Aurora Leigh (Annotated)

Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh (1856) is a daring verse-novel that fuses Bildungsroman, social critique, and poetic manifesto. Written in supple blank verse, it follows Aurora, an orphaned English-Italian poet, as she resists conventional marriage, confronts poverty and gendered limitation, and claims artistic vocation. Situated amid Victorian debates over "the woman question," industri...