Browning was likely the first woman poet in England to be considered for the post of poet laureate, a reflection of her success in the battle against the marginalized status of "woman writer." Despite popularity and critical acclaim during her lifetime, scholars have tended to remember her as the passionate woman who left home to marry her young poet-lover rather than as the innovative poet who gave voice to women's private and intellectual desires. Browning wrote widely on political and social topics, and she produced some of the world's most famous love poetry in her Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850). She also penned the semi-autobiographical story of a female poet striving for literary success and an equal partnership in marriage; her verse novel Aurora Leigh (1856) has been hailed by feminist critics as a new model of poetry and of womanhood.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

Elizabeth Barrett was born March 6, 1806, into a wealthy family of Herefordshire, England, the oldest of eleven children. In addition to the family estate in Herefordshire, called Hope End, her father owned extensive sugar plantations in Jamaica. She began writing poetry at the age of four, a calling to which her father encouraged her. When she was six, her father paid her for a poem with a note addressed to "the Poet-Laureate of Hope End." In 1820 Mr. Barrett privately published The Battle of Marathon, an epic-style poem Browning had written around the age of twelve, though the fifty copies he printed remained within the family. Also about this time, Browning injured her spine in a riding accident, and seven years later she suffered a burst blood vessel in her chest, leaving her permanently weakened. Her family's fortunes also began to suffer. Mrs. Barrett died in 1828, and in 1832 the mismanagement of Mr. Barrett's sugar plantations forced him to sell Hope End at a public auction. The family rented houses in Sidmouth, Devonshire, before settling in London in 1835. By the time Browning arrived in London, she had already developed a reputation as an emerging poetic talent. In 1826 she published An Essay on Mind, with Other Poems, and subsequently produced a translation of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound (1833). The publication of The Seraphim, and Other Poems in 1838 brought her into the most elite literary society in London, and she was considered one of England's most original and gifted young poets. The atmosphere of London did not agree with her, however; and just as her career began to develop, she was forced to retire to Torquay, another Devonshire coastal town. She spent three miserable years in Torquay in poor health, her misery compounded by the drowning death of a favorite brother. Even upon her return to London, illness and depression kept her confined in a sickroom, where she dedicated her life to literature. She was shy and refused to entertain her friends and admirers, but she did correspond with several literary notables, including Edgar Allen Poe, James Russell Lowell, Thomas Carlyle, and Robert Browning. Browning had appreciated Robert Browning's poetry even before she met him—her room at Wimpole Street contained an engraving of the poet—and she mentioned his name in the poem "Lady Geraldine's Courtship," from her two-volume collection Poems of 1844. He responded to the compliment in a letter claiming, "I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett," and later in the letter added "I love you, too." Thus the courtship began, with Robert Browning becoming one of the few visitors apart from family whom Browning would admit. Despite her father's objections—Mr. Barrett preferred to keep his children dependent on him—the...

SOURCE: Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. "Glimpses into My Own Life and Literary Character." In The Brownings' Correspondence, Vol. 1, edited by Philip Kelley and Ronald Hudson, pp. 348-56. Winfield, Kans.: Wedge-stone, 1984.

In the following excerpt from an unpublished essay, a young Browning discusses her poetic ambitions and her tendency toward sentiment. The essay was likely written during a period of at least two years, beginning when the poet was fourteen and ending sometime after her illness of 1821-22.

I was always of a determined and if thwarted violent disposition—My actions and temper were infinitely more inflexible at three years old than now at fourteen—At that early age I can perfectly remember reigning in the Nursery and being renowned amongst the servants for self love and excessive passion—When reproved I always considered myself as an injured martyr and bitter have been the tears I have shed over my supposed wrongs. At four and a half my great delight was poring over fairy phenomenons and the actions of necromancers—& the seven champions of Christendom in "Popular tales" has beguiled many a weary hour. At five I supposed myself a heroine and in my day dreams of bliss I constantly imaged to myself a forlorn damsel in distress rescued by some noble knight and often have I laid awake hours in darkness, "THINKING," as I expressed myself; but which was nothing more than musing on these fairy castles in the air!

I perfectly remember the delight I felt when I attained my sixth birthday[;] I enjoyed my triumph to a great degree over the inhabitants of the nursery, there being no UPSTART to dispute my authority, as Henrietta was quite an infant and my dearest Bro tho my constant companion and a beloved participator in all my pleasures never allowed the urge for power to injure the endearing sweetness of his temper.

I might, tho perhaps with injustice to myself, impute my never changing affection to this ever dear Brother to his mild and gentle conduct at this period. But he and I have attained an age not merely childish, an age to which infantine pursuits are no longer agreeable, we have attained an age when reason is no longer the subject of childish frivolity!—Still I believe that our affection for each other has become infinitely more enthusiastic and more rivetted—At four I first mounted Pegasus but at six I thought myself priviledged to show off feats of horsemanship—In my sixth year for some lines on virtue which I had pen[n]ed with great care I received from Papa a ten shilling note enclosed in a letter which was addrest to the Poet Laureat of Hope End; I mention this because I received much, more pleasure from the word Poet than from the ten shilling note—I did not understand the meaning of the word laureat but it being explained to me by my dearest Mama, the idea first presented itself to me of celebrating our birthdays by my verse[.] "Poet laureat of Hope End" was too great a tittle [sic] to lose—Nothing could contribute so much to my amusement as a novel. A novel at six years old may appear ridiculous, but it was a real desire that I felt,—not to instruct myself, I felt no such wish, but to divert myself and to afford more scope to my nightly meditations.. and it is worthy of remark that in a novel I carefully past over all passages which described CHILDREN—

The Fops love and pursuit of the heroines mother in "Temper" delighted me, but the description of the infancy of Emma was past over—At SEVEN I began to think of "forming my taste "—perhaps I did not express my thoughts in those refined words but I considered it time "to see what was best to write about & read about "! At 7 too I read the History of England and Rome—at 8 I perused the History of Greece and it was at this age that I first found real delight in poetry—"The Minstrel" Popes "Illiad"[,] some parts of the "Odyssey" passages from "Paradise lost" selected by my dearest Mama and some of Shakespeares plays among which were, "The Tempest," "Othello" and a few historical dramatic pieces constituted my Studies!—I was enchanted with all these but I think the story interested me more that [sic] the poetry till "The Minstrel" met my sight—I was then too young to feel the loveliness of simple beauty, I required something dazling to strike my mind—The brilliant imagery[,] the fine metaphors and the flowing numbers of "the Minstrel" truly astonished me. Every stanza excited my ardent admiration nor can I now remember the delight which I felt on perusing those pages without enthusiasm—

At nine I felt much pleasure from the effusions of my imagination in the adorned drapery of versification but nothing could compensate for the regret I felt on laying down a book to take up a pen—The subject of my studies was Pope's Illiad some passages from Shakespeare & Novels which I enjoyed to their full extent. At this age works of imagination only afforded me gratification and I trod the delightful fields of fancy without any of those conscientious scruples which now always attends me when wasting time in frivolous pleasures—

At ten my poetry was entirely formed by the style of written authors and I read that I might write—Novels were still my most delightful study combined with the sweet notes of poetic inspiration! At eleven I wished to be considered an authoress. Novels were thrown aside. Poetry and Essays were my studies & I felt the most ardent desire to understand the learned languages—To comprehend even the Greek alphabet was delight inexpressible. Under the tuition of M^r.M^c.Swiney I attained that which I so fervently desired. For 8 months during this year I never remember having directed my attentions to any other object than the ambition of gaining fame—Literature was the star which in prospect illuminated my future days[;] it was the spur which prompted me.. the aim.. the very soul of my being—I was determined (and as I before stated my determinations were not "airlike dispersable") I was determined to gain the very pinnacle of excellence and even when this childish & foolishly ambitious idea had fled not by the weight of the argument of a more experienced adviser but by my own reflections & conviction I yet looked with regret.. painful regret to the beacon of that distinguished fame I had sighed for so long.. & so ardently!

I never felt more real anguish than when I was undecieved on this point. I am not vain naturally & I have still less of the pedant in my composition than self conceit but I confess that during these eight months I never felt myself of more consequence and never had a better opinion of my own talents—In short I was in infinite danger of being as vain as I was inexperienced! During this dangerous period I was from home & the fever of a heated imagination was perhaps increased by the intoxicating gai[e]ties of a watering place Ramsgate where we then were and where I commenced my poem "The Battle of Marathon" now in print!! When we came home one day after having written a page of poetry which I considered models of beauty I ran down stairs to the library to seek Popes Homer in order to compare them that I might enjoy my OWN SUPERIORITY—I can never think of this instance of the intoxication of vanity without smiling at my childish folly & ridiculous vanity—I brought Homer up in triumph & read first my own Poem & afterwards began to compare—I read fifty lines from the glorious Father of the lyre—It was enough.. I felt the whole extent of my own immense & mortifying inferiority—

My first impulse was to throw with mingled feelings of contempt & anguish my composition on the floor—my next to burst into tears!&Iwept for an hour and then returned to reason and humility—Since then I have not felt MANY twitches of vanity and my mind has never since been intoxicated by any ridiculous dreams of greatness!!—From this period for a twelvemonth I could find no pleasure in any book but Homer. I read & longed to read again and tho I nearly had it by heart I still found new beauties & fresh enchantments—

At twelve I enjoyed a literary life in all it's pleasures. Metaphysics were my highest delights and after having read a page from Locke my mind not only felt edified but exalted—At this age I was in great danger of becoming the founder of a religion of my own. I revolted at the idea of an established religion—my faith was sincere but my religion was founded solely on the imagination. It was not the deep persuasion of the mild Christian but the wild visions of an enthusiast. I worshipped God heart and soul but I forgot that my prayers should be pure & simple as the Father I adored[.] They were composed extempore & full of figurative & florid apostrophes.

I shall always look back to this time as the happiest of my life[;] my mind was above the frivolous sorrows of childhood when I trusted with enthusiastic faith to His mercy "who only chasteneth whom he loveth"—…

SOURCE: Moser, Kay. "The Victorian Critics' Dilemma: What to Do With a Talented Poetess?" Victorians Institute Journal 13 (1985): 59-66.

In the following essay, Moser surveys the challenges Browning faced in being accepted as a woman and poet in the Victorian era.

And whosoever writes good poetry,
Looks just to art.
He will not suffer the best critic known
To step into his sunshine of free thought
And self-absorbed conception and exact
An inch-long swerving of the Holy lines.1

These lines from Aurora Leigh express Elizabeth Barrett's determination to remain true to a personal vision of her poetic art regardless of the critical response. Yet no author, least of all a poet, could afford to alienate the critics totally, for critics were the shapers of the Victorian audience; they were the gateway to that audience. A poetess was particularly dependent on good reviews, for even a single bad review could damn her work to an undeserved obscurity.

The arrival of Elizabeth Barrett on the poetic scene created special problems, for critics of this age were convinced that full poetic power simply could not exist in a woman. Thomas De Quincey had expressed the attitude of the age when he wrote: "'Woman, sister, there are some things which you do not execute as well as your brother, man; no, nor ever will. Pardon me, if I doubt whether you will ever produce a great poet from your choirs, or a Mozart, or a Phidias, or a Michael Angelo, or a great scholar. If you can create yourselves into any of these great creators, why have you not?'"2 DeQuincey's charge raised major questions for Victorian critics: could womankind produce a great poet, and had this creation appeared in Elizabeth Barrett? However, in spite of the natural inclination of critics to dispute, all admitted that she was the greatest woman poet who had ever lived, "our single Shakespearean woman."3 But Elizabeth Barrett refused to be judged by the lower standards habitually applied to women poets. In Aurora Leigh she makes her dislike of gender-based criticism quite clear as she insists that women4

… never can be satisfied with praise
Which men give women when they judge a book
Not as men's work, but as mere woman's work,
Expressing the comparative respect
Which means the absolute scorn. "Oh, excellent!
What grace! what facile turns! what fluent sweeps!
What delicate discernment—almost thought!
The book does honour to the sex, we hold.
Among our female authors we make room
For this fair writer, and congratulate
The country that produces in these times
Such women, competent to—spell."

Elizabeth Barrett's work was obviously too good and too provocative to be dismissed as merely pretty woman's verse. Thus, the dilemma of the Victorian critics emerged, what is one to do with a talented female poet who refused to be judged as a woman in an age which so clearly relegated women and their creative work to a lesser position on the aesthetic scale of value?

A review of Victorian criticism reveals divergent opinions on this issue. The few times when Elizabeth Barrett is judged by the same standards as a male counterpart, she is often considered the equal of such poets as Wordsworth and Tennyson.5 However, when her work is blamed, that criticism often takes the form of two accusations, one of which is definitely gender-based. She is frequently denounced for being too masculine because of her masculine subjects. Also she is charged with choosing topics, specifically contemporary social and political topics, that are inappropriate for poetry.

It is difficult for the modern mind to place itself in a Victorian perspective and imagine itself damning a woman poet for "manliness." In fact, it is nonsensical to attempt to evaluate a woman's work in terms of her male peers and at the same time demand that she be distinctly feminine. And yet, this is the contradictory standard, often unconscious of its bias, that was applied to Elizabeth Barrett. Readers were told that "she is all that the highest feminine intellect can attain to. Thoughtful, philosophic, vigorous and tender, with a passion and an earnestness that carry her right on to her object and sustain her throughout."6 However, in the same paragraph she is accused of "the effort to stand, not on a pedestal beside man, but actually to occupy his place" and in so doing commits what the critic judges to be grave errors. He writes, "She is occasionally coarse in expression and unfeminine in thought; and utters what, if they be even truths, are so conveyed that we would hesitate to present them to the eye of the readers of her own sex." And which of Elizabeth Barrett's poems is being described as "almost a closed volume for her own sex"?7 It is Aurora Leigh, and the "unfeminine thoughts" include the stories of two women: one, a poetess who commits the unpardonable sin of preferring a profession to marriage, and the second, a woman who is drugged, raped and bears an illegitimate child. The critic warns Elizabeth Barrett and her sex that: "Woman must be ever true to her womanly instincts if she would be the meet helper as well as companion of man."8

Aurora Leigh incited still another critic to attempt defining woman's role in the creation of poetry, and his comments are noticeably at odds with Elizabeth Barrett's performance, a performance he claims transgresses "the bounds of delicate feeling" in its "endeavour to show masculine vigour."9 He admits that women have "the most fundamental qualities required for poetic composition" particularly "the realizing imagination … which causes us to pity and to love.…"10 Where women go wrong, he insists, is invading the intellectual realm rather than limiting themselves to the emotional sphere where their talents lie. And further, women poets, and Elizabeth Barrett in particular, have gone wrong "by attempting descriptions of those feelings and passions which their sex is supposed neither to possess or even be acquainted with."11

What specifically did Victorian critics deem to be "coarse and indelicate" lines, lines that were too "masculine" to have come from a woman? The critics' favorite choice for indicating the "indelicacy" and "masculine vigor" in Elizabeth Barrett's verse comes again from Aurora Leigh:

Never flinch,
But still, unscrupulously epic, catch
Upon the burning lava of a song,
The full-veined, heaving, double-breasted Age:
That, when the next shall come, the men of that
May touch the impress with reverent hand, and say,
"Behold,—behold the paps we have all sucked!"12

Such a passage would surely escape critical censorship today at least for "indelicacy", but in an age that could not even bring itself to use the word "leg" in polite conversation, such writing was considered shockingly explicit. As one critic writes, "Lines such as these doth ill become a lady to have written, and only excite feelings of disgust when they are read."13

The disapproval and even anger of the critics flared when Elizabeth Barrett published Poems Before Congress in 1860. This time she was accused of being unfeminine not because of her indelicate expressions but because she had written on a political topic. Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine declared, "We are strongly of opinion that, for the peace and welfare of society, it is a good and wholesome rule that women should not interfere with politics."14 Begging to be defended from "a domestic female partisan," the writer outlines the accepted Victorian view of woman's sphere. Women may write verse as long as "they warble like larks in the firmament … or coo like pigeons in spring" or they may write of the finer arts of culinary affairs. When women confine their writing to these spheres, the critics

listen, read, comment, perpend, and approve without the slightest feeling that they have in any degree overstepped the pale of propriety. And when we see them engaged in deeds of true charity—in visiting the sick, relieving the distressed, providing food for the hungry and clothing for the naked, or praying at the lonely deathbed,—we acknowledge that it is no vain figure of poetry, no fanciful association of thought, that likens women to angels!15

But from politics women must be banned because "[to] reason they will not listen; to argument they are utterly impervious."16 Specifically, Poems Before Congress was criticized for being bad poetry, blind politics, and grossly unfair to England and English feeling. And once again Elizabeth Barrett was accused to being "masculine," this time for writing politically.

Thus, some critics thought political issues too "masculine" a subject for a woman poet. Still others considered all contemporary social and political issues inappropriate for any poet—man or woman. And this critical stance Elizabeth Barrett repeatedly violated, most notably in Casa Guidi Windows, Aurora Leigh and Poems Before Congress. In fact, in Aurora Leigh, she writes emphatically that the chief aim of a poet should be to illustrate the age in which s/he lives. She states:

But poets should
Exert a double vision; should have eyes
To see near things as comprehensively
As if afar they took their point of sight,
And distant things, as intimately deep,
As if they touched them. Let us strive for this.

Nay, if there's room for poets in this world
A little overgrown (I think there is),
Their sole work is to represent the age,
Their age, not Charlemagne's,—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 Roncesvalles.17

Claiming the contemporary as a fit subject for her poetry put Elizabeth Barrett into direct conflict with a number of her major critics. In its review of Aurora Leigh, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine chastized her, explaining that her philosophy "would lead to a total sacrifice of the ideal." They continue

It is not the province of the poet to depict things as they are, but so to refine and purify as to purge out the grosser matter, and this he cannot do if he attempts to give a faithful picture of his own times. For in order to be faithful, he must necessarily include much which is abhorrent to art, and revolting to the taste.…All poetical characters, all poetical situations must be idealised. Whilst dealing with a remote subject the poet can easily effect this, but not so when he brings forward characters of his own age.18

The London Quarterly Review echoed the same criticism four years later in 1861 when reviewing the newly released Poems Before Congress. They described the poems as "a perfect shriek"19 when she expresses her opinions about Italian politics. It should be noted that in Poems Before Congress, Elizabeth Barrett infuriated many critics with the stance she took in favor of Louis Napoleon, and much of the insistence that she stay away from political topics probably resulted from this reaction.

However, not all critics agreed that political and social issues were inappropriate poetic topics. The Chambers Edinburgh Journal insisted "that the age we live in is not destitute of themes for the poet when the inspiration of genius comes to mould the modern event into the poetic thought."20 After reminding its readers that women have been able to write only "poetry of the affections" and that "In the higher walks of poetry—such as the dramatic—few women have won a reputation,"21 the critic applauds Elizabeth Barrett for her Casa Guidi Windows.

Apart from the fine poetic fire which burns in many parts of the Casa Guidi Windows, the views which it gives us of Italian politics are clear and interesting. We do not usually look to poems for such things, least of all do we expect to find them in poetry written by a lady, but as we have said, Mrs. Browning's sympathies are not such as are confined within the sphere of feminine likings and dislikings. She has a great deal of masculine energy, and her writings are often pervaded by a spirit of political zeal not common in those even of the other sex.22

In the same complimentary vein, Fraser's Magazine applauds Casa Guidi Windows for being "a most wise and beautiful and noble poem,—a poem with a purpose and that purpose carried out in speech, as few are in these days of purposeless song twittering."23

Some critics accepted modern themes in poetry but felt the need to justify their stance. Speaking of Casa Guidi Windows, the Athenaeum explains that it is acceptable for Elizabeth Barrett to write of contemporary themes because "the familiarities of the present have not hid from her the spiritual truth which underlies them."24 Furthermore, the application of a high intelligence to contemporary events transforms them into appropriate poetic subjects.

In dealing with these "modern instances," Mrs. Browning has invested them with a tone of ideal grandeur which gives them in point of poetic effect all the remoteness of antiquity. We could cite no better example of the truth that the distance between the common and the ideal is not that between the past and the present, but that between objects as perceived by the senses and objects as interpreted by the mind.25

The blame that fell upon Aurora Leigh is representative of the criticism Elizabeth Barrett was to receive for much of her work. There were critics who damned her for what they deemed "unfeminine ideas" and "indelicate images." Others objected to her honest confrontation of the social issues of the day, issues they considered inappropriate for poetry or women. Specifically, in Aurora Leigh they objected to the independence and worldliness of Aurora and were appalled at the inclusion of the seduction of Marian Earle. However, other critics applauded Elizabeth for the content of Aurora Leigh and considered it appropriate poetical material. For example, in commenting on the story of Marian Earle and its depiction of the results of class oppression and class suffering, the Dublin University Magazine declared: "… the writer who exposes to public view these gangrenes that eat into and corrupt the heart of the social body, discharges a high duty to humanity."26 Moreover, the New York Daily Times describes Aurora Leigh as a "thoughtful, profound reflection on the problems of society and individual life. In these Mrs. Browning is no visionary, nor is she that terrible thing, a didactic professor in petticoats. She has much to say.…"27 Truly, Victorian critics could not agree on how to receive Elizabeth Barrett's poetry. In several ways she was charting new courses for critics to follow.

The quality of Elizabeth Barrett's poetical works produced difficulties for many Victorian critics because she exploded the received myths they had perpetuated about the poetical abilities of women, and she enlarged the accepted spheres of poetry. Defying Victorian judgements of women's abilities, she refused to limit herself to the superficial, emotional lyrics that were considered women's poetical sphere and instead tackled serious intellectual, social, political, and philosophical issues of the day forthrightly, not as a Lady Poet but as an intelligent, human thinker who asked to be judged as such. De Quincey had asked the question of women, "If you can create yourselves into any of these great creators, why have you not?" He expected only embarrassed silence as his answer. When Elizabeth Barrett appeared on the poetic scene, the question became moot.

Notes

1. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh, in The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. Ruth M. Adams (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1974), Book V, 11. 251-257.
2. Peter Bayne, "Studies of English Authors," Literary World, New Series 19, (June 6, 1879), 360.
3. Bayne, p. 360.
4. Aurora Leigh, Book II, 11. 232-243.
5. Bayne, p. 360.
6. " Aurora Leigh," Dublin University Magazine, 49 (April 1857), 470.
7. Dublin University Magazine, p. 470.
8. Dublin University Magazine, p. 470.
9. E. L. Bryans, "Characteristics of Women's Poetry," Dark Blue, 2, No. 10 (Dec. 1871), 490.
10. Bryans, p. 484.
11. Bryans, p. 490.
12. Aurora Leigh, Book V, 11. 214-219.
13. Bryans, p. 491.
14. "Poetic Aberrations," Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 87, No. 534 (April 1860), 490.
15. "Poetic Aberrations," p. 490.
16. "Poetic Aberrations," p. 490.
17. Aurora Leigh Book V, 11. 184-188; 200-207.
18. William Aytown, "Mrs. Barrett Browning—Aurora Leigh," Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 81, No. 961 (Jan. 1857), 34-35.
19. "Mrs. Browning—Poems Before Congress," London Quarterly Review 16, No. 32 (July 1861), 405.
20. "The Poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning," Chamber's Edinburgh Journal, n.d., found in the Meynell Collection (Item No. 80), Armstrong Browning Library, Baylor University, Waco, Texas, 362.
21. "The Poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning," p. 361.
22. "The Poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning," p. 361.
23. "This Year's Song-Crop," Fraser's Magazine. 44, No. 264 (Dec. 1851), 619.
24. "Reviews; Casa Guidi Windows," The Athenaeum, No. 1232 (June 7, 1851), 598.
25. "Reviews: Casa Guidi Windows," p. 597.
26. " Aurora Leigh," Dublin University Magazine, 49, No. 292 (April 1857), 464.
27. " Aurora Leigh. Mrs. Elizabeth Barrett Browning's New Poems," New York Daily Times, 9 Dec. 1856). Meynell Collection (Item No. 287), Armstrong Browning Library, Baylor University.

An Essay on Mind, with Other Poems (poetry) 1826

Prometheus Bound, Translated from the Greek of Aeschylus and Miscellaneous Poems by the Translator [translator] (poetry) 1833

The Seraphim, and Other Poems (poetry) 1838

Poems (poetry) 1844; published in the United States as A Drama of Exile, and Other Poems, 1844

* Poems (poetry) 1850

Casa Guidi Windows (poetry) 1851

Aurora Leigh (poetry) 1856

Poems before Congress (poetry) 1860

Last Poems (poetry) 1862

* This is a new and enlarged edition of the 1844 Poems, and contains Sonnets from the Portuguese.

SOURCE: Barrett Browning, Elizabeth. "Letter to Mary Russell Mitford, September 18, 1846." In Women of Letters: Selected Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Mary Russell Mitford, edited by Meredith B. Raymond and Mary Rose Sullivan, pp. 195-98. Boston: Twayne, 1987.

In the following letter to her close friend Mary Russell Mitford, Browning discusses her elopement with Robert Browning. The letter reflects her unconventional views of love and marriage.

My dearest friend I have your letter & your prophecy,—& the latter meets the event like a sword ringing into its scabbard. My dear dearest friend I would sit down by your feet & kiss your hands with many tears, & beseech you to think gently of me, & love me always, & have faith in me that I have struggled to do the right & the generous & not the selfish thing,—though when you read this letter I shall have given to one of the most gifted & admirable of men, a wife unworthy of him. I shall be the wife of Robert Browning. Against you,.. in allowing you no confidence,.. I have not certainly sinned, I think—so do not look at me with those reproachful eyes. I have made no confidence to any.. not even to my & his beloved friend M^r. Kenyon—& this advisedly, & in order to spare him the anxiety & the responsibility. It would have been a wrong against him & against you to have told either of you—we were in peculiar circumstances—& to have made you a party, would have exposed you to the whole dreary rain—without the shelter we had—If I had loved you less—dearest Miss Mitford, I could have told you sooner.

And now.. oh, will you be hard on me? will you say.. "This is not well".?

I tell you solemnly that nothing your thoughts can suggest against this act of mine, has been un-suggested by me to him—He has loved me for nearly two years, & said so at the beginning. I would not listen—I could not believe even. And he has said since, that almost he began to despair of making me believe in the force & stedfastness of his attachment. Certainly I conceived it to be a mere poet's fancy.. an illusion of a confusion between the woman & the poetry. I have seen a little of the way of men in such respects, and I could not see beyond that with my weary, weeping eyes, for long.

How can I tell you on this paper, even if my hands did not tremble as the writing shows, how he persisted & overcame me with such letters, & such words, that you might tread on me like a stone if I had not given myself to him, heart & soul. When I bade him see that I was bruised & broken.. unfit for active duties, incapable of common pleasures.. that I had lost even the usual advantages of youth & good spirits—his answer was, "that with himself also the early freshness of youth had gone by, & that, throughout his season of youth, he had loved no woman at all, nor had believed himself made for any such affection—that he loved now once & for ever—he, knowing himself——That, for my health,.. he had understood, on first seeing me, that I suffered from an accident on the spine of an incurable nature, & that he never could hope to have me stand up before him. He bade me tell him, what, if that imagination had been true, what there was in that truth, calculated to suppress any pure attachment, such as he professed for me? For his part, the wish of his heart had been then—that by consenting to be his wife even so, I would admit him to the simple priviledge of sitting by my side two hours a day, as a brother would: he deliberately preferred the realization of that dream, to the brightest, excluding me, in this world or any other."

My dear friend, feel for me. It is to your woman's nature that I repeat these words, that they may commend themselves to you & teach you how I must have felt in hearing them—I who loved Flush for not hating to be near me.. I, who by a long sorrowfulness & solitude, had sunk into the very ashes of selfhumiliation—Think how I must have felt to have listened to such words from such a man. A man of genius & of miraculous attainments.. but of a heart & spirit beyond them all!——

He overcame me at last. Whether it was that an unusual alikeness of mind.. (the high & the low may be alike in the general features).. a singular closeness of sympathy on a thousand subjects,.. drew him fast to me—or whether it was love simple .. which after all is love proper .. an unreasonable instinct, accident.. 'falling', as the idiom says.. the truth became obvious that he would be happier with me than apart from me—and I.. why I am only as any other woman in the world, with a heart belonging to her. He is best, noblest——If you knew him, YOU should be the praiser.

I have seen him only & openly in this house, observe—never elsewhere, except in the parish church before the two necessary witnesses. We go to Italy.. to Pisa—cross to Havre from Southampton.. pass quickly along the Seine, & through Paris to Orleans—till we are out of hearing of the dreadful sounds behind. An escape from the winter will keep me well & still strengthen me—& in the summer we come back.. if anyone in the world will receive us—We go to live a quiet, simple, rational life—to do work "after the pattern in the mount" which we both see.. to write poems & read books, & try to live not in vain & not for vanities—

In the meanwhile, it is in anguish of heart that I think of leaving this house so—Oh—a little thread might have bound my hands, from even working at my own happiness—But all the love came from that side ! on the other—too still it was—not with intention.. I do not say so—yet too still. I was a woman & shall be a wife when you read this letter. It is finished, the struggle is——

As to marriage.. it never was high up in my ideal, even before my illness brought myself so far down. A happy marriage was the happiest condition, I believed vaguely—but where were the happy marriages? I, for my part, never could have married a common man—and never did any one man whom I have had the honour of hearing talk love, as men talk, lead me to think a quarter of a minute of the possibility of being married by such an one. Then I thought always that a man whom I could love, would never stoop to love me—That was my way of thinking, years ago, in my best days, as a woman's days are counted—& often & often have I been gently upbraided for such romantic fancies—for expecting the grass underfoot to be sky blue, & for not taking M^r. A or B or C for the "best possible" whatever might be.

We shall not be rich—but we shall have enough to live out our views of life—& fly from the winters in Italy.

I write on calmly to you—How little this paper represents what is working within in the intervals of a sort of stupour.

Feel for me if not with me my dear dear friend—He says that we shall justify by our lives this act,—which may & must appear to many,.. as I say .. wilful & rash. People will say that he is mad, &I, bad—with my long traditions & associations with all manner of sickness. Yet God judges, who sees the root of things—And I believe that no woman with a heart, could have done otherwise.. much otherwise—You do not know him.

May God bless you—I must end. Try to think of me gently—& if you can bear to write to me, let me hear.. at Orleans—Poste Restante.

Here is the truth—I could not meet you & part with you now, face to face.

…

Your most affectionate

EBB

SOURCE: Stott, Rebecca. "'How Do I Love Thee?': Love and Marriage." In Elizabeth Barrett Browning, pp. 134-55. London, England: Pearson Education Limited, 2003.

In the following essay, Stott traces Browning's philosophy of love through its important influences and into her poetry, particularly Aurora Leigh and Sonnets from the Portuguese.

On January 10, 1845, Robert Browning wrote to Elizabeth Barrett for the first time, after reading her volume of poetry, Poems. He was a little-known thirty-two-year-old poet and playwright, she was an internationally renowned poet, an invalid, and a thirty-nine-year-old spinster. 'I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett—I do, as I say, love these verses with all my heart,' the letter said. Over the course of the next twenty months, they would write each other close to six hundred letters—one of the greatest literary correspondences of all time. The pair's last letter was exchanged on September 18, 1846, the night before the two left for a trip to Italy, and two weeks after their secret marriage. Their romance, which she would eventually credit with saving her life, lasted for fifteen years and spawned some of the world's most beautiful poetry.

(www.historychannel.com/exhibits/valentine/brownings.html)

This extract comes from an internet site dedicated to the history of Valentine's Day. The story of the Brownings' marriage and Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese have a powerful presence on wedding and romance internet sites, pages usually studded or embossed with cupids, roses and flowers, for the Sonnets from the Portuguese rank highly in the early twenty-first-century canon of poems-to-be-readat-weddings. The Brownings' union has become memorialised as one of the nineteenth century's greatest love stories (see Lootens, 1996a: 116-57) and their poetry has become 'exhibit A in almost any discussion of nineteenth-century romance' (Pinch, 1998: 7). Yet both Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning were fascinated as poets not only by the beauty, transcendence and pleasure of love itself, but also by the problems of its expression, by its institutionalisation in marriage, by its relationship to 'darker' emotions such as hate, obsession and possession, and by its relationship to power.

In this chapter I will examine Barrett Browning's love poetry, her attempt to express her thoughts about love and her struggle with what we might call the 'epistemology of love' (how do we know the loved person; how do we know love; how do we feel except through an already mediated set of literary tropes?). I will also explore Barrett Browning's treatment of the ethics of love (what is the role of thinking in love; what conditions justify giving up the self to another?), and the sociology of love (what happens to men and women when their love becomes institutionalised in marriage?). And I will show that, for a woman who has become an icon of romance and of idealised marriage, Barrett Browning was often fiercely critical and political in her analysis of marriage as an institution.

Love as Heaven

In a letter written to her sister soon after the publication of Aurora Leigh, Barrett Browning mused on the fact that people were talking about the poem as her 'gospel' and explained that the spiritual truths were not her own but were based on the teaching of the eighteenth-century Swedish philosopher and mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg:

I was helped to it—did not originate it—& was tempted much (by a natural feeling of honesty) to say so in the poem, & was withheld by nothing except a conviction that the naming of the name of Swedenborg, that great seer into the two worlds, would have utterly destroyed any hope of general acceptance & consequent utility … most humbly I have used [Swedenborg's 'sublime truths'] as I could. My desire is, that the weakness in me, may not hinder that influence.

(Letter to Arabella Barrett, Dec 10-18, 1856; cited in Reynolds, 1996: 339)

Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) was the son of a professor of theology at Upsala who was driven to seek a scientific explanation of the universe and of the relation of the soul to the body and the finite to the infinite. He experienced a series of visions in the 1740s upon which he based a series of theosophical and visionary writings. Followers of Swedenborg's theosophical interpretations of the Bible formed the 'New Church' in London in 1778. Swedenborg influenced the works of many nineteenth-century writers, including the poets William Blake and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the American philosopher and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson and the American feminist Margaret Fuller. His writings would also leave a mark on the writings of Honore Balzac, Charles Baudelaire, William Butler Yeats, August Strindberg and the philosopher William James.

Elizabeth Barrett, always hungry for philosophical and spiritual ideas but also temperamentally wary of dogma, approached Swedenborg's ideas from the earliest reading with some scepticism, as she wrote to Mary Mitford in 1842:

Do you know anything of Swedenborgianism? Swedenborg was a mad genius—there are beautiful things in his writings, but manifold absurdities,—and more darkness I do assure you though you may scarcely find it creditable, than in mine. Anthropomorphism, universal in application, is the principal doctrine. God is man in form & spirit,—incarnate essentially in Christ, a manifestation of God as He is—only one Person being recognized. Moreover all the angels are men in form & spirit,—and Heaven itself is in the shape of a man—that being the perfect form. The text insisted on is of course 'Let us make man in our image'—and then Scripture is preached away, dreamed away, fancied away into thin air—only, you know, Swedenbourg [sic] was inspired himself, & when a man says that's he's inspired, what can anybody else say?

(BC [The Browning's Correspondence] 6:128)

Yet she was right to identify the 'gospel' of Aurora Leigh as having its origins in Swedenborg's writings, for Swedenborg's central claim that 'The joys of heaven and eternal happiness are from love and wisdom and the conjunction of these in usefulness' (Swedenborg, 1995: 10) is the vision expressed by both Aurora and Romney at the end of the verse-novel:

The world waits
For help. Beloved, let us love so well,
Our work shall still be better for our love,
And still our love be sweeter for our work,
And both commended, for the sake of each,
By all true workers and true lovers born.(AL [Aurora Leigh] 9:923-8)

Swedenborg taught that God was infinite love and infinite wisdom and that from the Godhead emanated both the material and the spiritual world. Because the two worlds had a common origin in God, they were connected through a series of 'correspondences'. Spiritual truths are therefore embodied in the material world. He also believed that the original divine order had been perverted by human beings who, using their free will, had gradually severed the connection between the spiritual and material worlds. The intervention of Christ had therefore restored order to the universe by creating a new external pathway through which humans could approach God, and the Second Coming would be accomplished, not in the flesh, but rather through an intellectual and spiritual revolution, which Swedenborg saw as being achieved through his own writings and through his revelation of the hidden truths of the Bible.

In Aurora Leigh, Aurora comes to a Swedenborgian understanding that love, rather than art, is what 'makes heaven' (AL 9:659). The poem moves towards a full revelation of Swedenborgian principles as Romney and Aurora reconcile their differences in a passionate declaration of the three central Swedenborgian ideas of love, wisdom and use, couched in the vision of a New Jerusalem and in language that borrows heavily from Sweden-borg's writings. Thus Barrett Browning casts Romney and Aurora as workers in an intellectual and emotional revolution which will transform society by opening the roads between the material and spiritual worlds. Within Swedenborgian teaching love and wisdom become manifest in use; indeed, 'Love and wisdom without use are not anything; they are only ideal entities; nor do they become real until they are in use' (Swedenborg, 1971: 875). 'Use is the doing of good from love by means of wisdom. Use is goodness itself' (Swedenborg, 1995: 183). So Aurora, always dedicated to her art, comes to understand the superior power of love in Book 9, at the point that she declares her love for Romney:

Art symbolises heaven, but Love is God
And makes heaven. (AL 9:658-9)

When she and Romney do embrace finally in Book 9, their embrace, though described in erotically physical terms, is also a spiritual one. Love and wisdom unite. The persistent crossing and bridging of the material and spiritual worlds is both the subject and the mission of the poem for, in Aurora's words, the role of the poet is expressed in Swedenborgian terms: 'to keep up open roads / Betwixt the seen and the unseen,—bursting through / The best of your conventions with his best' (2:468-70). In this scene of union the material and spiritual worlds are fused through their bodies and souls:

Could I see his face,
I wept so? Did I drop against his breast,
Or did his arms constrain me? were my cheeks
Hot, overflooded, with my tears, or his?
And which of our two large explosive hearts
So shook me? That I know not. There were words
That broke in utterance.. melted, in the fire,—
Embrace, that was convulsion,.. then a kiss
As long and silent as the ecstatic night,
And deep, deep, shuddering breaths, which meant beyond
Whatever could be told by word or kiss. (AL 9:714-24)

While the communion between Aurora and Romney is said to be beyond understanding and beyond words, communion there is nonetheless:

The intimate presence carrying in itself
Complete communication, as with souls
Who, having put the body off, perceive
Through simply being. Thus,-twas granted me
To know he loved me to the depth and height
Of such large natures … (AL 9:749-54)

This is a description of physical and spiritual union much influenced by Swedenborg's ideas on conjugal love:

The Lord's Divine providence is most specific and most universal in connection with marriages and in its operation in marriages, because all delights of heaven flow from the delights of conjugial love, like sweet waters from a gushing spring. It is therefore provided that conjugial pairs be born, and they are raised and continually prepared for their marriages under the Lord's guidance, neither the boy nor the girl being aware of it. Then, after a period of time, the girl—now a marriageable young woman—and the boy—now a young man ready to marry—meet somewhere, as though by fate, and notice each other. And they immediately recognise, as if by a kind of instinct, that they are a match, thinking to themselves as from a kind of inner dictate, the young man, 'she is mine,' and the young woman, 'he is mine.' Later, after this thought has for some time become settled in the minds of each, they deliberately talk about it together and pledge themselves to each other in marriage. We say as though by fate, by instinct and as from a kind of dictate, when we mean by Divine providence, because when one is unaware that it is Divine providence, that is how it appears. For the Lord unveils their inner similarities so that they notice each other.

(Swedenborg, 1995: 20)

The portrayal of the love of Romney and Aurora as a love which is inevitable (preordained) yet postponed until both are spiritually ready for union, is one aspect of the poem that may have had its origin in the ideas of Swedenborg. But while Swedenborg symbolises conjugal union as the sweet waters of a gushing spring, Barrett Browning's metaphor is characteristically more violent. She describes Aurora and Romney's embrace as an overflowing, but it is also a convulsion, a melting and an explosion. The metaphors of sexual desire and spiritual union are geological: it is like an earthquake, a volcano and a flood all at once, part of the geological violence and transformation of the old that will result in the New Jerusalem and new landscape envisaged at the end of the book.

Yet, characteristically for Barrett Browning, the poem also challenges Swedenborgian teachings at the same time as asserting them. Aurora begins to wonder about the implication of believing that love makes heaven—the implication for women in particular. After all, she has loved Romney for some time. Should she have refused him as she did when he proposed all those years ago? In particular, she worries that denying him then meant that she has been in a fallen state since, fallen from the heaven that she might have made:

Art symbolises heaven, but Love is God
And makes heaven. I, Aurora, fell from mine.
I would not be a woman like the rest,
A simple woman who believes in love
And owns the right of love because she loves,
And, hearing she's beloved, is satisfied
With what contents God: I must analyse,
Confront, and question; just as if a fly
Refused to warm itself in any sun
Till such was in leone [a constellation of the stars which signifies late summer] (AL 9:658-67)

As Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar point out (1979: 577), the imagery of this passage reveals significant contradictions in Aurora's attitude to love. Aurora claims that her options as a woman are either to make heaven (to love) or to fall from heaven (not to love), yet being in love is also like being a fly basking in sunshine—satisfied, contended, unthinking, drunk with warmth and pleasure. Aurora claims that, in declining Romney's offer of love, she had refused to be 'a woman like the rest, / A simple woman' because instead of just accepting the gift of love at that point, she had insisted on analysing, confronting, questioning it. This refusal had resulted in her fall from heaven but had also ensured that she did not become a fly basking in the sunshine. The implication hangs for a moment that perhaps if she had been less proud when Romney had first proposed, more honest in her own feelings, the two lovers would not have had to suffer. Yet at the same time, the drama of the poem is created by that refusal and by the period of their joint exile from the 'heaven' of requited love, a period in which Aurora fulfils her vocation as a poet. It is also a period in which Romney is transformed; blinded, he comes to see Aurora not as a help-meet on a joint mission of reform, but as a woman and poet with a soul. Aurora's acceptance of love at the end of the poem is made possible precisely because they have both entered this struggle to understand, analyse and confront their feelings about each other.

Thinking Love

Love is idealised in the poem as what makes heaven, but unthinking love is disparaged. Earlier in the poem, at the point at which Aurora refuses to marry Romney in Book 2, for instance, she offers an analysis of women who are prepared to settle for any kind of love, unquestioningly:

Women of a softer mood,
Surprised by men when scarcely awake to life,
Will sometimes only hear the first word, love,
And catch up with it any kind of work,
Indifferent, so that dear love go with it.
I do not blame such women, though, for love,
They pick much oakum … (AL 2:443-9)

Picking oakum refers to the practice of untwisting and unpicking old rope to be mixed with tar and used for ship's caulking. It was tedious and backbreaking work which made the fingers bleed, work often given to convicts and the inmates of workhouses. Barrett Browning claims therefore that where love is acted upon by women in unthinking ways, a life of enforced servitude will often follow. Although the poem endorses the work ethic, it does not endorse the domestic slavery which so often accompanied marriage. Aurora is, after all, refusing not Romney's love, but Romney's offer of marriage as work; Romney was, she tells him scornfully, looking for a fellow-worker, not a lover. So Aurora's claims that she had been wrong not to yield to love earlier are undermined by such alternative reflections and knowledge. As she describes the proposal scene, Aurora suddenly assumes a retrospective view of Romney's proposal and her refusal, wondering for a moment what would have happened if she had accepted his offer of love:

If he had loved,
Ah, loved me, with that retributive face,..
I might have been a common woman now
And happier, less known and less left alone,
Perhaps a better woman after all,
With chubby children hanging on my neck
To keep me low and wise. (AL 2:511-17)

These tensions between love represented as an entry into servitude and/or unthinking complacency, and love as a Swedenborgian 'heaven' are shown to be tensions between being a 'common woman' and a dissenting independent-minded, thinking one, as Aurora is. For love is both a divine condition to be aspired to, as she discovers, and also one that at least potentially represents an obstacle to her own dissenting selfhood and to her ambitions to write. Had she said 'yes' when Romney first proposed, her life plot would have been a different one.

So while Barrett Browning endorses, even preaches, Swedenborgian principles about love as that which 'makes heaven' in Aurora Leigh, she constantly casts these 'truths' within the social and political contexts that bear on women's lives. 'Sonnet 22' of Sonnets from the Portuguese also shows her questioning Swedenborgian doctrines, exploring the relative benefits of the earthly/material and the divine/spiritual worlds as a place 'to love in'. In this poem male and female lovers, perfectly unified in love, transcend the material plane and turn into eroticised angels, their wings on fire. Barrett describes this process of angelic transformation and transcendence and then stops it abruptly with her injunction to the lover to 'think'. This monosyllabic imperative in the middle of the poem forms a 'volta' or turning point (interestingly a volta which arrives half a line earlier than it would be expected within a Petrarchan sonnet and so takes us by surprise). At this point, having raised these two soul/angels in erotic rapture, she brings them sharply down to earth again. At least on earth they will be left alone, she says, and not be pressed upon by other angels, for the 'contrarious moods of men' recoil from pure spirits. At least on earth there will be a secluded place to 'love in' even though (and perhaps because) that space is rounded by 'darkness and the death-hour'.

When our two souls stand up erect and strong,
Face to face, silent, drawing nigh and nigher,
Until the lengthening wings break into fire
At either curvèd point,—what bitter wrong
Can the earth do to us, that we should not long
Be here contented? Think. In mounting higher,
The angels would press on us and aspire
To drop some golden orb of perfect song
Into our deep, dear silence. Let us stay
Rather on earth, Belovèd,—where the unfit
Contrarious moods of men recoil away
And isolate pure spirits, and permit
A place to stand and love in for a day,
With darkness and the death-hour rounding it. ('Sonnet 22')

Angels, so often disembodied and androgynous in Western art, are given tangible, heavy, erotic bodies here. Barrett describes souls as bodies, seraphic bodies which have their feet on the earth: 'When our two souls stand up erect and strong' (emphasis mine). Instead of casting souls as ineffable, insubstantial, shadowy presences, Barrett Browning fully embodies them, beautifully describing, for instance, the delicate curve and lengthening of the angels' wings. By doing so she challenges established binaries between the body and soul and sets up a 'correspondence' between the spiritual and material worlds. So while on the one hand the poem questions the Swedenborgian privileging of the spiritual plane over the material one by reasserting the worth of earthly love, it reconciles that tension by bringing the material and spiritual into correspondence. The romantic sentiments of mutually enjoined bodies and souls, of love as heaven and as a revelation of divine truth may sound clichéd to a contemporary reader, but for Barrett Browning it was part of a philosophical and theological system of considerable rigour and complexity.

The Epistemology of Love

Dorothy Mermin and Angela Leighton have both attended to the problem of reading the Sonnets from the Portuguese too reductively as direct autobiographical expressions of sincerity (Leighton, 1986; Mermin, 1986). Mermin instead emphasises the sonnet sequence's 'emotional and intellectual complexity, the richness of reference, the elaborate and ingenious conceits, and the subtle ways in which images are used both for their emotional power and to carry an argument' (145). It is this intertwining of emotional and intellectual enquiry, a quest to understand as well as feel love, that characterises these poems. In this respect the Sonnets reveal a philosophical concern with the 'epistemology of love'—the relationship between love and knowledge, and the ethics of love—what is the role of thinking and reflection in romantic love: is it inimical to feeling or an integral part of it?

I have already claimed that Barrett Browning in Aurora Leigh idealises love but not unthinking love. Her love poetry is driven by the same concerns as Aurora's: 'I must analyse, / Confront and question' and the Sonnets are full of this concern to know, measure and define love. The most famous line, of course, is 'How do I love thee? Let me count the ways'. As Adela Pinch points out (Pinch, 1998: 7), the first verb of 'Sonnet 1' and therefore of the whole set of poems is 'thought': 'I thought,' the speaker begins, 'once how Theocritus had sung'. The poet/speaker mocks herself here as the contemplative musing poet who while thinking about love, becomes aware of a mystic shape moving behind her who draws her backward by the hair:

And a voice said in mastery, while I strove,—
'Guess now who holds thee?'—'Death,' I said. But there,
The silver answer rang,—'Not Death, but Love'. ('Sonnet 1', ll.12-14)

This concern with the role of thinking in love echoes Aurora's musings in Aurora Leigh about whether she was right to have refused Romney's love. Barrett seems to be suggesting in this opening sonnet that the overcontemplative poet can risk losing heaven (love), yet the unthinking lover risks being turned into the 'common woman' who settles unquestioningly for the first declaration of love. The project of the sequence of sonnets is to work at that paradox—to integrate thinking and feeling.

Secondly, as Pinch points out, the sequence as a whole is obsessed with:

spatial relations, with questions of scale and size, with measuring which of the two lovers is greater, smaller, higher, lower, nearer, or further than the other [and that this is] a symptom of the poem's meditation, on a more phenomenological level, on what it might mean to have a person, literally, in one's mind. What, Barrett Browning wants to know, does it mean to turn a person into a thought?

(Pinch, 1998: 8)

Pinch argues that the poems question the ethics of such meditations by dramatising the conflicts between thinking, knowing and loving, with these conflicts coming to a head in 'Sonnet 29,' where the poet is once again struck by self-consciousness about her own thinking:

I think of thee!—my thoughts do twine and bud
About thee, as will vines, about a tree,

Put out broad leaves, and soon there's nought to see
Except the straggling green which hides the wood.
Yet, O my palm-tree, be it understood
I will not have my thoughts instead of thee
Who art dearer, better! Rather, instantly
Renew thy presence; as a strong tree should,
Rustle thy boughs and set thy trunk all bare,
And let these bands of greenery which insphere thee
Drop heavily down—burst, shattered, everywhere!
Because, in this deep joy to see and hear thee
And breathe within thy shadow a new air,
I do not think of thee—I am too near thee. ('Sonnet 29')

In this extended metaphor, the speaker's thoughts are cast as the vines about the tree that, by an excess of budding and growth, soon conceal the tree itself and threaten to strangle it (there is also an implication that the vines are like restrictive clothes which conceal the true shape of the loved one—for when they are cast off the tree becomes 'all bare'). The kind of thoughts represented here, produced by a dangerous proximity, are cast as destructive and inimical to true knowing. The tree can only renew itself by casting off the insphering thoughts/vines, bursting and shattering them. Again these metaphors of explosion and bursting are part of the violence of love and knowledge, suggesting that, through such epiphanic moments of throwing off, new knowledge is gained. Finally, it is important to note that for Barrett Browning it is the degree of proximity in which these thoughts have been produced that is the problem, not thinking in itself: 'I do not think of thee—I am too near thee'. In 'Sonnet 15,' for instance, which seems to pair with this one, an alternative kind of sight is represented, a vision of love which exceeds the object of love and travels into future time and space and ultimately to oblivion:

But I look on thee—on thee—
Beholding, besides love, the end of love,
Hearing oblivion beyond memory;
As one who sits and gazes from above,
Over the rivers to the bitter sea. ('Sonnet 15,' ll.10-14)

And it is also thought and feeling enshrined or forced into words which is persistently problematised in these poems, not because Barrett necessarily believes that thought and feeling are possible without words, but rather that the words, phrases, conceits and metaphors that have been used to describe love in literature inhibit freshness of expression because they have been overused. After all, the first words of the sonnet sequence begin 'I thought once how Theocritus had sung'. She is thinking through the words of another as the poem begins, musing on a written text. Barrett persistently draws our attention to the way in which speech and writing, particularly literary writing, not only fashions experience, but also traps it in tropes, conceits and metaphors. She draws our attention to those habits and conventions of thought and representation that falsely or inadequately shape experience. Language—the attempt to fashion feeling into speech—is the paradox of these poems. Putting love into words must be done, particularly by lovers who are also poets, and yet the full expression of love is elusive. Literature and the conventions of writing can 'insphere' (contain, imprison, suffocate) established knowledge or can throw off the 'vines' of old knowledge, allowing us to see the tree as if for the first time. Barrett does not reject thinking about love but she does question our adherence to the old ways of knowing it, ways of knowing that have been controlled by writers and poets.

Nothing Like the Sun: The Literariness of Love

In the chapter on genre I showed how Barrett reused the sonnet form, pushing it to its limits, spilling over its confines in a way that mimicked the cut and thrust of charged, enquiring conversation, demonstrating how closely related these poems are to the love letters written by herself and Robert. The poems both utilise the conventions of courtly love and challenge them so that Barrett, for instance, in speaking as a woman, troubles the long-established gender conventions of the sonnet form of the male speaking-thinking lover-poet and the female silent-listening or absent object of desire. Here in the Sonnets from the Portuguese, as I said earlier, the poems become a duet or at least the reported half of an on-going conversation.

But there are other important ways in which Barrett recasts the conventions of courtly love in the Sonnets. They question, for instance, the established epithets and conceits of love established by the Petrarchan form in particular. Barrett was acutely aware in her letters and poetry of the literariness of romantic love, made all the more intense because she and Robert as poets were engaged in a shared quest to define their love for each other and experiencing the weight of literary tradition in doing so. Shakespeare had also wittily rejected established conceits ('false compare') in his famous Sonnet 130, struggling instead to find new ways of expressing feeling:

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground.
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.

Several sonnets in Sonnets from the Portuguese address this problem of 'false compare'. 'Sonnet 13,' for instance, begins:

And wilt thou have me fashion into speech
The love I bear thee, finding words enough,
And hold the torch out, while the winds are rough,
Between our faces, to cast light on each? ('Sonnet 13,' ll.1-4)

Instead, in this sonnet, the speaker opts for silence as the best form of sincerity:

Nay, let the silence of my womanhood
Commend my woman-love to thy belief,—
Seeing that I stand unwon, however wooed,
And rend the garment of my life, in brief,
By a most dauntless, voiceless fortitude,
Lest one touch of this heart convey its grief. ('Sonnet 13' ll.9-14)

This conflict between potentially hollow speech and sincere silence is repeated elsewhere in the sequence. The speaker reminds her lover in 'Sonnet 21,' for instance, that although she needs him to reiterate his love like the cuckoo he must 'love [her] also in silence with thy soul' (l.14). In the following sonnet in the sequence, Barrett continues to engage with the problems of language and silence explored in 'Sonnet 13' as the speaker addresses her lover as a writer, commanding him to find new ways of expressing his love and not to pre-script and define their love in ways that will not accommodate change:

If thou must love me, let it be for nought
Except for love's sake only. Do not say
'I love her for her smile—her look—her way
Of speaking gently,—for a trick of thought
That falls in well with mine, and certes brought
A sense of pleasant ease on such a day'—
For these things in themselves, Belovèd, may
Be changed, or change for thee,—and love, so wrought,
May be unwrought so. Neither love me for
Thine own dear pity's wiping my cheeks dry,—
A creature might forget to weep, who bore
Thy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby!
But love me for love's sake, that evermore
Thou mayst love on, through love's eternity. ('Sonnet 14')

But all the soul-searching about the impossibility of original expression of romantic love is not all in earnest. As Mary Rose Sullivan has shown, the Brownings' habit of echoing each other's words and of 'adapting, reforming, and returning them ever more freighted with meaning' began early in their correspondence and 'inevitably spilled over into their composition of poetry' (Sullivan, 1987: 57). There is much that is self-parodic and witty in Barrett Browning's Sonnets. In 'Sonnet 37,' for instance, the speaker laments the difficulty of originality and representation—writing about love, she laments, can be at worst a 'worthless counterfeit':

Pardon, oh, pardon, that my soul should make,
Of all that strong divineness which I know
For thine and thee, an image only so
Formed of the sand, and fit to shift and break. ('Sonnet 37,' ll.1-4)

But while the poem strives for originality of expression, it culminates ironically with an image borrowed from one of Robert Browning's most well-known poems, My Last Duchess, in which the Duke draws the envoy's attention to a sculpture of 'Neptune … / Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity, / Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me' (ll.54-6). In Barrett's sonnet, she ends by claiming that art is sometimes as hopelessly inadequate as commemorating salvation from shipwreck in the form of a sculptured porpoise, repeating Robert's image:

As if a shipwrecked Pagan, safe in port,
His guardian sea-god to commemorate,
Should set a sculptured porpoise, gills a-snort
And vibrant tail, within the temple-gate. (ll.11-14)

But while literature and the literary expression of love is often a hindrance to direct expression, the sonnets show how useful literary or artistic representation can be in providing tropes to think through. For instance, Barrett alludes to Tennyson's Mariana in the Moated Grange in one letter to Robert: 'I am like Mariana in the moated grange & sit listening too often to the mouse in the wainscot' (BC 10:254). But in a later letter she clarifies the analogy when she writes 'For have I not felt twenty times the desolate advantage of being insulated here and of not minding anybody when I made my poems? … and caring less for suppositious criticism than for the black fly buzzing in the pane?' (BC 10:271). The analogy is actually a difference, for unlike Mariana who suffers from an excess of feeling, Barrett's insulation has resulted not in emotional excess but in indifference to criticism. Throughout the sonnet sequences the burdensome legacy of Romantic poetry is used both as the material for new poetry and its adversary.

Love in Text; Love in Context

In Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart, Angela Leighton argues that Elizabeth Barrett Browning 'learned early to distrust the iconic postures of romance in favour of a socialised and contextualised account of desire' (Leighton, 1992: 87). This claim is everywhere confirmed by Barrett Browning's love poetry which relentlessly places love under a sociological microscope. Love does not exist in the abstract—it is always felt and acted upon by people shaped and determined by the ideas of their time, people in the world. For many women in the nineteenth century, love, however pleasurable or transcendent, was especially deterministic, for love was so often the entry point into a much more circumscribed world within the institution of marriage or outside it as a result of betrayal or a fall from respectability:

It is this sceptical awareness of the sexual politics of sensibility which marks out Barrett Browning's poetry from that of her predecessors. Love, in her work, is not a sacred ideal, removed from the contingencies of the world, but is dragged in the dust of that reality which was itself so hard-won an experience and a theme for her.

(Leighton, 1992: 544)

Barrett's ballads in particular address the danger of untempered feeling, of women who, like the 'women of a softer mood' evoked in Aurora Leigh (2:443), are consigned to a life of picking oakum because they love too much or too quickly or unwisely. In 'Bertha in the Lane' and 'A Year's Spinning,' the two heroines have been betrayed by absent lovers who do not even appear in the poem. In the first poem, the heroine, on her deathbed, confesses to her sister Bertha that she is dying of a broken heart. She had overheard, she says, her lover, Robert, declaring his love to her more beautiful sister in the lane. Still in love with Robert, still listening out for the sound of his footstep at the door like Mariana in Tennyson's poem, she dies self-consumed, yet refusing to blame either Bertha or Robert for their feelings. Instead it is the weakness of her own womanhood that has killed her:

Do not weep so—Dear,—heart-warm!
All was best as it befell.
If I say he did me harm,
I speak wild,—I am not well.
All his words were kind and good—
He esteemed me! Only, blood
Runs so faint in womanhood. (ll.155-61)

In 'A Year's Spinning' the betrayed woman, a spinner, has borne her lover's child which has since died. Her lament, like that of the dying sister in 'Bertha in the Lane', is not a call of revenge but rather one of despair about the weakness and vulnerability of women raised on a diet of false ideals and romantic love. These are the fragile 'women of a softer mood' resigned to picking oakum or death. Now that 'her spinning is all done' (l.5), her life and hope are extinguished. In 'The Romance of the Swan's Nest' the danger of self-deluding, self-consuming love is all the more sharply drawn as Barrett tells the story of 'Little Ellie' who sits beside a river imagining an idealised lover for herself in the language and imagery of romantic and chivalric love, straight out of a formulaic romance. In this fantasy, she imagines herself taking him to see the swan's nest among the reeds. In reality, while she has been dreaming, the swan's nest has been deserted and the eggs gnawed by rats. The dream has been violated.

The act of betrayal always happens offstage in these ballads for it is the consequences of the betrayal on women's lives that interest Barrett. So often the damage affects other women and children in the story: the spinner's shamed mother, the dead baby, Bertha who loses her sister because her beauty stimulated the act of betrayal. In 'A Romance of the Ganges', Luti, betrayed by her lover, reveals that betrayal to her rival Nuleeni and demands that Nuleeni become her accomplice in revenge. She demands that Luti whisper Nuleeni's name to her husband on their wedding day and again to their child when he asks about his father's deeds. These ballads show that untempered love is dangerous and often the result of the socialisation of women to expect to fulfil their lives only in a love plot (what we might call the imposition of a 'false consciousness'), a subject also addressed by other women writers of the nineteenth century from Mary Wollstonecraft to Harriet Taylor. In the ballads, Barrett persistently shows love as taking its place within an economy of power and sexual exchange. Indeed as Stone argues:

In her ballads of the 1830s and 40s, [Barrett] employs the starker power structures of medieval society to foreground the status of women in a male economy of social exchange, and to unmask the subtler preservation of gender inequities in contemporary Victorian ideology.

(Stone, 1995: 108-9)

The Politics of Marriage

Throughout her life Barrett Browning, icon of Victorian marriage and romance, was outspokenly critical of the institution of marriage and of many of the marriages she saw around her. 'Marriage in the abstract has always seemed to me the most profoundly indecent of all ideas,' she wrote to Mary Mitford during Robert's courtship (BC 12:63), continuing:

& I never could make out how women, mothers & daughters, could talk of it as of setting up in trade,.. as of a thing to be done. That life may go on smoothly upon a marriage of convenience, simply proves to my mind that there is a defect in the sensibility & the delicacy, & an incapacity to the higher happiness of God's sanctifying. Now think & see if this is not near the truth. I have always been called romantic for this way of seeing, but never repented that it was my way, nor shall.

(BC 12:62-3)

While Barrett Browning valued love as transcendent, even divine, she was no romantic as far as marriage was concerned—she had always been critical of women who believed marriage to be the only fulfilment for a woman; even during her often lonely and reclusive life, she was no 'Little Ellie' conjuring an imaginary lover out of thin air. A dream recorded in her diary when she was twenty-five shows that here at least marriage was experienced as a nightmare of further incarceration not a release from her present circumstances: 'I dreamt last night that I was married, just married; & in an agony to procure a dissolution of the engagement' (D [Diary by E. B. B.: The Unpublished Diary of Elizabeth Barrett Browning]; 111). Even when Robert insisted that she consider marriage as the only way they could live together abroad, she procrastinated and deferred committing herself to a final decision (see Forster, 1988: 164-77); the love letters written in the six months before they married show Barrett wrangling and tormented about marriage and its relation to power and money. She shows herself uncertain about how to judge the materialism of wedding preparation (the trousseau) in a letter to Miss Mitford, 'A year for marriages, is it? Well—it seems so—and some marry unfortunately (or fortunately) without trousseaus' (BC 13:213). Watching the preparations for her cousin Arabella Hedley's wedding, Barrett commented: 'there does enter into the motives of most marriages a good deal of that hankering after the temporary distinction, emotion and pleasure of being for a while a chief person …' (BC 13:213). The expense of Arabella's wedding seemed grotesque to her: 'six dress pocket handkerchiefs, at four guineas each […] forty guineas of lace trimming on the bridal dress' (BC 13:185). She was haunted by her experience and memory of repressive or unhappy marriages, she wrote to Robert:

To see marriages which are made everyday! Worse than solitudes & more desolate! In the case of the two happiest I ever knew, one of the husbands said in confidence to a brother of mine … that he had 'ruined his prospects by marrying,'—& the other said to myself at the very moment of professing an extraordinary happiness,… 'But I should have done as well if I had not married her.'

(BC 12:259)

And again only a few months before she agreed to marry him, she wrote:

When I was a child I heard two married women talking. One said to the other 'The most painful part of marriage is the first year, when the lover changes into the husband by slow degrees.' The other woman agreed, as a matter of fact is agreed to. I listened with my eyes & ears, & never forgot it … as you observe—It seemed to me, child as I was, a dreadful thing to have a husband by such a process.

(BC 13:126)

Barrett was supremely conscious of how divided their experiences were and would be—marriage would establish very different rights and conventions of behaviour for them as men and women. Would they be able to resist the stereotypical male and female behaviour so visible in all the marriages around them?

Did you ever observe a lord of creation knit his brows together because the cutlets were underdone, shooting enough fire from his eyes to overdo them to cinders[…] Did you ever hear of the litany which some women say through the first course.. low to themselves.. Perhaps not! it does not enter into your imagination to conceive of things, which nevertheless are.

Not that I ever thought of YOU with reference to SUCH—oh, no, no!

(BC 12:221)

The answer was to dissent, of course, to determine not to be a 'common woman' or a 'common man' in life and marriage (a determination which would be given to Aurora Leigh later), but the abuse of power, she felt, seemed to be enshrined in marriage—almost produced by it. She wrote the following letter on the anniversary of American Independence (at a time when she had already significantly begun to write 'A Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point' which so powerfully attacks the institutionalisation of slavery and the abuse of power):

Oh, I understand perfectly, how as soon as ever a common man is sure of a woman's affections, he takes up the tone of right & might.. & he will have it so.. & he wont have it so!—I have heard of the bitterest tears being shed by the victim as soon as ever, by one word of hers, she had placed herself in his power. Of such are 'Lover's quarrels' for the most part. The growth of power on one side.. & the struggle against it, by means legal & illegal, on the other.

(BC 13:116)

Her critique of marriage at this point is powerfully and astutely political. One wonders how, with this view of marriage, she could ever agree to marry, but at the same time one wonders how in the 1840s the Brownings might have lived together abroad without being married. Barrett Browning's critique of marriage did not decline after her marriage either; indeed she continued to write ever more politically about marriage and the abuse of women's rights. As Margaret Forster points out, 'the happier Elizabeth became with her man, the more furious she became at how men abused women' (Forster, 1998: 204).

The politics of marriage were most powerfully explored in Aurora Leigh. Romney in the course of the poem makes four proposals—two to Aurora and two to Marian. Three of these proposals are made, Barrett Browning shows us, for the wrong reasons, for Romney is driven by motives which are bound up with money, duty and inheritance. As Angela Leighton points out (1986), Aurora's answer to Romney's first proposal and Marian's answer to his second provide a critique of the system of values that underpin his dubious good intentions: 'Here's a hand shall keep / For ever clean without a marriage-ring', Marian replies to his offer of marriage. She is, she claims, already clean—she does not need his marriage ring to cleanse her. Aurora's rejection of his first proposal is based upon her understanding of what he has actually said which in her words amounts to the following statement:

'Come, sweep my barns and keep my hospitals,
And I will pay these with a current coin
Which men give women' (AL 2:539-41)

In paraphrasing Romney's proposal this way, Aurora shows her understanding of marriage as a transaction based upon law and money—marriage is the 'current coin' which men pay women in exchange for their labour. This analysis is also extended by Marian when she angrily asserts her rights as a mother:

'Mine, mine,' she said. 'I have as sure a right
As any glad proud mother in the world,
Who sets her darling down to cut his teeth
Upon her church-ring. If she talks of law,
I talk of law! I claim by mother-dues
By law,—the law which now is paramount,—
The common law, by which the poor and weak
Are trodden underfoot by vicious me,
And loathed for ever after by the good' (AL 6:661-9)

Barrett Browning, dissenter, is audible here in Marian's words, in this fierce analysis of the conflicts between common law and natural law. What is common is not always right. Instead, common law enshrines the rights of men against 'the poor and weak'. In this analysis she places herself in the tradition of Mary Wollstonecraft, Margaret Fuller, George Sand, and Barbara Bodichon who wrote in A Brief Summary, In Plain Language, Of The Most Important Laws Concerning Women; Together With A Few Observations Thereon in 1854: 'Women, more than any other members of the community, suffer from over legislation' (Bodichon, 1854: 13).

Marriage was a political issue in 1856 when this poem was published. The Matrimonial Causes Bill was making its way through Parliament and would become an Act in 1857. The Act would allow wives who could prove extreme cruelty or desertion to obtain a divorce and empower courts to force estranged husbands to pay maintenance to their former wives. It would deny the husband rights to the earnings of a wife he had deserted, and returned to a woman divorced or legally separated the property rights of a single woman. Behind this Act was the much-publicised marriage of the poet and novelist Caroline Norton which drew public attention to the severe economic penalties which women suffered when they separated from their husbands. After leaving her abusive husband in 1836, Norton had been prevented from seeing their three sons and had been cut off financially for by law all she had once owned including her inheritance, was her husband's by marriage. After her husband's unsuccessful attempt to prove her guilty of an adulterous affair, Norton filed for divorce on the grounds of cruelty. Her claim was rejected, however, as English law did not recognise cruelty as just cause for divorce. By this point Norton was earning money from her writing, but by law all her earnings belonged to her husband. Determined to use her personal misfortune to gather support for legal reform, she drew attention and support for her cause through the publication of pamphlets and the influence of her friends in Parliament, and in 1855, she published her most important pamphlet, A Letter to the Queen on Lord Chancellor Cranworth's Marriage and Divorce Bill, in which she reviewed the position of married women under English law:

1. a married woman has no legal existence whether or not she is living with her husband;
2. her property is his property;
3. she cannot make a will, the law gives what she has to her husband despite her wishes or his behaviour;
4. she may not keep her earnings;
5. he may sue for restitution of conjugal rights and thus force her, as if a slave to return to his home;
6. she is not allowed to defend herself in divorce;
7. she cannot divorce him since the House of Lords in effect will not grant a divorce to her;
8. she cannot sue for libel;
9. she cannot sign a lease or transact business;
10. she cannot claim support from her husband, his only obligation is to make sure she doesn't land in the parish poorhouse if he has means;
11. she cannot bind her husband to any agreement.

    In short, as her husband, he has the right to all that is hers; as his wife she has no right to anything that is his.

    (33)

Marriage, and women's rights and ownership of property within it, was the subject of much conversation and writing in the mid-1850s; it preoccupied social reformers, legislators, churchmen, poets and novelists. The Act secured some property rights to wives who were separated from their husbands but it maintained men's legal rights to all marital property. Barrett Browning's commitment to examining the legal injustice of marriage was part of that series of conversations and part of her commitment to exploring the concerns of 'this live, throbbing age' (AL 5:203). 'No longer,' writes Angela Leighton, 'a poetry of "love of love", hers is a poetry which constantly asks about the conventions of power which lie behind love, and which affect the improvised expression of the heart … those systems of socialisation represented by sex, class and money, for instance, and the systems of literary meaning, represented by historical and political reference, for instance, everywhere make themselves felt' (Leighton, 1992: 80).

In The Ring and the Book published after Elizabeth Barrett Browning's death, Robert Browning memorialised his wife's language and understanding of love and marriage. The passage reads as a homage to her ideas (Swedenborg taught that marriage as a pure union existed in heaven among angels) and part of the on-going conversation between them about marriage as a flawed human institution, a 'conversation' that continued beyond Barrett Browning's death:

Marriage on earth seems such a counterfeit,
Mere imitation of the inimitable:
In heaven we have the real and true and sure.
'Tis there they neither marry nor are given in
Marriage but are as angels: right,
Oh how right that is, how like Jesus Christ
To say that! Marriage-making for the earth,
With gold so much,—birth, power, repute so much,
Or beauty, youth so much, in lack of these!
Be as the angels rather, who, apart,
Know themselves into one, are found at length
Married, but marry never, no, nor give
In marriage; they are man and wife at once
When the true time is: here we have to wait
Not so long neither! (The Ring and the Book, 7:1821-38)

Abbreviations

The following abbreviations are used throughout the text

AL Aurora Leigh, ed. Margaret Reynolds, New York and >London: Norton, 1996

BC The Brownings' Correspondence, ed. Philip Kelley, Ronald Hudson and Scott Lewis, 14 vols, Winfield, Kan.: Wedgestone Press, 1984-1998

D Diary by E.B.B.: The Unpublished Diary of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1831-1832, ed. Philip Kelley and Ronald Hudson, Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1969

Bibliography

Bodichon, Barbara (1854), A Brief Summary, In Plain Language, Of The Most Important Laws Concerning Women; Together With A Few Observations Thereon, London: John Chapman

Forster, Margaret (1988), Elizabeth Barrett Browning, London: Chatto and Windus

Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar (1979), The Madwoman in the Attic: Women Writers and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, New Haven and London: Yale University Press

Leighton, Angela (1986), Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Brighton: Harvester Press

——(1992), Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf

Lootens, Tricia (1996 a), Lost Saints: Silence, Gender and Victorian Literary Canonization, Charlottesville, VA. and London: University Press of Virginia

Mermin, Dorothy (1986), 'The Damsel, the Knight, and the Victorian Woman Poet', Critical Inquiry 13:64-80

Pinch, Adela (1998), 'Thinking about the Other in Romantic Love', in Romantic Circle Praxis Series, http:www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/passions/pcts.html

Reynolds, Margaret (ed) (1996) Aurora Leigh, New York and London: Norton

Stone, Marjorie (1995), Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Basing-stoke: Macmillan

Sullivan, Mary Rose (1987), '"Some Interchange of Grace": "Saul" and Sonnets from the Portuguese ', Browning Institute Studies 15:55-68

Swedenborg, Emmanuel (1995), Conjugal Love, trans. N. Bruce Rogers, New York: Church of the New Jerusalem

SUEANN SCHATZ (ESSAY DATE WINTER 2000)

SOURCE: Schatz, SueAnn. "Aurora Leigh as Paradigm of Domestic-Professional Fiction." Philological Quarterly 79, no. 1 (winter 2000): 91-117.

In the following essay, Schatz presents Aurora Leigh as Browning's effort to counter the Victorian idealization of the domestic woman by creating a heroine who could appear in both domestic and professional roles.

I am waiting for a story, and I won't take one, because I want to make one, and I like to make my own stories, because then I can take liberties with them in the treatment.

—Elizabeth Barrett to Robert Browning; February 27, 1845

If, therefore, I move certain subjects in this work, it is because my conscience was first moved in me not to ignore them.

—Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Julia Martin;

February, 1857

1

Through an analysis of Aurora Leigh as domestic-professional fiction, in this essay I investigate Elizabeth Barrett Browning's evolving feminist and artistic philosophy. I define domestic-professional fiction as possessing several distinctive attributes: a prominent character is a professional woman writer who also occupies the role of caregiver in the home. While fulfilling the role of the ideal Victorian woman, "The Angel in the House," the domestic-professional author also subverts Victorian expectations of women by asserting her right to confront immediate political and moral issues and offer solutions. Domestic-professional texts offer paradigms of the woman/writer whose chosen vocation is that of social critic, a model intended to replace the Victorian ideal of woman precisely by co-opting it. Finally, domestic-professional fiction ultimately challenges its readers to make the decision to effect social change.

Barrett Browning's philosophy of literature, revealed in the content and form of Aurora Leigh, most definitively envisions a feminine strength and morality that address society's needs, extending the domestic ethics into the public sphere. Barrett Browning also stresses the power of writing as a means of discovering "truth" and as a woman's construction and acceptance of her self. Aurora's growth as a writer and a woman results from her relationships with Romney Leigh and Marian Erle. Thus, since a central thematic principle in domestic-professional fiction is that a woman break free from cultural conventions to cultivate the power that can transform society, Barrett Browning's doctrine of art encompasses the personal and the political, of which Aurora and Romney's marriage is the ultimate symbol; the "New Jerusalem" they anticipate at the end of this epic verse-novel emphasizes the need to work toward a just society. Importantly, while Barrett Browning advocates the construction of a fair society, she does so by critiquing a cherished Victorian ideal, that of the Angel in the House that she believes denigrates both women and society. For Barrett Browning, society will benefit much more from the professional woman than from the woman who has no creative outlet other than her domestic duties.

Aurora Leigh was first published in 1856, two years after another poem whose female figure would increasingly personify the ideal Victorian woman, Coventry Patmore's The Angel in the House. Barrett Browning uses a variety of characters familiar to Victorian readers—the lovelorn heroine (Aurora), the "good" woman (Aurora again), the "fallen" woman (Marian), the social idealist (Romney), and the conniving aristocrat (Lady Waldemar), among others, in surprising ways to address her concerns regarding contemporary issues, such as the woman question, individualism and social conditions. One character type that appears only marginally is the Angel in the House, the feminine figure who is becoming increasingly codified into the middle-class norm as the ideal woman.'1 There are several instances in which the Angel does show up briefly in Aurora Leigh, only to be exorcised by Barrett Browning, who realizes how damaging this image is to women. She teasingly introduces such a woman in the form of Aurora's mother on the first page of the book:

But still I catch my mother at her post
Beside the nursery-door, with finger up,
'Hush, hush—here's too much noise!' while her sweet eyes
Leap forward, taking part against her word
In the child's riot.2

But Barrett Browning immediately destroys such an image by informing the reader that Aurora's mother is already dead. Further, Aurora's study of her mother's portrait conjures up not an idealized version of the woman, but shows the layers of complexity that women truly are (1.149-68). Images range from "abhorrent" to "beautiful," from Muses and Fates, Psyche and Medusa, to Our Lady of Passion and Lamia: "Ghost, fiend, and angel, fairy, witch, and sprite" (1.154). All of these female images, including Aurora's mother, are women of power, specifically women whose power the patriarchal order wants to limit or destroy. In their place the Angel in the House is instituted in order to control female power and influence. From the outset of her poem, Barrett Browning seems to suggest that the Angel in the House is an ideal and only that. Furthermore, it is not necessarily an ideal that should be pursued. Why, after all, seek an unattainable model of a woman when real women contain within them "the burning lava of a song / The full-veined, heaving, double-breasted Age" (5.215-16)?

Aurora Leigh met with great success, despite some critics' reservations. But even reviewers who found major fault with Barrett Browning's subject matter or style almost unanimously praised some portion of the poem. For example, W. E. Aytoun, in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, complained that the story was one "which no admirer of Mrs. Browning's genius ought in prudence to defend. In our opinion it is fantastic, unnatural, exaggerated; and all the worse, because it professes to be a tale of our times." Yet, he ends his review thusly: "Still, with all its faults, this is a remarkable poem; strong in energy, rich in thought, abundant in beauty; and it more than sustains that high reputation, which by her previous efforts, Mrs. Browning has so honourably won."3 Aurora Leigh continued to be reprinted and influential through the end of the century, as did Coventry Patmore's The Angel in the House, however, with one major difference. While Barrett Browning made corrections but no major revisions to her poem before her death in 1861, Patmore continually revised his, finally settling on a last revision in 1886.4 It is this edition that has been reprinted and been the standard for twentieth-century scholars.5

Recently, though, several critics have returned to Patmore's original versions of the two parts of the poem, "The Betrothal" and "The Espousals," which help highlight Barrett Browning's ideological endeavor in Aurora Leigh. In particular, Linda K. Hughes argues that Patmore's revisions indicate an alarmist reaction to the social upheaval Britain was facing by the end of the century. Hughes notes that in the 1854 version, "the husband and wife are collaborators, she the critic rather than the passive recipient of his verses."6 But by the time Patmore finished revising his poem for the standard and approved edition,

[W]hat increasingly disappeares … is a sense of women as living presences.… [They become] far more disembodied and reified, far more relegated to the status of symbols manipulated for artistic purposes. Far more in the final than in the first edition, that is, the female becomes entombed, drained of life and vitality and encased in form.7

What Hughes is noting in the revision of The Angel in the House is a tightening of ranks, so to speak, a retrenching from the idea that British society was progressing toward a more liberated and egalitarian one. Certainly much of this change had to do with the burgeoning industrial and colonial empire that Britain had developed, creating what Karl Beckson calls the "characteristically Victorian assumptions that the age required manliness and determination to sustain Britain's industrial progress, its programs of reform, and the expansion of its empire."8 Since the definition of "manliness" was changing, so too was the definition of "womanliness." The Angel in the House figure became increasingly codified in a middle-class psyche that was more and more confused about moral integrity. If "being a good man" was about obtaining material goods to offer proof of one's economic status, then "being a good woman" was about offering a certain kind of self-sacrifice to counter such rampant materialism, a balancing of intangible morality with tangible acquisitiveness.

As I will show, Barrett Browning eschews the mere idealization of women in favor of presenting a complex individual who might actually improve society. Through Aurora's maturation process, both as a writer and a woman, Barrett Browning suggests a "real-life" role model, a woman who can successfully combine the professional and domestic spheres. In light of nineteenth-century attitudes towards women, for Barrett Browning to imply that women belonged in the professional as well as the domestic sphere required a layered, sophisticated argument. Accordingly, throughout this article I quote several long passages of Barrett Browning's verse-novel; many of her ideas are complicated and deserve citation in full because, as Margaret Reynolds points out, "[T]here is little chance of economical quotation as clauses accumulate and argument opens into allegory."9

2

In the famous garden scene in Book 2 of Aurora Leigh, Aurora's cousin Romney admonishes her,

'There it is!—
You play beside a death-bed like a child,
Yet measure to yourself a prophet's place
To teach the living. None of all these things,
Can women understand. You generalise
Oh, nothing—not even grief! Your quick-breathed hearts,
So sympathetic to the personal pang,
Close on each separate knife-stroke, yielding up
A whole life at each wound, incapable
Of deepening, widening a large lap of life
To hold the world-full woe. The human race
To you means, such a child, or such a man,
You saw one morning waiting in the cold,
Beside that gate, perhaps. You gather up
A few such cases, and when strong sometimes
Will write of factories and of slaves, as if
Your father were a negro, and your son
A spinner in the mills. All's yours and you,
All, coloured with your blood, or otherwise
Just nothing to you.' (2.179-98)

There are two delicious ironies in Romney's smug accusation. One is that Romney just previously said that he had not read Aurora's poems, but insinuates he knows what she writes about anyway. Since the apostrophe "you" in this speech changes from the singular "Aurora" to the plural "women," one presumes that Romney has read the work of other poetesses and surmises that they all write about the same things. He faults them for not generalizing, for only caring about an individual's problems. Romney here is guilty of exactly the opposite: he generalizes too much (about women poets) and, moreso, he is uninformed. Further, he does not explain why it is important to generalize rather than to individualize. The second irony is Romney's contention that women will "teach the living" what they know "of factories and of slaves" (2.182, 194) Romney overlooks the fact that "ladies" were not "educated" to concern themselves with such matters as slavery and child-labor laws, and since Aurora and other women do so indicates these writers educated themselves regarding political matters, regardless of societal opinion.

Furthermore, Romney is missing the point when he complains, "'The human race / To you means, such a child, or such a man, / You saw one morning waiting in the cold, / Beside that gate, perhaps'" (2.189-92): he does not understand that the personal is political, that an individual's actions towards other individuals are the basis for social change. Yet, Romney is not altogether wrong here. At age twenty, Aurora has not witnessed such things as workhouses and mills personally and so if she has written about them, it is from second-hand experience or from what she has gathered reading about such. The fact is we are never quite sure what Aurora writes about because Aurora Leigh is the only piece of her writing that we actually read. Beverly Taylor notes that we never read the poetry that changes Romney's opinion that art cannot induce social good: "Instead the poetry by Aurora that we do read is Aurora Leigh itself, the poem that relates the social turmoil of the Victorian period to the interior life of individual woman."10 More importantly, as my discussion will show, what Aurora precisely does need to learn is to care deeply rather than superficially for an individual's problems before she can fulfill her potential of becoming a poet who affects and changes society. That is, Aurora must incorporate the ideology of social change within her own life before she can be a true poet.

Despite her belief in her work, Aurora thinks she needs to make a choice between being a professional writer or a wife, thus prompting her initial rejection of Romney's marriage proposal. She vehemently opposes Romney's conventional argument that women cannot produce great art, but totally accepts the societal convention that she must choose between work and love. Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi asserts that Aurora consistently denies her femininity precisely because it interferes with her chosen vocation as poet, traditionally a male domain.11 It is only through her interaction with Marian that Aurora comes to realize her true self is a combination of the writer and the wife: she is the poet who will enact social change by calling attention to the wrongs of society, and she is the woman who will influence social change through the model of her personal life, as a partner in an egalitarian marriage. As befitting mirror images, Aurora only achieves her true sense of self when her reflector Marian does.

Thus, one reason why Barrett Browning chooses not to give us examples of Aurora's poetry may be the verse-novel's objective in describing the growth of a poet's mind, specifically a woman poet's mind. Despite the modest fame and critical acclaim she receives for her poetry, Aurora consistently doubts her talent as a force for social change. It is only after she shares in her "sister-mirror" Marian Erle's traumatic experiences that she is truly able to write a poem that she believes is worthy of her genius (and that is Aurora Leigh itself) and so is also worthy to share with readers. She claims in Book 1 that she "Will write my story for my better self" (1.4), but in actuality she also writes Marian's story. As final proof to Romney that political acts spring from personal experience, Aurora's story tells a writer's story and a woman's story, two narratives that are enmeshed and cannot be divided in Barrett Browning's aesthetic credo of domestic-professional fiction.

In some respects, Aurora Leigh is the conventional heroine of mid-Victorian novels who seeks her hero, for despite her own unwillingness to admit her love for Romney, it is consistently brought to the reader's attention. She regularly listens for and encourages his name to be brought up in conversations, and several times she purposely finds reasons to write to him. After fleetingly seeing a woman in Paris she believes to be the lost Marian, her first inclination is not to follow, but "to write to Romney" (6.333). Even in her disquisitions on art, the focal point is her cousin; for example, Aurora questions her ability to write poetry that will affect people since Romney was not touched. She nearly convinces herself of her inadequacy: "I must fail, / Who fail at the beginning to hold and move / One man,—and he my cousin, and he my friend" (5.30-2).

But what sets her apart from the traditional lovelorn heroine is that she is a writer and that does make all the difference. Aurora thinks about things Victorian women are not necessarily supposed to think or write about and she does things women are not necessarily supposed to do. She defies convention by siding with a "fallen woman" and questioning social injustice towards women. More important, Aurora does so by writing and creating a philosophy of art. As Kathleen K. Hickok notes, Barrett Browning's use of familiar characters makes the poem all the more bold because she uses them unconventionally to address controversial social issues: "The audacity and the achievement of Aurora Leigh resided in its confrontation all at once of so many social and personal facts of nineteenth-century English life and in its challenges to the validity of the conventions which customarily concealed those facts."12 Despite the conventional ending of Aurora Leigh with the impending marriage of Aurora and Romney, the conclusion is achieved through unorthodox means and so holds the promise that the future will challenge or change conventions. More specifically it will be the woman writer who envisions such a society, the "New Jerusalem" that Aurora and Romney anticipate at the end of Aurora Leigh. Though Aurora concedes that "Art is much, but love is more" (9.656), it is precisely her experiences as a writer that allow her to come to this conclusion because Aurora realizes that "Art symbolises heaven, but Love is God / And makes heaven" (9.658-9). Love is the ultimate artist/creator of a just society and all other art must be created in duty to Love.

Not content with solely utilizing familiar characters in stereotypical ways, Barrett Browning opposes and aligns these characters, specifically the "good" woman and the "fallen" woman. Several critics, including Gail Turley Houston and Ellen Chafee, have noted the connotation of a woman's writing in the nineteenth century as a form of prostitution.13 Aurora's moral integrity, however, is never questioned either by herself or readers of Aurora Leigh, and so in this way the woman writer is set against the prostitute or fallen woman. Even though Aurora transgresses boundaries by writing professionally and rejecting marriage, she is still seen as morally good; it is her unconventionality that paradoxically emphasizes her integrity. At the same time, Barrett Browning aligns the woman writer with the fallen woman by having Aurora tell Marian's story, thereby vicariously participating in the young woman's disgrace. By giving voice to Marian's story, Aurora allows the reader to see that, despite her circumstances, Marian is also good and should be accorded the same respect as honorable women. However, Barrett Browning makes it clear that Marian is fallen through circumstances not of her own doing and not through caprice. Thus while challenging Victorian standards, Aurora's defense of Marian is acceptable to middle-class readers because of the younger woman's noncomplicity in the situation.

Aurora and Marian are explicitly linked by several comparisons, revealing to the reader that their relationship will address problems that women of both the higher and lower classes faced, and that Marian is necessary to and indivisible from Aurora's self-construction: both were sickly children and both were "parentless," Aurora literally orphaned by her parents' deaths and Marian figuratively by an abusive, alcoholic father and a mother willing to prostitute her daughter. Living in the fashionable district of Kensington in London, the adult Aurora occupies an apartment "up three flights of stairs / Not far from being as steep as some larks climb" (3.158-59), prompting Lady Waldemar to remark on "'the trouble of ascent / To this Olympus'" (3.372-73). Going to visit Marian, now engaged to her cousin, Aurora notes her ascent in a tenement slum of St. Margaret's Court: "Still, up, up! / So high lived Romney's bride!" (3.793-94). Although Aurora's rationale for her top-floor rooms is to conserve money, Marian's similar living situation indicates that Aurora is dangerously close to crossing the boundaries of middle-class respectability. Most important, both women share a misguided (Aurora) or an absent (Marian) sense of self. Aurora must correct this condition by realizing that she must construct a new sense of herself as a writer and a woman before she can accept the laurels of the true poet.

Part of this task is Aurora's learning from and recording Marian's construction of herself. They first meet through Romney's act of putting his social theory of abolishing the class system into action; he has asked Marian to marry him: "'Twixt class and class, opposing rich to poor, / Shall we keep parted? Not so.…/…joiningina protest 'gainst the wrong / On both sides. / … fellow-worker, be my wife?'" (4.124-25, 130-31, 150). He thus performs the same action of which he earlier accused Aurora: using the individual to represent the universal. Marian agrees to marry, but not because she loves him. Her past has destroyed any positive sense of herself and she docilely accepts Romney's proposal on the grounds that she will be his "fellow-worker" (ironically the same grounds on which Aurora refused him). When Aurora asks her, "'So indeed / He loves you, Marian?'" (4.167-68), she replies that he does only in the sense that as one of the masses, she is part of his social idealism, and so he loves her as he loves the cause:

'Loves me!' She looked up
With a child's wonder when you ask him first
Who made the sun—a puzzled blush, that grew,
Then broke off in a rapid radiant smile
Of sure solution. 'Loves me! he loves all,—
To work with him for ever and be his wife.' (4.167-75)

Marian cannot, as Aurora at this point in time cannot, conceive of herself as a sexual woman, for similar and differing reasons. Both women are trapped by societal constructions of womanliness from which they cannot presently free themselves. Trained to become only good wives and mothers, Victorian women were consistently reminded of their perceived lack of intellect. Thus, Victorian conventions envisioned women as sexless, spiritual creatures, yet women were constantly made aware that theirs was the inferior sex.

Aurora's inability to form an authentic sense of herself as a woman comes from her belief that she cannot have both a professional and personal life: Victorian culture separated the spheres of domestic and public, and she must live in one or the other. Her identification with the male-dominated arena of poetry writing further denies Aurora the faculty to acknowledge her womanliness, and hence her sexuality.14 Marian's absence of a strong sense of self develops from a past that denied her dignity. Her mother's intention to sell her to the landlord has so scarred Marian that she rejects her right to pure Victorian womanhood. She defines being Romney's wife as being his coworker, thus rejecting her sexuality. Marian is also constrained by middle-class definitions of her as a working-class woman: for her to believe herself worthy of Romney would be considered presumptuous and arrogant.

Since both Aurora and Marian see themselves as transgressing the boundaries of nineteenth-century womanhood, they surrender their sexuality so that they cannot be accused of unwomanliness. Barrett Browning, however, utilizes this conventional attitude to expose the unconventional reality of women's sexuality, of which she consistently reminds her readers through her sensual language, Marian's rape and pregnancy, and Aurora and Romney's sensuous kiss in Book 9. Moreso, according to Barrett Browning, women must not only accept but celebrate their sexuality as part of their identity and as part of their poetry. Aurora and Marian will learn to break free of the restraints imposed upon them by society, each defining for herself what role she will play. Aurora's writing of these self-reconstructions is vitally important to Barrett Browning's philosophy of art, which I will discuss presently: through the creation of art itself comes the creation of the individual, which in turn empowers and changes society.

However, Aurora's transformation is often a slow and painful one, revealing the phases Aurora must maneuver through to achieve an authentic sense of self. For example, Aurora's account of a discussion between herself and Romney reveals a condescending attitude toward Marian, troubling to the reader because it is written several years later, after Aurora knows Marian's whole story and has come to realize how worthy she is. Yet, Aurora must offer this scene because it emphasizes Marian's lowly sense of self. Aurora and Romney objectify her as a "thing" and a "gift," speaking as if Marian were not present:

'Here's one, at least, who is good,' I sighed, and touched
Poor Marian's happy head, as doglike she
Most passionately patient, waited on,
A-tremble for her turn of greeting words;
'I've sate a full hour with your Marian Erle,
And learnt the thing by heart,—and from my heart
Am therefore competent to give you thanks
For such a cousin.
'You accept at last
A gift from me, Aurora, without scorn?
At last I please you?' (4.280-89)

But, despite Aurora's condescension, we must also take this telling as an essentially truthful chronicle of the meeting. Aurora describes Marian as "doglike" precisely because Marian's estimation of herself at that time demands that Aurora do so.

However, when she begins to relate Marian's narrative in Book 3, Aurora reveals, "I tell her story and grow passionate. / She, Marian, / did not tell it so, but used / Meek words that made no wonder of herself / For being so sad a creature" (3.847-50). Aurora realizes the power of her writing, that it can bring about change, but only if it is "truthful." She is willing to make herself look patronizing in order for Marian's tale to fully affect the reader. Her recounting of Marian's story is "truthful" then to its essence, rather than to the actual words used, an important point of Aurora's philosophy that art can enact social change:

'The speakable, imaginable best
God bids [the poet] speak, to prove what lies beyond
Both speech and imagination? …
I hold you will not compass your poor ends
Of barley-feeding and material ease,
Without a poet's individualism
To work your universal. It takes a soul,
To move a body: it takes a high-souled man,
To move the masses, even to a cleaner stye:
It takes the ideal, to blow a hair's-breadth off
The dust of the actual.—Ah, your Fouriers failed,
Because not poets enough to understand
That life develops from within.…' (2.471-3, 476-85)

Aurora's command that "It takes a soul, / To move a body" intimates that poets must first know themselves before being able to affect the lives of others. Even though she understands completely "That life develops from within," Aurora does not know her own soul well enough to trust her instincts regarding her feelings toward Romney. She begins to develop her first steps toward wholeness through relating to Marian's degradation.

Marian's dishonor comes at the expense of her chastity and her naive trusting of others. In an attempt to sabotage their wedding, Lady Waldemar convinces Marian that Romney needs a wife of his own class, and implores her to leave for Australia where she can begin a new life. Lady Waldemar's "maid," who is supposed to make the arrangements, instead orchestrates Marian's kidnapping; she is drugged and sent to France, where raped and impregnated, she later gives birth to a son. Finding her in Paris, Aurora persuades Marian to continue on with her to Florence, where she can care for the young mother and child. Here Aurora's growth is again mirrored by Marian's; Aurora's first impression is that Marian is at fault, accusing her of "'tak[ing] / The hand of a seducer'" (6.746-47), until Marian explains what actually happened. As Marian loses her naiveté, Aurora loses her judgmental superiority and learns to be in sympathetic identification—what Keats termed essential for a poet—with the young woman.

Marian's self-identity is conditioned by her role now as "'nothing more / But just a mother'" (6.823-24). Additionally, as she speaks of Romney, "She felt his / For just his uses, not her own at all" (6.906-7). But Marian is realizing who she is and how she became such: "'man's violence, / Not man's seduction, made me what I am'" (6.1226-27). Because of the brutality of her rape, Marian must learn to stand for herself and her child since she knows no one else will do so. She has made sacrifices for her son, but more important, Marian has gained a self-confidence that is essential to her and her child's survival. This insight allows her to reject Romney's second offer of marriage in Florence, despite knowing that marrying him will give her son a name and a place in society: "'a woman, poor or rich, / Despised or honoured, is a human soul, / And what her soul is, that, she is herself'" (9.328-30).

When Marian finally recognizes that her acceptance of Romney's first proposal was wrong precisely because she did not love him as a woman should love a man ("'What was in my thought? / To be your slave, your help, your toy, your tool. / To be your love … / Did I love, / Or did I worship?'" [9.369-71, 378-79]), Aurora admits that she does indeed love Romney. Both women fully embrace a definition of womanliness they have constructed, rejecting the Victorian ideology of womanhood. Marian refuses Romney in order to take full responsibility for herself and her son. Even though her pregnancy was not of her own proclivity, Marian realizes that she must be proud of her maternity, confronting society about its prejudicial attitudes towards unmarried mothers. Her rejection of Romney enables Aurora to spiritually, intellectually, and physically accept him. Flaunting Victorian conventions as a writer and a woman, through her poetry, she will address prejudice and injustice. And as she embraces Romney, she will embrace her sexuality. However, these victories have been hard-fought battles.

3

As I will show, Barrett Browning's delineation of Aurora's philosophy of art discloses her philosophy of womanhood, one that integrates the writer's concerns with the woman's. Despite her protestations to Romney that women can write great art, Aurora's philosophy is a complex weaving of newly-emerging feminist and long-embedded patriarchal ideas. As critics have noted, Aurora has inculcated male hereditary conceptions of poetry because she has been educated only by men's ideas.15 Her father taught her Greek and Latin, thus "wrap[ping] his little daughter in his large / Man's doublet, careless did it fit or not" (1.727-28); and her aunt yields to conventional wisdom concerning a girl's education: to train her to be the Angel in the House. Accordingly, her aunt has Aurora learn French and German "since she liked a range / Of liberal education" (1.401-2); some algebra and science "because / She misliked women who are frivolous" (1.405-6); and makes her read "a score of books on womanhood"

To prove, if women do not think at all,
They may teach thinking, (to a maiden-aunt

Or else the author)—books that boldly assert
Their right of comprehending husband's talk
When not too deep, and even of answering
With pretty 'may it please you,' or 'so it is,'—
Their rapid insight and fine aptitude,
Particular worth and general missionariness,
As long as they keep quiet by the fire
And never say 'no' when the world says 'ay,'
For that is fatal,—their angelic reach
Of virtue, chiefly used to sit and darn,
And fatten household sinners,—their, in brief,
Potential faculty in everything
Of abdicating power in it: she owned
She liked a woman to be womanly,
And English women, she thanked God and sighed,
(Some people always sigh in thanking God)
Were models to the universe. (1.427-46)

Reynolds believes that the section dealing with "books on womanhood" refers to conduct books by Sarah Stickney Ellis, while lines 438 and 440, which contain the words angel ic and house-hold, prompt Paul Turner to argue that Aurora Leigh was a direct reference and refutation to Patmore's poem.16 In either case, despite her insistence that Aurora become a "womanly woman" and her perpetuation of the patriarchal system of education, Aunt Leigh herself has rejected this model, and so becomes a different kind of role model for Aurora. Although she seemingly preserves patriarchy through her attitudes, nonetheless, Aunt Leigh remains a single and independent woman.

Amidst the total immersion in patriarchal doctrine but also because of her aunt's example, Aurora finds seeds of feminist thought growing within her. So it is fitting that on the morning of her twentieth birthday, Aurora walks in the garden and crowns herself with a wreath of ivy "In sport, not pride, to learn the feel of it" (2.34), a scene that deftly interweaves these two competing ideologies. She chooses ivy over bay, the traditional crown of the poet, because "The fates deny us if we are overbold" (2.39); but she also refuses bay because it is the crown of the male poet and Aurora, though confident of her writing ability, is less than convinced of her genius. Notwithstanding rebuking Romney for his contention that "'We shall not get a [woman] poet'" (2.225), Aurora has, because of her education, internalized much the same perspective. But she has also found a strength through and in her writing that allows her to struggle against such indoctrination.

Her blossoming philosophy of art is contained within her description of the ivy. While it invokes a pessimistic vision of woman's writing as dead or forgotten since ivy "grow[s] on graves," (2.51), the ivy also resonates with images of power and tradition. Aurora describes the ivy as she envisions her poetry to be: "bold" and "strong," but "pretty too, / (And that's not ill)" (2.50, 51, 52-53). The ivy's ability to grow "as good … on graves / As twist about a thyrsus" (2.51-52) invokes the poetic traditions of elegies and epics. Finally, that "not a leaf will grow / But thinking of a wreath" (2.47-48) represents poetry's utilitarian function, what will eventually become Aurora's chosen, and decidedly feminist, position as a poet of social criticism.

Aurora's growing feminism is evident in the reasons for her rejection of Romney's marriage proposal on the grounds that "'What [he] love[s], /Is not a woman,…but a cause'" (2.400-1). She will not marry a man who puts social activism before love. Aurora also points out the irony that in order to be good wives, women must embody all the qualities that they have been educated and encouraged not to acquire, specifically strength and individuality of character:

… 'am I proved too weak
To stand alone, yet strong enough to bear
Such leaners on my shoulder? poor to think,
Yet rich enough to sympathise with thought?
Incompetent to sing, as blackbirds can,
Yet competent to love, like HIM?'17
(2.359-64)

Ironically, Aurora, later living in London pursuing her career, finds similar paradoxes in being a writer:

My critic Belfair wants another book
Entirely different, which will sell, (and live?)
A striking book, yet not a startling book,
The public blames originalities,—…
Good things, not subtle, new yet orthodox,
As easy reading as the dog-eared page
That's fingered by said public fifty years,
Since first taught spelling by its grandmother,
And yet a revelation in some sort:
That's hard, my critic Belfair. (3.68-71, 74-9)

The reading public wants something new, yet something comfortable while the husband wants a wife who is morally strong but dependently weak. While Victorian culture associated a woman's writing with prostitution, Barrett Browning also clearly makes the correlation between prostitution and marriage. Any relationship that relies on an uneven power base ultimately abuses the less powerful.

Aurora recognizes the prostitution involved with writing: "I wrote for cyclopaedias, magazines, / And weekly papers, holding up my name / To keep it from the mud" (3.310-12);18 but she also realizes that acceptance of Romney's proposal of marriage would be tantamount to "the sanctioned prostitution of marriage":19 "If I married him, / I should not dare to call my soul my own / Which so he had bought and paid for" (2.785-87). Convinced there is no compromise, the young Aurora chooses the writing because she believes in the God-given right to use her talent for work: "'… every creature, female as the male, / Stands single in responsible act and thought / As also in birth and death'" (2.437-39).

Throughout Aurora Leigh, Barrett Browning reveals Aurora's complex process of finding out who she is as a writer and a woman. As Angela Leighton points out, it is Aurora's (and Barrett Browning's) belief in a poetry that embraces and celebrates everyday life that allows Barrett Browning to "derive a theory of women's writing as contemporary, combative and self-sufficient. However, it is one of the strengths or merits of [Aurora Leigh] that it also traces the hidden personal cost of this achievement."20 At first Aurora holds onto an unflagging belief in the patriarchal conditions of art. She attempts the traditional forms, with varying degrees of success, but certainly without a sense of accomplishment: ballads and pastorals "the worse done, I think, / For being not ill-done" (5.132-33). Aurora shuns dramatic writing because it mostly "Adopts the standard of the public taste / To chalk its height on" (5.270-71). She concedes that there is great drama, Shakespeare's for example, but the distrust of her own genius convinces her that she would "keep it down / To the level of the footlights" (5.318-19). Romney's words that "[Women] miss the abstract when we comprehend. / We miss it most when we aspire,—and fail" (5.57-58) continue to haunt Aurora's conscience until she decides, "I'll have no traffic with the personal thought / In art's pure temple" (5.61-62). Aurora temporarily thinks that Romney is right, that the personal must be disconnected from the political. However, this notion is short-lived as she realizes her own truth: that to be socially responsible, a poet must deal with important current issues, not with the past.

Thus Aurora makes a startling break with tradition, claiming the right for poetry to be concerned with the contemporary age: "All actual heroes are essential men, / And all men possible heroes" (5.151-52). That epic and, more important, socially-beneficial poetry occupies itself with the past is "wrong thinking, to my mind, / And wrong thoughts make poor poems.…/I do distrust the poet who discerns / No character or glory in his times" (5.165-66, 189-90). Barrett Browning's most unabashed declaration of her theory of art is Aurora's "womanization," in Gail Turley Houston's term, not only of the age but of its poetry:21

Never flinch,
But still, unscrupulously epic, catch
Upon the burning lava of a song
The full-veined, heaving, double-breasted Age:
That, when the next shall come, the men of that
May touch the impress with reverent hand, and say
'Behold,—behold the paps we all have sucked!
This bosom seems to beat still, or at least
It sets ours beating: this is living art,
Which thus presents and thus records true life.' (5.213-22)

Here Barrett Browning connects the Victorian age with the power of women, a power that transcends time and will affect future generations. More explicitly, the poetry that she endorses, "Which thus presents and thus records true life," is the literature that doesn't "flinch" nor shy from controversy. In fact, it will produce contention (as did the above passage that earned Aurora Leigh such epithets as "infelicitous," "unnatural," "coarse," "mean, gross, and puerile" from the critics) in order to coerce the public into confronting injustice, another essential doctrine of domestic-professional fiction. The amazonian image that Barrett Browning presents as indicative of true poetry and the true age is Woman, "full-veined" and "heaving," establishing a model for future generations. When Aurora finally decides that "The artist's part is both to be and do, / Transfixing with a special, central power / The flat experience of the common man" (5.367-69), her faith in her genius begins to bloom. But she will go even one step further and "be and do" the experience of the common woman in telling Marian's story. Aurora's initial step in the correction of her sense of self is her sharing in Marian's degradation and allowing her a voice to speak to a society that says such women should be silent.

One of Aurora's chief moves that reveals she is coming to terms with the divisions within herself is her decision to confront Lady Waldemar. Agonizing over her rejection of Romney several years earlier and his now impending marriage to Lady Waldemar, for the first time in the poem Aurora upbraids herself for not being the kind of woman that society says a man wants as a wife:

I thought, 'Now, if I had been a woman, such
As God made women, to save men by love,—
By just my love I might have saved this man,
And made a nobler poem for the world

Than all I have failed in.' But I failed besides
In this; and now he's lost! through me alone! (7.184-89)

Aurora sees herself falling short as a poet and a woman here because she has not yet been able to reconcile a professional life with a personal one; as Susanna Egan points out, "Failing to recognize her own love for Romney, Aurora has separated head from heart and art from life."22 But Aurora does not dwell on this defeat for long; she has Marian and her son to look after. In learning to care for them, Aurora ironically must learn what Romney accused her of many years previously: the importance of individualizing a problem rather than generalizing it. Through this devotion, Aurora can then acknowledge her love for Romney and extend to him her empathy.

Her dawning realization that she must be responsible for others leads Aurora to protect Romney by writing Lady Waldemar, letting her know that she knows what part Lady Waldemar played in Marian's tragedy. That the writing of this letter comes immediately after Aurora's denouncement of herself as not womanly enough is significant. Aurora finally is able to put behind her Victorian society's ideal woman because she realizes she has no use for her as a model for herself; however, stripped of its idealization, the ideology reveals hows the image denigrates and suppresses women and their abilities. In this letter, Aurora demands, when they are married that Lady Waldemar be Romney's "faithful and true wife" (7.344). She then invokes the image of the Angel in the House, but not for the usual idealization:

Keep warm his hearth and clean his board, and, when
He speaks, be quick with your obedience;
Still grind your paltry wants and low desires
To dust beneath his heel;…
… You shall not vex him,—mark,
You shall not vex him, jar him when he's sad,
Or cross him when he's eager. Understand
To trick him with apparent sympathies,
Nor let him see thee in the face too near
And unlearn thy sweet seeming. Pay the price
Of lies, by being constrained to lie on still:
'Tis easy for thy sort: a million more
Will scarcely damn thee deeper. (7.345-48, 353-61)

Aurora summons up the ideal figure of Victorian womanhood not as a model for Lady Waldemar, but as a punishment. Lady Waldemar's false mask of concern for Romney and the lower classes forces Aurora not only into the role of Romney's protector, but also of blackmailer. Despite its "unladylike" connotations, Aurora's threat reveals that she has learned that caring for and protecting others is more important than social conventions. She may not be able to stop the marriage, but she can see to it that Romney is treated well. Not even bothering to veil her threat, Aurora's words are clear:

… Fail a point,
And show our Romney wounded, ill-content,
Tormented in his home, we open mouth,
And such a noise will follow, the last trump's
Will scarcely seem more dreadful; even to you;…
And so I warn you. I'm … Aurora Leigh. (7.364-68, 374)

It is interesting that Barrett Browning constitutes the Angel of the House image as punishment here, and I think it can be read in two ways. It must first be understood, as Elizabeth Langland has convincingly established, that the Angel in the House was largely a middle-class ideal.23 So, if seen as representative of the aristocracy's selfishness and indifference to the lower classes, Lady Waldemar can receive no greater chastisement than having to conduct herself as a middle-class woman. But I think Barrett Browning appropriates this image for a much broader purpose. The Angel in the House, as an unattainable ideal for middle-class women, is clearly a punishment, not a goal, for these women also. This image is a lie, forcing women "to lie on still." Barrett Browning instead offers Aurora Leigh, a not-so-perfect woman who is self-asserting rather than self-effacing. This model of woman, because not ideal nor forced into silence or hypocrisy, is the one who will, with hope and work, change society and create a New Jerusalem.

4

After Aurora has formulated her ultimate philosophy of art, a change appears in the narrative in Book 6. No longer written in the past tense from a distanced perspective, Aurora's story is now told in journal-or diary-like form, with "entries written down, as it were, soon after the events described have taken place."24 Barrett Browning, says Alison Case, presents two kinds of narrative plots—'a female Kunstlerroman [Books 1-5] and a feminine love story [Books 6-9]"—and then matches them with appropriate narrative styles.25 But it is more than just the construction of two different types of stories here. Once Aurora has fulfilled her quest as artist—definitively elucidating her philosophy of art—, she can break free of the male rules of writing, returning to the more conventionally-accepted feminine writing of diaries and letters, comfortably accepting it but also using it for socio-political purposes. Barrett Browning also breaks from the traditional masculine dictates of writing: her combination of writing an epic concerned with the contemporary and utilizing the traditionally feminine epistolary and diary novel genres leads Barrett Browning to invent a new genre of her own: the novel-poem, a form that she seems to specifically designate as woman's writing. This new genre, specifically designed to address contemporary social problems and offer a woman's solutions to them, marks Barrett Browning's poem as the most prominent, if not the first, example of nineteenth-century domestic-professional fiction.26

The distinctive form of Aurora Leigh met with mixed critical reception, many reviewers accusing Barrett Browning of experimenting for experimentation's sake. While R. A. Vaughn of the British Quarterly Review enthusiastically applauded the poem's novelty as "original, because natural—for originality is but nature—a genuine spontaneity,"27 other reviewers censured Barrett Browning's boldness in breaking the rules. W. E. Aytoun, of Blackwood's, questioned her presumption in mixing the high aesthetics associated with epic poetry with the low social concerns of reality associated with the novel:

We may consider it almost as a certainty that every leading principle of art has been weighed and sifted by our predecessors; and that most of the theories, which are paraded as discoveries, were deliberately examined by them, and rejected because they were false or impracticable.…All poetical characters, all poetical situations, must be idealised. The language is not that of common life, which belongs essentially to the domain of prose. There lies the distinction between a novel and a poem.…We cannot allow fancy to be trammelled in its work by perpetual reference to realities.28

And H. F. Chorley of The Athenæum concurred:

This looks not like a poem, but a novel.…But what are we to say if we waive purpose—if we do not discuss the wisdom of the form selected … if we treat 'Aurora Leigh' as a poetical romance? Simply, that we have no experience of such a mingling of what is precious with what is mean … as we find in these nine books of blank verse.29

Aytoun and Chorley articulate a familiar theme of nineteenth-century criticism: the hallowing of tradition and maintaining of the status quo. Both reviewers see poetry strictly in aesthetic terms; it is not an arena in which to promote change—either in society or in literature. Barrett Browning, however, postulated that poetry should and must confront immediate social issues and knew that she was threatening long-held, sanctioned views. She anticipated reactions such as Aytoun's and Chorley's.

In a letter to art critic Anna Jameson, Barrett Browning conceded that Aurora Leigh was an assay into uncharted territory, but it was one that was borne of lengthy contemplation, not of, in Aytoun's words, "a token of morbid craving for originality"30: "But 'the form,' in this sense is my experiment, & I dont [sic] 'give it up' yet, having considered the subject much & long."31 Barrett Browning not only expected unfavorable reviews, she also seemed to revel in them; in fact, what appears to have surprised her most of all was the immense amount of commendatory reaction, not only from critics but the reading public. In another letter to Jameson, Barrett Browning laughs at the image of herself as a revolutionary:

And as for the critics—yes, indeed, I agree with you that I have no reason to complain. More than that, I confess to you that I am entirely astonished at the amount of reception I have met with—I who expected to be put in the stocks and pelted with the eggs of the last twenty years' 'singing birds' as a disorderly woman and freethinking poet!32

One senses from reading Barrett Browning's letters that she was somewhat disappointed that Aurora Leigh did not draw as much fire as she had thought it would. No cowering wallflower, Barrett Browning wanted the format of her verse-novel to draw attention to the concerns within it, specifically "the condition of women in our cities": "If a woman ignores these wrongs, then may women as a sex continue to suffer them; there is no help for any of us—let us be dumb and die."33

Barrett Browning's anticipation of the predicted reaction from conservative reviewers is reflected in Aurora and Romney's early discordant relationship: Romney is the critic of the woman poet's attempt to transform literature and society. But Barrett Browning makes it clear through their evolving association that it is not so much a confrontational situation as it is a sustaining, nurturing one. From the start, Romney is influential in bringing out the "fight" in Aurora. While all others around her whisper among themselves that she "'Thrives ill in England'" (1.497), but do nothing about it, Romney confronts her "With sudden anger": "'You wish to die and leave the world a-dusk / For others, with your naughty light blown out?'" (1.500, 502-3). Aurora responds by looking "into his face defyingly" (1.504). Men and women, Barrett Browning believes, should not be combative for confrontation's sake, but engage in a communication that debates, challenges, and encourages each other.

Throughout the course of their relationship, each will repeatedly dare the other to achieve his or her highest potential. Romney's assertions that she (nor other women) can write great poetry may be contemptible, but they also challenge Aurora to achieve such greatness. In return, Aurora's contention that Romney's social idealism will not attain its intended ends because it fails to consider the individual will eventually make Romney reconsider his work. After reading one of Aurora's later books of poetry (one that his words dared her to write), Romney concedes that art can affect the political precisely because of its effect on the individual:

… 'We want more quiet in our works,
More knowledge of the bounds in which we work;
More knowledge that each individual man
Remains an Adam to the general race,
Constrained to see, like Adam, that he keep
His personal state's condition honestly,
Or vain all thoughts of his to help the world,
Which still must be developed from its one
If bettered in its many.' (8.852-60)

Romney and Aurora's courtship/friendship survives its on-again/off-again condition because each understands, if somewhat unconsciously, that they are encouraging each other to their fullest capability. Aurora realizes the necessity for both men and women to fulfill their potential for the embetterment of society. However, she also recognizes that women, more often than not, are dissuaded or refused from fulfilling that potential. Therefore, a central thematic principle in domestic-professional fiction is that a woman break free from cultural conventions to cultivate the power that can transform society. That power is embodied in Aurora and Romney's vow of love for each other; their passion for their work is matched by their passion for each other:

There were words
That broke in utterance … melted, in the fire,—
Embrace, that was convulsion,… then a kiss
As long and silent as the ecstatic night,
And deep, deep, shuddering breaths, which meant beyond
Whatever could be told by word or kiss. (9.719-24)

Aurora now can fully engage herself with her work as a social poet, to which the writing of Aurora Leigh will attest, while Romney, blinded in a fire attempting to achieve social idealism by force, understands that his life must actively involve the loving of another, not the cold embracing of a social ideal: "'Shine out for two, Aurora, and fulfil / My falling-short that must be! work for two, / As I, though thus restrained, for two, shall love!'" (9.910-12). His previous figurative blindness now replaced by literal blindness, Romney now "sees" clearly, as does Aurora, that life must be a balance of individualizing and generalizing.

5

At the beginning of Book 2, Aurora labels herself "Woman and artist,—either incomplete, / Both Credulous of completion" (2.4-5). It is through the writing of her story, within which Marian's story is so crucial a part, that the writer is now completed. Her forthcoming marriage to Romney completes the woman. Deirdre David argues that their union signifies that "woman's poetry is created from her sexuality," and that by uniting Aurora and Romney, Barrett Browning's verse-novel is not feminist, but one that ultimately reifies the concept that "woman's art is made the servitor of the male ideal."34 However, David ignores the revolutionary concept of Barrett Browning's giving Aurora (and Aurora Leigh) a definite sexuality in the first place.35 Life without love is unbalanced; until she can put her life in balance (and the same can be said of Romney), Aurora cannot fulfill her potential as a poet. Once she does so, the result is Aurora Leigh and a part in a promising union. As Beverly Taylor notes, "The existence of the poem, Aurora Leigh, written after the events it records, demonstrates that her projected marriage to Romney does not silence her as a poet or reduce her to the status of dependent and helpmate she had so much feared initially; instead, their union engenders richer, more complex and more satisfying verse."36 Aurora is now mature enough to realize not only that art and love are compatible, but also mature enough to take on the creation of two "New Jerusalems": the writing of socially-beneficial poetry and partnership in an egalitarian marriage, both embodied within her text.

A new society, based upon "new laws / Admitting freedom" (9.947-8), holds the hope for an equitable community, much as Aurora and Romney's relationship holds the promise of an egalitarian union. Indeed, the entire verse-novel has seemed to be headed in this direction. However, I say "holds the promise" because Aurora writes this ending immediately after the scene where the lovers stand facing the east, toward the rising sun, envisioning a new society that will fuse art and social activism. We are left exactly where Aurora and Romney leave off—looking toward a new dawn, but never entirely confident that this new dawn will be unlike the previous ones. It is an ending of guarded optimism. Barrett Browning would like to believe that a just society is only a sunrise away, yet having Aurora write her story and end it at this moment signifies that she is not certain it will ever be achieved. It is the end of the verse-novel, but only the beginning of social transformation should the readers of Aurora Leigh take up Barrett Browning's challenge as she intends.

Notes

1. The "Angel in the House" was certainly the ideal long before Patmore's time, but his poem sanctified the image and gave it its celestial epithet.
2. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh, ed. Margaret Reynolds (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 1.15-19. Citations of the text are to this edition.
3. W. E. Aytoun, "Mrs. Barrett Browning—Aurora Leigh," Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine 81 (January 1857): 32, 41.
4. In a letter to Isa Blagden on January 7, 1859, Barrett Browning noted the somewhat tediousness of revising proofs for the third edition of Aurora Leigh, claiming she "dizzied myself with the 'ifs' and 'ands,' and done some little good I hope at much cost …" The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. Frederic Kenyon (London: Smith, Elder, 1897), 2.302.
5. The most widely-used collection of Patmore's poetry is Frederick Page's 1949 edition, The Poems of Coventry Patmore, "complete so far as [Patmore] wished them to be republished and in the text as he finally revised it." (Oxford U. Press), v.
6. Linda K. Hughes, "Entombing the Angel: Patmore's Revision of Angel in the House," in Victorian Authors and Their Works: Revision Motivations and Modes, ed. Judith Kennedy (Ohio U. Press, 1991), 143.
7. Hughes, 140-41.
8. Karl Beckson, London in the 1890s: A Cultural History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 62.
9. Margaret Reynolds, "Aurora Leigh: 'Writing her story for her better self,'" Browning Society Notes 17.1-3 (1987-88): 5.
10. Beverly Taylor, "'School-Miss Alfred' and 'Materfamilias': Female Sexuality and Poetic Voice in The Princess and Aurora Leigh," in Gender and Discourse in Victorian Literature and Art, ed. Antony H. Harrison and Beverly Taylor (Northern Illinois U. Press, 1992), 23-24.
11. Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi, "Aurora Leigh: The Vocation of the Woman Poet," Victorian Poetry, 19 (1981), 41.
12. Kathleen K. Hickok, "'New Yet Orthodox': The Female Characters in Aurora Leigh," International Journal of Women's Studies 3 (1980): 480.
13. Gail Turley Houston, "Gender Construction and the Kunstlerroman: David Copperfield and Aurora Leigh," PQ 72 (1993): 213-36 and Ellen Chafee, "Conceiving Literary Femininity: Figures of the Woman Writer 1857-1900" (Diss., Rutgers University, 1996), 16.
14. See Gelpi.
15. In addition to Gelpi, see Kathleen Blake, "Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Wordsworth: The Romantic Poet as a Woman," Victorian Poetry, 24(1986): 387-98 and Patricia Thomas Srebrnik, "'The Central Truth': Phallogocentrism in Aurora Leigh," Victorian Newsletter, 84 (1993): 9-11.
16. Reynolds, Aurora Leigh: 18, note 1 and Paul Turner, "Aurora Versus the Angel," RES 24 (1948): 227-35.
17. Reynolds glosses this word as "Christ, presumably," Aurora Leigh, 49, note 2.
18. Aurora's feelings that she "dirties" herself by writing for periodicals echo the sentiments of Mary Shelley who, after Percy Shelley's death, needed to write on an almost constant basis for various magazines in order to support herself and her young son: "I write bad articles which help to make me miserable—But I am going to plunge into a novel, and hope that its clear water will wash off the mud of the magazines—." From a letter to Leigh Hunt, February 9, 1824, in The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, ed. Betty T. Bennett (Johns Hopkins U. Press, 1980), 1.412. Shelley had originally written the word "dirt," but crossed it out in favor of the harsher "mud," indicating how much she detested writing such.
19. Susanna Egan, "Glad Rags for Lady Godiva: Woman's Story as Womanstance in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh," English Studies in Canada 20 (1994): 290.
20. Angela Leighton, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Sussex: Harvester Press, Ltd., 1986), 115-16.
21. Gail Turley Houston, Royalties: The Queen and Victorian Writers (U. Press of Virginia, 1999).
22. Egan, 295.
23. Elizabeth Langland, Nobody's Angels: Middle-Class Women and Domestic Ideology in Victorian Culture (Cornell U. Press, 1995), 79.
24. Reynolds, Aurora Leigh, 194, note 2.
25. Alison Case, "Gender and Narration in Aurora Leigh," Victorian Poetry 29 (1991): 17.
26. This essay is part of a larger project that examines the influence of Aurora Leigh on British women's domestic-professional fiction of the 1890s. The major texts of my discussion are Rhoda Broughton's A Beginner (1894), Mary Cholmondeley's Red Pottage (1899), Marie Corelli's The Sorrows of Satan (1895), Ella Hepworth Dixon's The Story of a Modern Woman (1894), Sarah Grand's The Beth Book (1897), and Annie E. Holdsworth's The Years That the Locust Hath Eaten (1895).
27. R. A. Vaughn, "Aurora Leigh. By Elizabeth Barrett Browning," British Quarterly Review 25 (January 1857): 263.
28. Aytoun, 34, 34-5, 41.
29. H. F. Chorley, "Aurora Leigh. By Elizabeth Barrett Browning," The Athenæum no. 1517 (November 22, 1856): 1425.
30. Aytoun, 39.
31. Quoted in Reynolds, Aurora Leigh, 341.
32. Letters, 2:252.
33. Letters, 2:254.
34. Deirdre David, "'Art's A Service': Social Wound, Sexual Politics, and Aurora Leigh," Browning Institute Studies 13 (1985): 130, 113.
35. See, for example, Christine Sutphin, "Revising Old Scripts: The Fusion of Independence and Intimacy in Aurora Leigh," Browning Institute Studies, 15 (1987): 43-54.
36. Taylor, 23.

Bibliography

Donaldson, Sandra. Elizabeth Barrett Browning: An Annotated Bibliography of the Commentary and Criticism, 1826-1990. New York: G. K. Hall, 1993, 642 p.

Includes an introduction identifying principal works and dominant themes; criticism is in English, French, and Italian.

Biographies

Forster, Margaret. Elizabeth Barrett Browning: A Biography. London: Chatto & Windus, 1988, 416 p.

Offers new primary evidence about Browning's childhood.

Taplin, Gardner B. The Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957, 482 p.

Provides a definitive biography, with a detailed account of the creation, publication, and critical reception of Browning's poetry.

Criticism

Byrd, Deborah. "Combating an Alien Tyranny: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Evolution as a Feminist Poet." Browning Institute Studies 15 (1987): 23-41.

Examines Browning's place in the history of women writers, including the poet's own reading and influences and the development of her social thought.

Case, Alison. "Gender and Narration in Aurora Leigh." Victorian Poetry 29, no. 1 (spring 1991): 17-32.

Contends that in Aurora Leigh Browning transgressed the conventions of the novel.

Cooper, Helen. "Working into Light: Elizabeth Barrett Browning." In Shakespeare's Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets, edited by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, pp. 65-81. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979.

Considers Browning's portrayal of the patriarchal literary tradition and her criticisms of women's complicity in their own oppression.

——. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Woman and Artist. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988, 231 p.

Analyzes Browning's work in the context of liberal humanism and at a unique moment in the nineteenth century open to nontraditional authors who represent a middle-class spirit.

David, Deirdre. "Woman's Art as Servant of Patriarchy: The Vision of Aurora Leigh." In Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy: Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, pp. 143-58. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987.

Contends that despite feminist interpretations to the contrary, Aurora Leigh engages in a traditional and conservative endorsement of patriarchal politics.

Friewald, Bina. "'The praise which men give women': Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh and the Critics." Dalhousie Review 66 (1986): 311-36.

Suggests that Victorian reviewers' praise for Aurora Leigh weakened its potential force as a radical or subversive text.

Gelpi, Barbara Charlesworth. "Aurora Leigh: The Vocation of the Woman Poet." Victorian Poetry 19, no. 1 (spring 1981): 35-48.

Sees Aurora Leigh as a metaphorical investigation of Browning's changing attitudes toward herself, her profession, and womanhood in general.

Gilbert, Sandra M. "From Patria to Matria: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Risorgimento." PMLA 99, no. 2 (1984): 194-211.

Parallels Browning's interest in Italy's nationalization with the poet's own search for a new identity grounded in a feminine tradition; contends that she sees in Italy the potential for a new kind of society separate from patriarchy.

Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. "The Aesthetics of Renunciation." In The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, pp. 539-80. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.

Interprets Aurora Leigh as a compromise between self-assertion and feminine submission, where the heroine must learn to give up her identity.

Hayter, Alethea. Mrs. Browning: A Poet's Work and its Setting. London: Faber and Faber, 1962, 261 p.

Attempts to shift the course of criticism on Browning by emphasizing poetic craft and originality over personality and "womanly sweetness."

Jones, Christine Kenyon. "'Some World's-Wonder in Chapel or Crypt': Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Disability." Nineteenth Century Studies 16 (2002): 21-35.

Looks at the relationships among gender, disability, and identity in Browning's poetry and letters.

Leighton, Angela. Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986, 192 p.

Interprets Browning's work with feminist and psychoanalytic approaches, including an emphasis on the poet's family relationships as reflected in the poems.

——. "'Because men made the laws': The Fallen Woman and the Woman Poet." In New Feminist Discourses: Critical Essays on Theories and Texts, edited by Isobel Armstrong, pp. 342-60. New York: Routledge, 1992.

Observes how women poets including Browning, Christina Rossetti, and others ally themselves with the figure of the fallen woman to help create a feminine poetic voice.

Lupton, Mary Jane. "The Printing Woman Who Lost Her Place: Elizabeth Barrett Browning." Women 2, no. 1 (1970): 2-5.

Suggests that Browning's work has been undervalued because of misplaced attention to her illness and her femininity; critiques the poet's handling of gender issues in Aurora Leigh.

Mermin, Dorothy. "Genre and Gender in Aurora Leigh." The Victorian Newsletter 69 (spring 1986): 7-11.

Contends that Aurora Leigh transgresses the distinction between poetry and fiction as it does the distinction between males and females.

——. Elizabeth Barrett Browning: The Origins of a New Poetry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989, 325 p.

Emphasizes Browning's creation of new poetic forms as well as new ways of being a woman in society, particularly in her marriage; notes the influence of both Romantic and Victorian culture.

Moers, Ellen. Literary Women: The Great Writers. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1976, 336 p.

Includes Browning in the tradition of nineteenth-century women writers, noting common themes, images, and genres.

Schor, Esther. "The Poetics of Politics: Barrett Browning's Casa Guidi Windows." Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 17, no. 2 (fall 1998): 305-24.

Analyzes Browning's political poetry about Italy.

Steinmetz, Virginia. "Images of 'Mother-Want' in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh." Victorian Poetry 21, no. 4 (1983): 351-67.

Takes a psychoanalytic approach to maternal imagery in Aurora Leigh.

Stephenson, Glennis. Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Poetry of Love. Ann Arbor, Mich.: U.M.I. Research Press, 1989, 153 p.

Asserts that Browning's love poetry uses a female voice employing a male tradition; observes the poet's insistence on an active role for women in relationships and the reality of feminine sexual desire.

Stone, Marjorie. "Cursing as One of the Fine Arts: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Political Poems." Dalhousie Review 66, no. 1-2 (1986): 155-73.

Sees the curses in Browning's poems as expressions of anger for women's oppression.

Straight, Julie. "'Neither Keeping Either Under': Gender and Voice in Elizabeth Barrett's The Seraphim." Victorian Poetry 38, no. 2 (summer 2000): 269-88.

Focuses on Browning's treatment of the Crucifixion and its relationship to hierarchy and the female Voice.

Walsh, Susan. "'Doing the Afra Behn': Barrett Browning's Portrait of the Artist." Victorian Poetry 36, no. 2 (summer 1998): 163-86.

Links the discourse of Victorian sanitation reform and public health concerns to the treatment of gender roles in Aurora Leigh.

OTHER SOURCES FROM GALE:

Additional coverage of Browning's life and career is contained in the following sources published by the Gale Group: British Writers, Vol. 4; Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography, 1832-1890; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols. 32, 199; DISCovering Authors; DISCovering Authors: British Edition; DISCovering Authors: Canadian Edition; DISCovering Authors Modules: Most-studied Authors and Poets; DISCovering Authors 3.0; Exploring Poetry; Literature Resource Center; Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, Vols. 1, 16, 61, 66; Poetry Criticism, Vol. 6; Poetry for Students, Vols. 2, 16; Poets: American and British; Twayne's English Authors; World Literature and Its Times; World Literature Criticism; and World Poets.