways in which Barrett Browning identifies herself with Wordsworth, adopts his Romantic aesthetics, and aligns her poetic autobiography with his: in “her valuation of childhood, the loss of mother, then father, a turning toward nature, early poetic aspirations and self-doubts, a confrontation with social ills, the attraction of revolutionary or philanthropic hopes.”⁴² Yet for all the thematic parallels between Wordsworth's autobiography and Aurora's, the most essential features of the Wordsworthian paradigm, those ideological elements that define his particular Romanticism—the guiding role of Nature in the poet's development, the negative (or at best neutral) importance of the city, the sequential progress of love of nature leading to love of man and to a civic poetry—are questioned and modified in Aurora Leigh.

To begin with, Barrett Browning inscribes the Wordsworthian myth of Nature as “mother nature”—a moral teacher, protector of the child's psyche, and maternal substitute—not once but twice in Aurora Leigh, first in the account of Aurora's childhood in the Tuscan hills, “the mountains above Pelago” (1:111), and again in the account of Marian Erle's birth in the Malvern Hills, “in a hut built up at night / To evade the landlord's eye” (3:832-33). In both narratives, examples of nature's beneficent influence repeat scenes from The Prelude with genuine appreciation. But in the first Barrett Browning treats the myth of a maternal, nurturing nature with skepticism about its origins as a masculine literary construction, and in the second she considers its possibilities, negative as well as positive, in shaping the lives of the working-class poor. It is the need for repetition, I believe, that registers Barrett Browning's consciousness of the difficulties of the Wordsworthian model for the modern woman poet and her intention to revise the developmental sequence of The Prelude.

When Aurora's mother dies, her father removes his child from Florence and resettles in a Tuscan village. His rationale derives from literary mythology:

Because unmothered babes, he thought, had need
Of mother nature more than others use,
And Pan's white goats, with udders warm and full
Of mystic contemplations, come to feed
Poor milkless lips of orphans like his own—
Such scholar-scraps he talked, I've heard from friends[.]

(1:112-17)

Aurora's language reveals an ambivalence about poetic myths of “mother nature.” On the one hand, “the white walls, the blue hills, my Italy” (1:232) nurture the young girl, and the “vocal pines and waters” become “confederate” with books, which Aurora's father also brings with him, as the “strong words of counselling souls” (1:187-89). On the other hand, Aurora distances herself from her father's beliefs with the phrase “he thought,” as if to register the myth of mother nature as a masculine conception, not one fully or unequivocally shared by the mature woman poet who narrates her autobiography. With “scholar-scraps” Aurora suggests fragments of truth, patriarchal or academic learning that only half-comprehends the function of real mothers or the relation between mother nature and humankind.⁴³ Barrett Browning thus incorporates the two great teachers of Wordsworth's Prelude, nature and books, into her poem, giving Aurora the credentialing experiences of the Romantic poet, yet questioning the adequacy of the model.

With the domesticated nature that replaces the Italian hills as Aurora moves to England and into puberty, Barrett Browning admits to an even greater ambivalence about the adequacy of the Wordsworthian model for the English woman poet. The landscape of Aunt Leigh's country house is clipped, controlled, and utterly domesticated with its lime tree, broadly sweeping lawn, “shrubberies in a stream / Of tender turf” (1:583-84), and line of elms that “stopped the grounds and dammed the overflow / Of arbutus and laurel” (1:587-88). This domestic English garden is not paradise but purgatory. England's is “Not a grand nature,” Aurora laments: “Italy / Is one thing, England one” (1:615, 626-27). The verbs Aurora associates with Italian nature—cleaving, leaping, crying out for joy or fear, palpitating, panting, and (finally) “waiting for / Communion and commission” (1:615-25)—all suggest that the aspiring young Englishwoman will not find the Wordsworthian sublime in her homeland, that her hope lies in deviating from English domesticity and reclaiming a larger European landscape and literary tradition.

In these early scenes Barrett Browning adopts the views of Germaine de Staël in De l'Allemagne (Germany, 1813), even as details of Aurora's birth and experience derive from Staël's “Italian” Corinne (1807)—that “immortal book,” as young Barrett had called it.⁴⁴ In her work of comparative literature, Staël had characterized English literature and culture as thoroughly domestic: “Domestic affections holding great sway over the hearts of the English, their poetry is impressed with the delicacy and solidity of those affections.” Staël had also judged, as a consequence, that English poetry had lost “the principle of terror, which is employed as one of the great means in German poetry.”⁴⁵Aurora Leigh reproduces these views to the extent that it locates the young poetess within an English country house and makes her early verse pastoral or weak georgic (poetry that Romney, incidentally, dismisses as “happy pastorals of the meads and trees,” with little relevance to the “hungry orphans” and “beaten and bullied wives” of modern urban life, 2:1201-10). Yet for all that her depiction of English culture concurs with Staël's, Barrett Browning never fully endorses Staël's judgment. For one thing, Aurora Leigh does not dismiss the beneficial influence of a specifically domesticated nature. Once Aurora has moved to the city, she regrets her loss of the English countryside—“A hedgehog in the path, or a lame bird, / In those green country walks” (3:147-48)—and she acknowledges its restorative power: “I seem to have missed a blessing ever since” (3:150). For another, in thinking about the domesticity and femininity of English poetry, Barrett excluded Wordsworth from such categorizations as Staël proposed: to Mary Russell Mitford she cited Coleridge as saying “that every great man he ever knew, had something of the woman in him, with one exception: and the exception was Wordsworth.”⁴⁶ By excluding Wordsworth from feminization, Barrett Browning can maintain—and claim the advantages of—a domestic tradition of English verse, while simultaneously incorporating the power of masculinity and the Wordsworthian sublime into her version of the poetic tradition.

Why should Barrett Browning, then, repeat certain natural scenes from Wordsworth's autobiography in her minibiography of Marian Erle? Repetition, as J. Hillis Miller notes, can involve contradiction or counterpart, the latter “a strange relation whereby the second is the subversive ghost of the first.”⁴⁷ Unlike Aurora's narrative of childhood, Marian's tale, told “with simple, rustic turns” (4:151), seems more directly to echo Wordsworth's belief in nature as moral teacher and protector of the child's innocence and integrity. If Wordsworth grew up in Nature,

                                                            as if I had been born
On Indian plains, and from my mother's hut
Had run abroad in wantonness, to sport
A naked savage, in the thunder shower,

(1:297-300)

Marian, too, is “born upon a ledge of Malvern Hills,” not in an imaginative Indian hut but in a less idealized “hut built up at night / To evade the landlord's eye, of mud and turf” (3:830-33). If Wordsworth spent his infancy beside the “ceaseless music” of the Derwent, which gave him

Amid the fretful dwellings of mankind
A foretaste, a dim earnest, of the calm
That Nature breathes among the hills and groves,

(1:279-81)

so the less fortunate Marian, at three, would “run off from the fold,”

And, creeping through the golden wall of gorse,
Would find some keyhole toward the secrecy
Of Heaven's high blue, and, nestling, down, peer out—
Oh, not to catch the angels at their games,
She had never heard of angels—but to gaze
She knew not why, to see she knew not what,
A-hungering outward from the barren earth
For something like a joy.

(3:884-91)

If Wordsworth learned his moral lessons from Nature's “fearless visitings” or her “Severer interventions, ministry / More palpable, as best might suit her aim” (1:352, 355-56), so Marian “dazzled black her sight against the sky” and “learnt God that way” (3:892, 895):

                    This grand blind Love, she said,
This skyey father and mother both in one,
Instructed her and civilised her more
Than even Sunday school did afterward.

(3:898-901)

Marian's childhood is more explicitly Wordsworthian than Aurora's, its narrative more imitative of the early scenes of The Prelude, the tone more appreciative, less ironically distanced from its Romantic model.

In making Marian the more direct descendant of the child Wordsworth, Barrett Browning validates the Wordsworthian model but also demotes it to a simpler or lower phase of development. She may have intended to associate Marian's simple rustic life and response to nature with the “naive” poetry of Friedrich Schiller's “Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung” (1795-96). In Schiller's classic formulation, nature in “naive” states of civilization, as in their literatures, “inspires us with a sort of love and respectful emotion, not because she is pleasing to our senses, or because she satisfies our mind or our taste, … but merely because she is nature. This feeling is often elicited when nature is considered in her plants, in the mineral kingdom, in rural districts; also in the case of human nature, in the case of children, and in the manners of country people and of primitive races.” In the Schillerean dichotomy, Aurora would in turn be associated with “sentimental” or “modern” poetry in that “nature, in our time, is no longer in man, and … we no longer encounter it in its primitive truth.” For Schiller this loss in modern experience is less a loss than an opportunity: “the end to which man tends by civilisation is infinitely superior to that which he reaches through nature.”⁴⁸ Aurora's distance from Marian—and Wordsworth—represents in these terms an advance on The Prelude, an opportunity for progress and perfection.⁴⁹ Writing at a distance from Wordsworthian myth, Aurora can recognize its values and limitations, while also seeing the direction in which modern poetry should go.

Yet such an evolutionary interpretation of Barrett Browning's repetition—an interpretation that makes Wordsworth in the “masculine” literary tradition preliminary to the new woman poet in the same way that L. E. L. is preliminary in the “feminine”—obscures a more potent reason for reproducing versions of Wordsworth's childhood in both female characters' lives. In both cases, we might note, nature fails. In Marian's case, nature cannot protect her from a derelict mother or the evils of city life; in Aurora's, nature is simply inadequate to the task of the modern city poet. Both cases are intertwined and essential to Barrett Browning's critique and revision of Wordsworth.

Despite the moral lessons that Marian gleans from nature and despite the psychological integrity that her experiences with nature and books consolidate, as a young woman she is virtually powerless against evil parents or the social and economic complexities of urban life. This difference of gender Wordsworth only dimly acknowledges in The Prelude, primarily in the tales of Mary Robinson, Maid of Buttermere, and in scenes of London life in book VII. In contemplating Mary Robinson's sad case, Wordsworth muses on their almost identical childhoods in nature:

For we were nursed—as almost might be said—
On the same mountains, children at one time,
Must haply often on the self-same day
Have from our several dwellings gone abroad
To gather daffodils on Coker's stream.

(7:42-46)

This feminine countertale, a minibiography of an “artless daughter of the hills,” shows the limits of nature's maternal nurture. Nature cannot save Mary from the “spoiler,” “‘a bold bad man’” who lies and seduces her, as it has saved Wordsworth from other evils.⁵⁰ But Wordsworth passes over this lack, recording only that Mary has returned to her native habitation and now “lives in peace / Upon the spot where she was born and reared; / Without contamination doth she live / In quietness, without anxiety” (7:320-23). As Lawrence Kramer suggests, Wordsworth transforms Mary into a “pastoral Proserpina,” “a perpetually innocent child of earth, a figure of renewal and pastoral innocence.”⁵¹

To a female reader, however, as to a Victorian sensitive to the question of the “fallen woman,” Wordsworth's treatment of the Maid of Buttermere's tale reveals some strange inadequacies. In The Prelude Wordsworth imagines Mary egotistically as a version of his younger self or emblematically as a version of disrupted but restored childhood innocence;⁵² yet he neither considers the difference of gender nor imagines a life story for Mary after seduction nor thinks about her illegitimate child in any terms other than death:

Beside the mountain chapel, sleeps in earth
Her new-born infant, fearless as a lamb
That, thither driven from some unsheltered place,
Rests underneath the little rock-like pile
When storms are raging. Happy are they both—
Mother and child!

(7:324-29)

Such happiness is death or death-in-life. In contrast, in Marian Erle's narrative, Barrett Browning writes beyond the “fall,” making the social and economic causes of the “fallen woman” a matter of inquiry and imagining an afterlife for Marian's babe (if not quite for Marian herself).⁵³ It is the burden of Aurora Leigh, books VI-VII, to extrapolate from the half-told tale of The Prelude, book VII, a more adequate account of the fallen woman's experience; to recognize the gaps in Wordsworth's understanding and fill them; and thus to remake the Romantic poet into a modern poet cognizant of sexual politics and modern urban experience. Aurora must recognize the repetition—the sameness as well as difference—in Marian's life story and her own.

Such recognition includes a shift of the poet's interest from nature to city. In The Prelude the Maid of Buttermere's tale falls within Wordsworth's “Residence in London”—that is, he recalls it by seeing (or hearing of) a play at Sadler's Wells, Edward and Susan, or The Beauty of Buttermere, and he associates it with his first encounter with an urban prostitute:⁵⁴

I heard, and for the first time in my life,
The voice of woman utter blasphemy—
Saw woman as she is to open shame
Abandoned, and the pride of public vice.

(7:384-87)

Wordsworth's flight from the fallen woman is part of his larger flight from the city. As he admits in his “meditation” on “such spectacle” (7:393-94), he later feels “a milder sadness” rather than sheer distress, but he never gets beyond “grief / For the individual and the overthrow of her soul's beauty” (7:395-97). To put it starkly, Wordsworth never comes to terms with city life. When he summarizes his response to London and its place in his poetic development, the judgment is extreme:

Oh, blank confusion! true epitome
Of what the mighty City is herself
To thousands upon thousands of her sons,
Living amid the same perpetual whirl
Of trivial objects, melted and reduced
To one identity, by differences
That have no law, no meaning, and no end—
Oppression, under which even highest minds
Must labour, whence the strongest are not free.

(7:722-30)

The city defies the power of the poetic imagination to make sense of it. Even if, as critics such as Lucy Newlyn have eloquently argued, Wordsworth's response to London was actually more ambivalent, including a recognition of “the vitality of London that nourishes his ‘riper mind,’”⁵⁵ the fact remains that The Prelude does not credit the city with any significant force in shaping the poet's mind or art.

Nor is the city associated in The Prelude with any creditable form of autobiography. As Mary Jacobus and Laura Marcus have argued, “Wordsworthian ‘value’, which must remain untainted by textual commodification,” is “dependent upon the casting-out of the prostitute (Book VII of The Prelude) who stands not only, as in DeQuincey's autobiography, for disreputable confession and commodified selfhood, but in her ‘painted bloom’, for literary figuration, seduction or solicitation by Romantic personification itself.”⁵⁶ By opening up Aurora Leigh to Marian Erle's story, even making it essential to the poet's own, Barrett Browning casts off not the fallen woman but fear of autobiography as a disreputable genre and the early nineteenth-century taboo against self-writing or any such self-display by proper women.

I have already suggested that Barrett Browning transplants Aurora from country to city to valorize the movement of professional women writers of her generation from provincial towns to London as artistic center. I would now add that Barrett Browning moves Aurora from country house to urban garret to insist upon the imaginative resources of the city and to underscore the necessity of the poet's engagement—not just encounter—with urban experience. It was no coincidence, I think, that when young Elizabeth Barrett cited an exemplary poem in defense of Wordsworth against criticism that he was a third-rate versifier, she chose the sonnet “Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802”:

Earth has not anything to show more fair;
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty. …(57)

Aurora Leigh is not dull of soul. Her visionary moments in the city are not occasional, as are Wordsworth's, but integral to her development. She in effect recognizes what Wordsworth only reluctantly acknowledged: that it is the interchange not of the human imagination and nature but of the imagination and any aspect of the visible world that counts.

When in book III Aurora takes up residence in a garret chamber, “up three flights of stairs” (3:158), she becomes quite explicitly a city poet. Aurora's prospect is of “slant roofs and chimney-pots,” of “the great tawny weltering fog,” of “Spires, bridges, streets, and squares” (3:177, 179, 181)—the prospect vision of nineteenth-century London. Aurora's inspiration is not blocked, she is not one “in city pent” (as Wordsworth imagined the young Coleridge to be), nor does she lack visionary experience. “Your city poets see such things / Not despicable” (3:186-87), Aurora reports. Her account of her early days in London ends with a visionary moment as dramatic as that in Wordsworth's ascent of Snowdon:

… sit in London at the day's decline,
And view the city perish in the mist
Like Pharoah's armaments in the deep Red Sea,
The chariots, horsemen, footmen, all the host,
Sucked down and choked to silence—then, surprised
By a sudden sense of vision and of tune,
You feel as conquerors though you did not fight,
And you and Israel's other singing girls,
Ay, Miriam with them, sing the song you choose.

(3:195-203)

Harking back to the first Hebrew poetess and aligning herself with inspired epic and epideictic poetry, Aurora here answers Romney's earlier denigration of women's verse as merely “the cymbal tinkle in white hands” (2:170). She counters his assertion that Miriam ought to sing only “when Egypt's slain” (2:171)—that is, after Moses, the male leader, has done his work. Aurora insists that the poet's vision does the work, and celebrates it, too.

In the new model of poetic development and literary career that Barrett Browning constructs, this vision must occur in the city. As a young poet, Aurora must get past believing that her finest poetry will be “natural” or “landscape” poetry, that it will recollect her experiences in nature, whether in Italy or in England, whether autobiographical or fictive. The generic progression that Aurora outlines for herself in book V begins with “ballads” and “sonnets,” then continues with a “descriptive poem called ‘The Hills’” (5:90). Is this, we might ask, a Wordsworthian progression from the “lyrical” ballads of 1798 through the more sustained consideration of nature's work in The Prelude of 1805? Or is this a typically feminine progression from “ballads” (5:85) to the extended “pastorals” (5:130) that women poets such as Mary Howitt, Mary Mitford, and even Elizabeth Barrett herself wrote in the 1830s?⁵⁸ Book V of Aurora Leigh is ambiguous: Aurora's early work is not fully Wordsworthian in that it lacks “thoughts that lie too deep for tears,” nor yet is it traditionally feminine in that Aurora aspires to the greater achievement of classical nature poetry, to what “well the Greeks knew” (5:96). Aurora dismisses her ballad writing as too easy: “the ballad's race / Is rapid for a poet who bears weights / Of thought and golden image” (5:84-86), and she criticizes her pastoral as verse only of “surface-pictures—pretty, cold, and false / With literal transcript” (5:131-32). The great poetry that she sets herself to write is instead epic—not the historical matter of Britain (in a swipe at Tennyson) or that of any ancient or medieval subject but an epic of modern life:

… this live, throbbing age,
That brawls, cheats, maddens, calculates, aspires,
And spends more passion, more heroic heat
Betwixt the mirrors of its drawing-rooms,
Than Roland with his knights at Roncevalles.

(5:203-7)

Aurora's ars poetica in book V recalls Wordsworth's deliberation on epic themes in The Prelude (1:146-228). But Barrett Browning renounces historical subjects—the sorts of subjects Wordsworth enumerates and she herself chose in such early works as The Battle of Marathon (1820), Prometheus Bound (1833), and A Drama of Exile (1838)—and instead dedicates Aurora to the writing of a new epic, “the burning lava of a song” that celebrates “The full-veined, heaving, double-breasted Age” (5:215-16).⁵⁹

Although Aurora commits herself to this new poetry in book V, she does not write it immediately. Like Wordsworth at the beginning of The Prelude, she suffers a blockage. Aurora's blockage is distinctly un-Wordsworthian, however—not only in the pivotal place it gives to human love but in its misprision of the role of nature in the inspiration and production of poetry. At the end of book V, distressed by her unrequited if unacknowledged love for Romney, Aurora sells her father's books (in what has long been read as a rejection of the masculine poetic tradition) and heads to Italy, her maternal homeland. Her invocation of Italy expresses an expectation of what the maternal landscape can do for the woman poet:

                                                            And now I come, my Italy,
My own hills! Are you 'ware of me, my hills,
How I burn toward you? do you feel tonight
The urgency and yearning of my soul,
As sleeping mothers feel the sucking babe
And smile?

(5:1266-71)

Aurora expects the nurturance, psychological and poetical, that she has never had in England—an expectation derived from novels like Corinne or the “Italian” verse of the English poetesses. As it turns out, in Italy Aurora finds neither the nurturance nor the inspiration she seeks; Italy's hills “go / [Their] own determined, calm indifferent way” (5:1273-74). Expectations of the maternal homeland, of Italy as autobiographical and poetical origins, turn out to be unfounded.

What I am suggesting, to state it paradigmatically, is that the final books of Aurora Leigh reject both the Wordsworthian myth of nature as the primary source of poetic inspiration and the feminine myth of Italy, so dominant in the writings of Staël, Robinson, Hemans, and Landon, as the origin of women's poetry. At the beginning of The Prelude, Wordsworth escapes “From the vast city, where I long had pined / A discontented sojourner” (1:6-7), and, once returned to nature, feels poetic inspiration return:

For I, methought, while the sweet breath of heaven
Was blowing on my body, felt within
A correspondent breeze, that gently moved
With quickening virtue, but is now become
A tempest, a redundant energy,
Vexing its own creation.

(1:33-38)

At a parallel narrative moment, Aurora escapes London and “the marriage bells of Romney” (7:397), and on a ship bound for Genoa feels “the wind soft from the land of souls” (7:467). But while this Italian breeze and the landscape of her childhood possess a restorative power—

I could hear my own soul speak,
And had my friend—for Nature comes sometimes
And says, ‘I am ambassador for God’—

(7:464-66)

they produce no correspondent breeze of poetic inspiration. Once in Florence, the homeland of Landon's improvisatrice, “that land, / Where the poet's lip and the painter's hand / Are most divine,” Aurora sits quiet as death, producing nothing.⁶⁰ While watching a Tuscan sunset or resting in her villa on “a perfect night, / Until the moon, diminished to a curve, / Lay out there like a sickle for His hand / Who cometh down at last to reap the earth”—at such times, she admits, “ended seemed my trade of verse” (7:1298-1302). Although Aurora tries to rationalize this quietude as divine—“With God so near me, could I sing of God?”—her language betrays other sources of silence, of why she “did not write, nor read, nor even think” (7:1305-6): a lost future, a spoiled life (“like some passive broken lump of salt / Dropped in by chance to a bowl of oenomel, / To spoil the drink” [7:1308-10]), a waiting for death (the moon as grim reaper, as “sickle” of God).

The problem of poetic inspiration—or its lack—is one that all Romantic biographies of the poet or poetess address, from Mary Robinson's semi-autobiographical Sappho and Phaon (1796) to Landon's archetypal histories of the poetess to Wordsworth's greater odes and “self-biography” tracing the “Growth of a Poet's Mind.” Indeed, in the final books of The Prelude Wordsworth explicitly raises the question of how the “Imagination,” once “Impaired,” can be “Restored.”⁶¹ This is the question that Barrett Browning poses in the final books of Aurora Leigh—not for herself (apparently she never suffered from writer's block) but for her archetypal woman poet. Wordsworth's answer involves the two primary “attributes” of nature—“emotion” and “calmness” or “peace and excitation”—that support the poetic imagination, at once stimulating it with “That energy by which he [the poet] seeks the truth,” while also soothing or preparing it with “that happy stillness of the mind / Which fits him to receive it when unsought” (13:1-10). Barrett Browning's answer reworks the Wordsworthian formula by dividing those primary “attributes” between nature and man rather than assigning them to nature alone. In nature, Aurora finds “calmness” and “peace,” but too much of it. She needs man—and, specifically, one man—to provide the “emotion” and “excitation” that will stimulate her to write great poetry.

Barrett Browning brings nature and man, peace and excitation, together in the final scene of Aurora Leigh, a scene that rewrites the climactic episode of The Prelude, Wordsworth's ascent of Mount Snowdon. In ascending Snowdon, the poet experiences a landscape that seems “the type / Of a majestic intellect” (14:66-67), one that reassures him of the power of the imagination. This Wordsworthian landscape—with Moon “hung naked in a firmament / Of azure” (14:41-42), “a silent sea of hoary mist” covering all but the tips of “headlands, tongues, and promontory shapes” (14:43, 46), and beneath “the roar of waters, torrents, streams / Innumerable, roaring with one voice / Heard over earth and sea” (14:59-61)—emblematizes the ideal relation of the human mind and nature. In it the imagination not so much usurps as “feeds upon infinity,” “broods / Over the dark abyss” (14:71-72)—the latter image suggesting a repetition in poetic creation of original, divine creation and a reminiscence of Paradise Lost (1:20-22), where the Holy Spirit broods over Chaos and makes it fertile.

The closing landscape of Aurora Leigh, books VIII-IX, transforms Wordsworth's seascape into a cityscape. Instead of the Irish Sea disappearing in a “hoary mist,” the city of Florence, seen from the hills above, disappears in shadows:

                                                            Gradually
The purple and transparent shadows slow
Had filled up the whole valley to the brim,
And flooded all the city, which you saw
As some drowned city in some enchanted sea,
Cut off from nature. …

(8:34-39)

The sound heard from below is the roar not of waters but of the Duomo bell and “twenty churches [that] answer it” (8:46). There is a “golden moon” overhead (9:841)—but described fully only after Aurora and Romney embrace. Once again, Barrett Browning insists on the city as an equally valid and historically more likely source of the Victorian poet's inspiration. Yet if this cityscape provides Aurora with the “peace” and “calmness” that can restore her imagination, the “emotion” and “excitation” of Wordsworth's formula come from elsewhere. The seascape provokes a passionate, erotic desire to “leap and plunge”:

And find a sea-king with a voice of waves,
And treacherous soft eyes, and slippery locks
You cannot kiss but you shall bring away
Their salt upon your lips.

(8:41-44)

This erotic figure of Aurora's imagination puts man back into the originary scene of inspiration and creation; he provides the excitement that nature on its own lacks.

As Dorothy Mermin has suggested, Aurora's vision of a “sea-king,” a male version of the mermaid, “establishes her as the speaking subject whose desire elicits its object.”⁶² When Aurora imagines, Romney appears. This scene of a powerful female imagination revises, as I have already argued, the finale of Landon's History of the Lyre, in which the poetess, however inspired in personal solitude or public performance, cannot successfully move the man she loves. It also revises, if perhaps unconsciously, those scenes in The Prelude, book VII, in which erotic desire is seen as antithetical (or at best irrelevant) to the poetic imagination. But the most significant revision of the Wordsworthian model of poetic development comes in Barrett Browning's insistence that the new woman poet follow out the implications of what Wordsworth claimed to know (that love of nature leads to love of man) and what her womanly experience has taught (that “man” includes both a single man, Romney, and Man, all humankind).

For all Wordsworth's attempts to show a progression from his early love of nature to his mature concern for humankind, the dramatic scene on Mount Snowdon omits man, and the subsequent exposition of the poet's progress from “the ways of nature” to “the works of man and face of human life” to his “Faith in life endless” (14:198, 202, 204) seems less convincing as a result. In Aurora Leigh Barrett Browning never fully endorses the Wordsworthian progression, Aurora's earliest memories making human love more foundational than love of nature and her final vision suggesting a simultaneity rather than a hierarchy or sequence. Nonetheless, Aurora moves, as does Wordsworth, from a moment of personal vision to a concern for humankind itself, and her vision fully recognizes that “face of human life.” Just as Wordsworth on Snowdon finds an emblem of the ideal relation of nature and the human mind, so Aurora finds in marriage to Romney an emblem of ideal human relations and of man's work for other men.

It is a traditional emblem drawn from the Song of Songs, one of love and spousal union:⁶³

                                                            First, God's love.
And next … the love of wedded souls,
Which still presents that mystery's counterpart.
Sweet shadow-rose, upon the water of life,
Of such a mystic substance, Sharon gave
A name to! human, vital, fructuous rose,
Whose calyx holds the multitude of leaves,
Loves filial, loves fraternal, neighbour-loves
And civic—all fair petals, all good scents,
All reddened, sweetened from one central Heart!

(9:881-90)

Aurora's emblem reverses Wordsworth's order, beginning with divine love, then moving to “the love of wedded souls,” and finally expanding into all varieties of human love: familial, brotherly, neighborly, and civic.⁶⁴ It responds to the despair of The Prelude, book XI, where, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, Wordsworth images the era as “a budding rose” that “did not wake to happiness” (11:121-23); Aurora's emblematic rose promises a full bloom even in the nation or civitas. And it allows Barrett Browning to bring together the anticipated endings of her generic mix: the traditional marriage of domestic fiction, the apocalyptic union of English epic, and, in a moment of autobiographical revelation, the happiness of her own marriage to Robert Browning.

Finally, Aurora's vision and union with Romney allow Barrett Browning to incorporate, if only provisionally, a difficult, sometimes excluded aspect of English poetic autobiography: the politics of poetry. Daniel Riess has written persuasively of the depoliticizing of poetry in Landon's volumes of the 1820s: The Improvisatrice, The Troubador, The Golden Violet, and (I would add) A History of the Lyre. Whereas Staël's Corinne and other writings of the Coppet circle on which Landon drew used literature to engage in political debate (to attack, for example, the “dead” neoclassicism endorsed by the Napoleonic empire), Landon's adaptation of the story of Corinne represents, in Riess's view, “a testament to her shrewd skill at transforming potentially controversial Romantic works into a non-polemical Romanticism suitable for the mass market.”⁶⁵ In The Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of Women's Poetry Marlon B. Ross views this retreat from politics, notable in More, Barbauld, and other early nineteenth-century women writers, as part of a larger separation of women's poetry and the sphere of “feminine desire” from Romantic male poetry and “the masculine terrains of power.”⁶⁶ In Aurora Leigh Barrett Browning puts the politics back into women's verse, returning to Staël's seminal model and repoliticizing Landon's derivative histories. In the debates between Aurora and Romney in book II over how best to ameliorate social ills; in the class satires of book IV, where “Saint Giles” meets “Saint James” at Romney and Marian's wedding; in the drawing-room gossip of book V, where Sir Blaise's Anglo-Catholicism meets Mister Smith's German Rationalism; in the political commentary of book IX, where Aurora and Romney discuss (and sometimes dismiss) feminism, socialism, communism, Comteanism, and other political isms—in these and other passages, Aurora Leigh resists the gendering of poetry that her female predecessors had so readily accepted, indeed encouraged, as they carved out a niche for women's verse.

Barrett Browning's relation to Wordsworthian politics is less straightforward. In general terms, Aurora Leigh, like The Prelude, responds to the nineteenth-century debate over poetry's worth: Is it important and influential work, or is it, as Utilitarians thought, a pleasant but trivial activity? Aurora calls it, in what may be a response to Ford Madox Brown's famous mid-Victorian painting Work, “imperative labour” (1:880), superior to the work of “common men” who “Lay telegraphs, gauge railroads, reign, reap, dine / And dust the flaunty carpets of the world / For kings to walk on” (1:870-72). The poem engages, to borrow Ross's terms, the “conflict between the romantic desire to view poetry as an influential kind of work that shapes material life through its immaterial power and the utilitarian desire to view poetry as a pleasing, but essentially superfluous activity that distracts men from the real work of technological advancement, economic growth, and sociopolitical progress.”⁶⁷ In this cultural debate Barrett Browning asserts, with Wordsworth, the power of poetry to shape human lives. This is the lesson Romney learns through the destruction of Leigh Hall and his socialist schemes, then through his reading of Aurora's poetry. In asserting poetry's power, Barrett Browning assigns it to a source even more “immaterial” than Wordsworth's: “God's love” rather than nature. (It is as if nature itself were too dangerously material in an overly material age.)

More specifically in terms of contemporary politics and political movements, Aurora Leigh reproduces the pattern of The Prelude in its movement from an enthusiastic but wrongheaded politics to a more mature understanding of how social and moral progress might occur. At the end of his “Residence in France,” books X-XII, Wordsworth describes a civic despair induced by the Terror of the French Revolution:

                                                            I lost
All feeling of conviction, and, in fine,
Sick, wearied out with contraries,
Yielded up moral questions in despair.

(11:302-5)

Although he recovers his moral equilibrium, and even at the end of The Prelude reasserts his “hopes of good to come” (13:63), he still rails against political rulers and social theorists, including Adam Smith, who “Plan without thought, or buil[d] on theories / Vague and unsound” (13:70-71). In Aurora Leigh Romney replaces Wordsworth, and socialist schemes become the narrative equivalent of the French Revolution. Romney suffers from Wordsworth's naive political enthusiasm and then from his political despair. At the end of the poem it is Romney, like Wordsworth but unlike Aurora, who rails against political and social theorists:

“Fewer programmes, we who have no prescience.
Fewer systems, we who are held and do not hold.
Less mapping out of masses to be saved,
By nations or by sexes. Fourier's void,
And Comte absurd—and Cabot puerile.”

(9:864-69)

Apparently Aurora the poet has already absorbed the lesson of The Prelude, thus avoiding the false steps that Romney, a nonreader of poetry, inevitably takes. Or perhaps, as a woman unobligated to enter the political arena, she never fully faces the temptation of politics to which such men as Wordsworth (or such characters as Romney) succumb.

How one chooses between these two possibilities depends, I think, on which genre of Aurora Leigh one chooses to emphasize and how Barrett Browning's politics appear from that generic perspective. Critics who read the poem primarily as domestic fiction tend to see in the differences between Aurora and Romney, as in their marriage, a reinscription of traditional gender roles, a capitulation to patriarchy, a conservative ending to Aurora's life story. Ellen Moers's disappointment in Aurora Leigh as “a good second-rate novel” stems, for all her celebration of Barrett Browning and her reintroduction of the work to the feminist canon, from this generic emphasis; in the novelistic tradition, the poem's closure seems conventional, even conservative, scarcely political.⁶⁸ Herbert Tucker's more generous reading depends on its attention to epic dimensions. In the “consecrated elements” of Aurora's final epic vision—“the ‘jasper-stone as clear as glass’ and the jeweled heavens of the last lines”—Tucker finds a “crystalline Bildung … precipitated out of the poetic solution in which Aurora's selfhood has been dissolved, diffused, and suspended for a kind of re-creation to which the traditional bildungsroman gave little play.” Emphasizing the Bildungsroman form rather than Victorian domestic fiction, Tucker sees epic as renovating the novel by “expanding the horizons of domestic fiction beyond merely human engagements, through the edification of the bridal New Jerusalem, to espouse a sacred civic trust.”⁶⁹ Thus Aurora, we might say in response to my initial formulation, has not only absorbed the political lessons of The Prelude but also reconceived the tactics of epic as a public, civic-minded genre.

Reading Aurora Leigh as autobiography may produce yet the most encouraging view of Aurora and her creator as poetically and politically engaged. By choosing to include politics in the narrative of Aurora's development, Barrett Browning breaches the boundary between the realms of masculine and feminine writing and, unlike the poetesses before her, moves into the masculine terrain of politics and publicity. That Barrett Browning should introduce politics not only into women's poetry but also into a woman writer's autobiography is especially significant, given the deep resistance to self-display that More and Barbauld, Joanna Baillie and Hemans reveal. (Hemans, for example, was so excessively concerned with violating codes of proper femininity that when her sister, Harriet Owen, composed a memoir to preface Hemans's posthumous poems, “Owen initiate[d] her memoir by protesting the indecorousness of writing a memoir of a woman who wished her life to remain private.” By comparison, Landon was comfortable with self-display—and hence an easier poetess for Barrett Browning to adapt.)⁷⁰

When Aurora determines to write of herself “for my better self” (1:4), she knows that she violates a feminine code of early nineteenth-century women writers against autobiography, yet she characterizes her act not as self-violation but as self-improvement. That her improvement extends beyond the self and encompasses the civic body we can determine from the final vision of the poem—a vision of the New Jerusalem that represents not a domestic Eden, the traditional feminine realm, but rather a new world “whence shall grow spontaneously / New churches, new economies, new laws / Admitting freedom, new societies / Excluding falsehood” (9:946-49). Except perhaps for the final section of Harriet Martineau's Autobiography, with its prophetic “Last View of the World,” there is no autobiographical conclusion quite so engaged with the public good or quite so insistent about the need for the woman writer to move out of the private and into the civic realm.

Notes

1. Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh, 3:158, 303. Further citations are given parenthetically by book and line numbers in McSweeney's edition.

2. Herbert Tucker, “Aurora Leigh: Epic Solutions to Novel Ends,” 62.

3. Ibid., 67.

4. Letter 139, 4 February 1842, in Raymond and Sullivan, Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Mary Russell Mitford, 1:345. The letter is also included in Miller, Elizabeth Barrett to Miss Mitford, 106. As a subsequent letter written on 18 November 1842 attests (letter 200, 2:81), Barrett disputed with friends about the value of Wordsworth's poetry, in this case with Hugh Boyd, who considered the poet laureate third-rate. Boyd, she reports, “was very angry … IS … will be perhaps in spite of all—and why?—why because I wont agree with him that Wordsworth is at best, a third rate poet.”

5. The exception may be Caroline Bowles's Birthday (1836), which was considered autobiographical in the tradition of Cowper's Task. Barrett Browning knew and admired Bowles (later the wife of Robert Southey), as her letter in response to Richard Hengist Horne's New Spirit of the Age attests: “Caroline Southey should have been mentioned with some distinction. She is a womanly Cowper, with much of his sweetness, and some of his strength, and there is much in her poems to which the heart of the reader leans back in remembrance” (Stoddard, Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Addressed to Richard Hengist Horne, 200). I have found no evidence, however, that Barrett Browning viewed The Birthday as a poem about artistic development.

6. Ross, Contours of Masculine Desire, 229.

7. Landon, Poetical Works, 223. Unless I indicate otherwise, all citations of Landon's work are to F. Sypher's edition, which is a reprint of the volume edited and illustrated by William Bell Scott and published by George Routledge in 1873.

8. It is possible to read the opening lines of Aurora Leigh as autobiographically relevant to Barrett Browning's career. If, as Tricia Lootens suggests in Lost Saints, 122, Barrett Browning's “Vision of Poets” “celebrates Romantic genius, Pythian inspiration, and the agonies of Christian sanctity,” and if the only woman poet included in this poem is Sappho, “Who died for Beauty as martyrs do” (l. 289), then we may read Aurora Leigh as a (partial) renunciation of that earlier vision. L. E. L.'s Eulalie is based on Sappho and on Madame de Staël's Sapphic writer Corinne—figures Barrett had admired greatly in her youth.

9. Glennis Stephenson, “Poet Construction: Mrs Hemans, L. E. L., and the Image of the Nineteenth-Century Woman Poet,” in Neuman and Stephenson, ReImagining Women, 66. See also London's Erinna: “It was my other self that had a power; / Mine, but o'er which I had not a control. … / A song came gushing, like the natural tears, / To check whose current does not rest with us” (Landon, Poetical Works, 216).

10. Leighton, Victorian Women Poets, 61.

11. Robinson, Memoirs (1826), 132.

12. Landon left biographical materials with Laman Blanchard, her literary executor, who wrote a “sketch of the literary and personal life of L. E. L.,” as he put it, “in fulfilment of a pledge given to her long before she meditated leaving England” (Life and Literary Remains of L. E. L., v).

13. The phrases come from Ross's chapter on More and Barbauld, “The Birth of a Tradition: Making Cultural Space for Feminine Poetry,” in Contours of Masculine Desire, 192, 202. As his chapter title implies, Ross views More and Barbauld as key figures in a single “feminine” tradition, as differentiated from a “masculine” Romantic tradition; yet the transmission from Robinson to Landon suggests that there were two feminine traditions, one less invested in woman's role as “sociomoral handmaiden.”

14. E[mma] R[oberts], “Memoir of L. E. L.,” in Landon, “Zenana” and Minor Poems, 9; Blanchard, Life and Literary Remains of L. E. L., 1:17, 40. Roberts also refers to Landon's poetry as “her effusions” (10).

15. William Howitt, Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets, 2:134.

16. Norma Clarke, “The Cause of Infant Genius,” paper given at the International Conference on Women's Poetry, Birkbeck College, London University, 21 July 1995.

17. Roberts, “Memoir of L. E. L.,” 16, 11.

18. Speaking specifically of Landon's Improvisatrice, Blanchard notes, “Thus, though it was but Sappho who sang, Sappho and L. E. L. were voted to be one, and the minstrel was identified as a martyr to ill-starred passion and blighted hope”: Life and Literary Remains of L. E. L., 2:41. See also Howitt's anecdote in Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets, 2:132-33, about Landon's deflating of “a young sentimental man” by explaining, “with an air of merry scorn,” that her poetry was “all professional, you know!”

19. Landon, preface to “Venetian Bracelet,” vii-viii.

20. Howitt, Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets, 2:137. Howitt follows this passage with an anecdote he heard from Emma Roberts, which she apparently suppressed: that Landon, “when calumny was dealing very freely with her name,” told Roberts that she had a “remedy” for her “suffering” and showed her friend “a vial of prussic acid.” Howitt treats this anecdote as a real-life version of a fictional incident in Landon's novel Ethel Churchill, thus suggesting another link between the poetess's life and her work.

21. Letter dated 16 July 1841, in Miller, Elizabeth Barrett to Miss Mitford, 77-78.

22. There is also Elizabeth Barrett's commentary in her poem “L. E. L's Last Question,” which suggests that, had L. E. L. thought more of Him “who drew / All life from dust, and for all tasted death,” her poetry might have achieved a greater, more long-lasting significance. This sense of the poetess's focus on things domestic and mundane to the omission of higher, spiritual matters continues in Aurora Leigh.

23. Kathleen Blake traces the parallels to Wordsworth's Prelude in “Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Wordsworth,” 387-98, and argues that the primary difference lies in Barrett Browning's emphasis on love. My point, a slightly different one, is that Barrett Browning uses parallels with Wordsworth to distinguish Aurora from the Romantic female poetess.

24. Aurora takes the lark as her counterpart in bk. II:744-45, “The little lark reached higher with his song / Than I with crying,” and in bk. III:151-52: “The music soars within the little lark, / And the lark soars.” These passages recall most notably bk. VII:18-31 of The Prelude, in which Wordsworth allies himself with a “choir of red-breasts” at winter's end, and bk. XIV:381-89, in which he figures his autobiographical poem as “this Song, which like a lark / I have protracted, in the unwearied heavens / Singing.”

25. Blanchard, Life and Literary Remains of L. E. L., 1:13. Biographers also noted that her reviewing for the Literary Gazette required wide and thoughtful reading.

26. “Prefatory Notice,” in Hemans, Poetical Works, 22.

27. Rundle, “‘Inscription of these volumes,’” 247.

28. Leighton, Victorian Women Poets, 51, suggests that in this detail Barrett Browning “may well be remembering the life of L. E. L.” I would add that the geographical shift from the parish of Brompton to the adjacent Kensington follows a historical shift of respectable Victorian authors and artists in a westward direction. Bohemians moved southward to Chelsea.

29. Blanchard, Life and Literary Remains of L. E. L., 1:79. This description also appears in Elwood, Memoirs of the Literary Ladies of England, 2:319, and Howitt, Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets, 2:130. It continues: “—with a simple white bed, at the foot of which was a small, old, oblong-shaped sort of dressing-table, quite covered with a common worn writing-desk heaped with papers, while some strewed the ground, the table being too small for aught besides the desk; a little high-backed cane-chair which gave you any idea rather than that of comfort—a few books scattered about completed the author's paraphernalia.”

30. See, for example, Emma Roberts's comment that “the history and literature of all ages and all countries were familiar to her, … the extent of her learning, and the depth of her research, manifesting themselves in publications which do not bear her name” (“Memoir of L. E. L.,” 17).

31. Blanchard, Life and Literary Remains of L. E. L., 1:32-33.

32. Barrett Browning may also be defending the “Cockney School,” a derogatory label she thought ill chosen. To Mary Russell Mitford she complained, “And, what is the cockney school? … Is it not their locality which gave the name—& still less resonably [sic] than the Lakes gave another? And are any of us the worse for living in London, if we dont roll in the dust of the streets?” (letter 737, 6 March 1840, in Kelley and Hudson, Brownings' Correspondence, vol. 4).

33. Howitt, Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets, 2:137; Blanchard, Life and Literary Remains of L. E. L., 1:52.

34. Landon, Poetical Works, 226. Cf. Hannah More's use of the myth of Atalanta in Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (in Works, 1:367) to argue that women writers cannot sustain their careers as men can.

35. On this score, Angela Leighton incorrectly suggests that Aurora's father is more important than Romney to her poetic development: “It is not the realisation that she has loved and lost Romney, but that she has lost her father, which tests and educates her imagination,” Leighton argues in Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 136. Romney is important because he becomes the patriarchal mouthpiece, arguing the traditional challenges to women's abilities and for Aurora's “proper” place in the domestic sphere. Her father is not put in this position because Barrett Browning wants Aurora to claim her paternal inheritance—the learning, the intellectual contribution—without undue complication.

36. Landon, Poetical Works, 229. The Englishman listens to a long monologue in which Eulalie laments the ill effects of fame and praises the virtues of “the loveliness of home” and “support and shelter from man's heart” (226). When the monologue ends, he abruptly states, “I soon left Italy; it is well worth / A year of wandering, were it but to feel / How much our England does outweigh the world” (230). One could read this hiatus simply as an acknowledgment that poetic genius is unsuited to domestic life. Landon seems to have intended, however, a stronger link between the continuing work of the poetess and the approval—including love—of her male audience.

37. Cora Kaplan, in her ground-breaking study of the sources of Aurora Leigh, calls it the “most vulgar” alteration of the Corinne myth (“Introduction” to “Aurora Leigh” and Other Poems, 17). Dorothy Mermin writes more ambivalently: “Perhaps the oddest thing about Aurora Leigh, after all, is the triumphantly happy ending—happy for the heroine at any rate, if not for her disempowered and humiliated lover” (Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 217). In “Aurora Leigh: Epic Solutions to Novel Ends,” Herbert F. Tucker explains, to my mind convincingly, the ending as the combination of novelistic convention and epic apocalypse.

38. Browning, Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, 1:232.

39. Mermin, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1. Later Mermin suggests that Barrett Browning's “real rival was L. E. L., not Homer or Byron or even Mrs. Hemans, whom she considered too ladylike and deficient in passion to be seriously reckoned with” (32). If Mermin is correct, as I think she may be, then the density of allusions to Landon's work in Aurora Leigh points to that rivalry.

40. The term “Self-biography” comes from Coleridge's notebooks, 4 January 1804, cited in the apparatus of Wordsworth, Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850, 529. The 1850 title page of the poem reads: The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet's Mind, An Autobiographical Poem. Throughout this chapter I cite the 1850 edition.

41. “On a Portrait of Wordsworth by B. R. Haydon,” in Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 98.

42. Blake, “Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Wordsworth,” 390.

43. On the problematic substitution of maternal nature for real mothers, see Steinmetz, “Images of ‘Mother-Want’ in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh,” 351-67.

44. On the importance of Corinne for Barrett Browning and other nineteenth-century women writers, see Moers, Literary Women, 173-310, and Cora Kaplan, “Introduction” to “Aurora Leigh” and Other Poems, 16-23. To Hugh Stuart Boyd, Elizabeth Barrett wrote on 9 June 1832 that she had been reading Corinne “for the third time, & admired it more than ever” (letter 453 in Kelley and Hudson, Brownings' Correspondence, 3:25, which includes the phrase “immortal book”).

45. Staël-Holstein, Germany, 1:224-25. The chapter in which this quotation occurs is titled “Of the Judgment formed by the English on the subject of German Literature.”

46. Letter of 8 November 1842, in Miller, Elizabeth Barrett to Miss Mitford, 141.

47. Miller, Fiction and Repetition, 9.

48. Friedrich Schiller, “On Simple and Sentimental Poetry,” in Bate, Criticism, 408-9.

49. That this advance is conceived in terms of social class rather than progressive civilizations reminds us of the recurring problem Barrett Browning faces in treating working-class characters and issues, a problem discussed by Kaplan, “Introduction” to “Aurora Leigh” and Other Poems, 35-36.

50. These lines and phrases come from the fuller account of the Maid of Buttermere in the 1805 Prelude, ed. Wordsworth, Abrams, and Gill, 7:342-46, 325, 323. Like Barrett Browning's account of Marian Erle, Wordsworth's of Mary Robinson wavers between the language of melodrama, traditionally associated with lower-class characters, and the more “universal” language of The Prelude, with which Wordsworth narrates his own life. This failure to convert Mary Robinson's story from stage drama to auto/biography reveals his difficulty with both class and gender differences.

51. Kramer, “Gender and Sexuality in The Prelude,” 626.

52. See ibid., 625-30, as well as Onorato, Character of the Poet.

53. Barrett Browning follows Wordsworth in imagining the fallen but pure mother as “dead” to the world. At the end of Aurora Leigh, when Romney proposes to marry Marian and adopt her child, Marian insists that “since we've parted I have passed the grave” (9:282) and that she will not “get up from my grave, / And wear my chin-cloth for a wedding-veil” (9:392-93). Barrett Browning emphasizes the life of the child, who, fathered by God, not man, represents the future redemption of humankind.

54. The melodrama was performed at Sadler's Wells in April-June 1803, and Mary Lamb wrote Coleridge and Wordsworth about it in July 1803. It is unclear whether Wordsworth actually saw the play.

55. In “Lamb, Lloyd, London,” 169-87, Newlyn argues that the 1805 version of The Prelude includes not just traditional negative judgments of the city but almost Lamb-like moments of recognizing its vitality and imaginative potential. Her argument relies, however, on passages in the 1805 version that were expurgated from the 1850 published edition, which was the text Barrett Browning read. Less optimistically, in “Gender and Sexuality in The Prelude,” 622, Kramer suggests that Wordsworth relegates London to the “realm of fancy, the imagination's poor relation, the mundane, indiscriminate, and capricious manipulation of images.”

56. This is Marcus's formulation in Auto/biographical Discourses, 37. She amplifies Jacobus's reading in Romanticism, Writing and Sexual Difference, 230-36.

57. See letter 200, 18 November 1842, in Raymond and Sullivan, Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Mary Russell Mitford, 2:81.

58. In an essay on Mary and William Howitt in Horne's New Spirit of the Age, 177-98, Mary is credited with having “the true ballad spirit” and the couple (who published jointly) with “the irresistible tendency of one to describe natural scenery, and the legendary propensities of the other” (185). As we know from comments to Mitford, however, Barrett believed that Mary Howitt's represented a literary career gone bad, that Howitt had failed to consolidate her powers and, with The Seven Temptations, declined as a poet. To Robert Browning she suggests that the Howitts' journalism, including their editorship of the People's Journal, led Mary to publish “pure nonsense,” “pretty, washy, very meritorious” stuff (Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, 1845-1846, 2:124).

59. The fullest discussion of bk. V as ars poetica appears in Holly A. Laird's “Aurora Leigh: An Epical Ars Poetica,” in Jones, Writing the Woman Artist, 355-70. Laird emphasizes Barrett Browning's “twofold” vision of heroism in life and art, its articulation and embodiment in Aurora Leigh.

60. Landon's Improvisatrice begins: “I am a daughter of that land, / Where the poet's lip and the painter's hand / Are most divine,—where the earth and sky / Are picture both and poetry— / I am of Florence” (ll. 1-5). Eulalie, the poetess of A History of the Lyre, is, like Staël's Corinne, from Rome. On Italy as a mythic source of women's poetry, see Sweet, “Bowl of Liberty,” one part of which was presented at the Conference on Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers, University of South Carolina, March 1996.

61. The titles of bks. XII and XIII are “Imagination and Taste, How Impaired and Restored.”

62. Mermin, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 190. Mermin does not believe, however, that Aurora and Romney achieve the “complicated reciprocity” depicted in the Sonnets from the Portuguese. In this judgment we differ, in that I believe Barrett Browning signals the reciprocity through the dialogic form in which most scenes involving Aurora and Romney occur.

63. Romney alludes to the traditional interpretation of the Song of Songs as an emblem of Christ and his church when he speaks of “the love of wedded souls” as “that mystery's counterpart, … Of such mystic substance, Sharon gave a name to” (9:882-86). In Protestant hermeneutics, the Song of Songs represents “(1) a vivid unfolding of Solomon's love for a Shulamite girl, (2) a figurative revelation of God's love for His covenant people, Israel, and (3) an allegory of Christ's love for His heavenly bride, the Church” (as explained in The New Scofield Reference Bible [New York: Oxford University Press, 1967], 705). Barrett Browning in effect adds a fourth level of interpretation that includes public forms of human love, including the fraternal, neighborly, and civic.

64. Deirdre David, for whom this passage signifies “the appropriation of Aurora's art and sexuality by male power,” is partially correct in suggesting that the biblical emblem indicates that “all political and social action will originate in and be sweetened from their marriage,” but as the passage actually states, for Aurora, such action originates in “God's love” (9:880)—perhaps not a satisfying distinction for a modern feminist but crucial to Barrett Browning's insistence that divine, not earthly, models inform her poetry and politics (see her chapter “Woman's Art as Servant of Patriarchy,” in Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy, 152-53).

65. Riess, “Laetitia Landon and the Dawn of English Post-Romanticism,” 815. Like Stuart Curran (“Romantic Poetry: The I Altered,” in Mellor, Romanticism and Feminism, 185-207), I would distinguish these early volumes from Landon's later poems of the 1830s, especially The Zenana: An Eastern Tale (1839), which “focus on exile and failure” and which recognize the limited sphere in which the poetess operates.

66. Ross, Contours of Masculine Desire, 204.

67. Ibid., 259. In defining the poet's vocation, Barrett Browning participates in a long tradition, from Milton through Cowper to Wordsworth, about the value of poetic labor; on this tradition, see Goodman, “‘Wasted Labor’?” 415-46, as well as Liu, “The Economy of Lyric,” in Wordsworth, 311-58, and Clifford Siskin, “Wordsworth's Prescriptions: Romanticism and Professional Power,” in Ruoff, Romantics and Us, 303-21.

68. Moers, Literary Women, 59. David's harsher view of Aurora's politics—“In this poem we hear a woman's voice speaking patriarchal discourse—boldly, passionately, and without rancour”—stems from a reaction against celebratory feminist readings that hear in the poem “women's language” but also, I think, from a neglect of the politics of genre. When David ironically concludes that Barrett Browning “was a good deal more political and a good deal more intellectual than literary history has imagined” (Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy, 157-58), she implies a political innocence about the poet's work that the self-conscious manipulation of genres belies.

69. Tucker, “Aurora Leigh,” 80.

70. On Hemans, see Ross, Contours of Masculine Desire, 251. Even Landon chose to observe the convention of letting a friend write a biography rather than compose an autobiography herself. Blanchard begins his introduction to the Life and Literary Remains of L. E. L. with an explanation that “long before she meditated leaving England,” she left him “with some materials for a slight sketch of her life,” and that the rest of the information “has been supplied by the anxious care of her family” (v-vi).

Selected Bibliography

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Blake, Kathleen. “Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Wordsworth: The Romantic Poet as Woman.” Victorian Poetry 24 (1986): 387-98.

Blanchard, Laman. Life and Literary Remains of L. E. L. London: Henry Colburn, 1841.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. Aurora Leigh. Ed. Kerry McSweeney. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

———. The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Cambridge ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974.

B[rowning], R[obert] B[arrett], ed. The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, 1845-1846. 2 vols. London: Smith, Elder, 1899.

David, Deirdre. Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987.

Elwood, Mrs. [Anne Katharine]. Memoirs of the Literary Ladies of England, from the Commencement of the Last Century. 2 vols. London: Henry Colburn, 1843.

Goodman, Kevis. “‘Wasted Labor’? Milton's Eve, the Poet's Work, and the Challenge of Sympathy.” ELH 64 (1997): 415-46.

Hemans, Felicia. The Poetical Works of Mrs. Felicia Hemans. Ed. W. M. Rossetti. London: E. Moxon, [1873].

Horne, R. H., ed. A New Spirit of the Age. 2d ed. London: Smith, Elder, 1844.

Howitt, William. Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets. 2 vols. London: Richard Bentley, 1847.

Jacobus, Mary. Romanticism, Writing and Sexual Difference: Essays on “The Prelude.” Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Jones, Suzanne W., ed. Writing the Woman Artist: Essays on Poetics, Politics, and Portraiture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991.

Kaplan, Cora, ed. “Aurora Leigh” and Other Poems. London: Women's Press, 1978.

Kelley, Philip, and Ronald Hudson, eds. The Brownings' Correspondence. 14 vols. Winfield, Kans.: Wedgestone Press, 1984-98.

Kowalski, Elizabeth. “‘The Heroine of Some Strange Romance’: The Personal Recollections of Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna.” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 1 (1982): 141-53.

Kramer, Lawrence. “Gender and Sexuality in The Prelude: The Question of Book VII.” ELH 54 (1987): 619-37.

Landon, Letitia. Poetical Works of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, “L. E. L.” Ed. F. J. Sypher. Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1990.

———. “The Venetian Bracelet,” “The Lost Pleiad,” “A History of the Lyre,” and Other Poems. Boston: Cottons & Barnard, 1830.

———. “The Zenana” and Minor Poems of L. E. L., with a Memoir by Emma Roberts. London: Fisher, 1839.

Leighton, Angela. Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Brighton: Harvester, 1986.

———. Victorian Women Poets: Writing against the Heart. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992.

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Marcus, Laura. Auto/biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994.

Martineau, Harriet. Autobiography. Ed. Maria Weston Chapman. London: Smith, Elder, 1877.

Mellor, Anne K., ed. Romanticism and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.

Mermin, Dorothy. Elizabeth Barrett Browning: The Origins of a New Poetry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.

———. Godiva's Ride: Women of Letters in England, 1830-1880. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.

Miller, Betty, ed. Elizabeth Barrett to Miss Mitford. London: John Murray, 1954.

Miller, J. Hillis. Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982.

Moers, Ellen. Literary Women: The Great Writers. New York: Oxford University Press, 1963.

More, Hannah. Coelebs in Search of a Wife, Comprehending Observations on Domestic Habits and Manners, Religion and Morals. London: J. Chidley, 1837.

———. The Works of Hannah More. New York: Harper, 1854.

Neuman, Shirley, and Glennis Stephenson, eds. ReImagining Women: Representations of Women in Culture. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993.

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Raymond, Meredith B., and Mary Rose Sullivan, eds. The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Mary Russell Mitford. Waco, Tex.: Armstrong Browning Library, 1983.

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R[oberts], E[mma]. “Memoir of L. E. L.” In “The Zenana” and Minor Poems of L. E. L., with a Memoir by Emma Roberts. 2 vols. London: Fisher, 1839.

Roberts, Emma. Scenes and Characteristics of Hindostan. London: Fisher, n.d.

Robinson, Mary. Memoirs of the Late Mrs. Robinson, Written by Herself. From the Edition Edited by Her Daughter. London: Hunt & Clarke, 1826.

Ross, Marlon B. The Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of Women's Poetry. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Rundle, Vivienne. “‘The inscription of these volumes’: The Prefatory Writings of Elizabeth Barrett Browning.” Victorian Poetry 34 (1996): 247-78.

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Steinmetz, Virginia V. “Images of ‘Mother-Want’ in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh.” Victorian Poetry 21 (1983): 351-67.

Stoddard, Richard Henry, ed. Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Addressed to Richard Hengist Horne. New York: James Miller, 1877.

Sweet, Nanora. “The Bowl of Liberty: Felicia Hemans and the Romantic Imagination.” Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1993.

Tucker, Herbert F. “Aurora Leigh: Epic Solutions to Novel Ends.” In Famous Last Words: Changes in Gender and Narrative Closure, ed. Alison Booth. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993.

Wordsworth, William. The Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850. Ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill. New York: Norton, 1979.