Aurora Leigh Study Guide

Elizabeth Barrett was born in County Durham, England, the eldest of 12 children and a distant cousin of the literary patron John Kenyon. She took an early interest in poetry and also developed health issues at a young age, including headaches and spinal pain that would recur throughout her life. She published her first adult collection of poetry in 1838 and wrote prolifically in the following years. In 1844, she published Poems, which earned the admiration of fellow poet Robert Browning. Elizabeth Barrett would eventually marry him, over the objections of her father, who disowned her. On both sides, Barrett Browning’s family profited from the slave trade and the sugar industry in Jamaica, although she herself would become politically active in the abolition movement and also the movement to regulate child labor. Barrett Browning published what is perhaps her best-known and most ambitious long work, Aurora Leigh, in 1856, a few years before her death in Italy.  Although Barrett Browning’s work was popular in her lifetime, much of it went out of print shortly after, only to be rediscovered later in the 1970s by feminist literary critics who helped contribute to Barrett Browning’s current reputation as one of the foremost poets of her era.

The character of Aurora Leigh wants to write an epic about her own time period, believing that every poet probably finds their own age commonplace but is able to turn it into epic poetry regardless. In many ways, this ambition is also true of Elizabeth Barrett Browning herself, who sets her long poem Aurora Leigh in more or less Barrett Browning’s present and in places that Barrett Browning herself traveled and lived. At the time of Aurora Leigh’s publication, there were examples of women who had become successful as writers—Barrett Browning wrote after Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice) and at about the same time as the Brontë sisters (whose works include Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë and Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë). These women were outnumbered by men and sometimes dismissed by critics, but they and Barrett Browning represent how the literary landscape was tentatively changing to incorporate more women. Still, despite her popularity in her lifetime, Barrett Browning’s work was relatively ignored during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was only due to renewed interest in the 1970s and 1980s, during what is often called the second wave of feminism, that Barrett Browning once again rose to prominence, with new editions of her work being published. Today, Barrett Browning herself is often considered part of the first wave of modern feminism, a period that begins roughly around the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and included issues like women’s suffrage.

Aurora Leigh is a long poem that is partly inspired by the Greek and Roman epics that the character Aurora reads in the book. These include The Iliad and The Odyssey (by Homer) as well as The Aeneid (by Virgil). Some of the most famous examples of long epic poems in English include Paradise Lost by John Milton and The Dunciad by Alexander Pope, both of which may also have been an influence on Barrett Browning and her desire to write epic poetry in English. In its book-length poetic structure, Aurora Leigh also has some similarities to Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, another Romantic-era novel in verse. Notably, Aurora Leigh has a less rigid poetic structure than any of these other poems, making it a precursor to modernist poetry, which is less likely to contain rhymes and regular poetic meters. Barrett Browning’s works are also often paired with the work of her husband, Robert Browning, whose poetic career features several book-length poems, including Pauline and Paracelsus. In terms of philosophy and politics, Barrett Browning cited Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, one of the first modern feminist texts, as being a major influence on her own ideas about feminism. Of Barrett Browning’s many literary followers, two of the most prominent are Edgar Allan Poe (“The Raven”) and Emily Dickinson, who each modeled aspects of their own poetry on Barrett Browning’s example.