Read complete books and articles on: Aurora Leigh (by Elizabeth Barrett Browning)

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett - 1806–61, English poet, b. Durham. A delicate and precocious child, she spent a great part of her early life in a state of semi-invalidism. She read voraciously—philosophy, history, literature—and she wrote verse. In 1838 the Barrett family moved to 50 Wimpole St., London. Six years later Elizabeth published Poems, which brought her immediate fame. The volume was a favorite of the poet Robert Browning, and he began to correspond with her. The two fell in love, but their courtship was secret because of the opposition of Elizabeth's tyrannical father. They married in 1846 and traveled to Italy, where most of their married life was spent and where their one son was born. Mrs. Browning threw herself into the cause of Italian liberation from Austria. "Casa Guidi," their home in Florence, is preserved as a memorial. Happy in her marriage, Mrs. Browning recovered her health in Italy, and her work as a poet gained in strength and significance. Her greatest poetry, Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850), was inspired by her own love story. Casa Guidi Windows (1851), on Italian liberty, and Aurora Leigh (1857), a novel in verse, followed. During her lifetime Mrs. Browning was considered a better poet than her husband. Today her life and personality excite more interest than her work. Although as a poet she has been criticized for diffuseness, pedantry, and sentimentality, she reveals in such poems as "The Cry of the Children" and some of the Sonnets from the Portuguese a highly individual gift for lyric poetry.

Bibliography

See The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1845–46 (1899, new ed. 1930); R. Besier, The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1930), the most popular dramatization of the Brownings' love story; biographies by G. B. Taplin (1957), I. C. Clarke (1929, repr. 1970), and M. Forster (1989); The Courtship of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning (1985) by D. Karlin; studies by H. Cooper (1988) and G. Stephenson (1989); bibliography by W. Barnes (1967).

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11 of the Best Books and Articles on: Aurora Leigh (by Elizabeth Barrett Browning)

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1.

Aurora Leigh » Read Now
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Kerry McSweeney. 361 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

Aurora Leigh, now available in the first critically edited and fully annotated edition for almost a century, is the foremost example of the mid-nineteenth century poem of contemporary life. It is an amazing verse novel which provides a panoramic view of the early Victorian age in London. The...
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Aurora Leigh, now available in the first critically edited and fully annotated edition for almost a century, is the foremost example of the mid-nineteenth century poem of contemporary life. It is an amazing verse novel which provides a panoramic view of the early Victorian age in London. The dominant presence in the work however, is the narrator Aurora Leigh, as she develops her ideas on art, love, God, the "Woman Question", and society.
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2.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Woman & Artist (Chap. 6 "Woman and Artist, Both Complete: Aurora Leigh (1856)") » Read Now
by Helen Cooper. 219 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
3.

Aurora Leigh as Paradigm of Domestic-Professional Fiction, in Philological Quarterly » Read Now
by Sueann Schatz. 26 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
4.

Gender Construction and the 'Kunstlerroman': 'David Copperfield' and 'Aurora Leigh,' in Philological Quarterly » Read Now
by Gail Turley Houston. 23 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
5.

The Foreign Woman in British Literature: Exotics, Aliens, and Outsiders (Chap. 6 "Challenging Traditionalist Gender Roles: The Exotic Woman as Critical Observer in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh") » Read Now
by Marilyn Demarest Button, Toni Reed. 201 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

While England has been strengthened by a proud isolationism, she has simultaneously been enriched by the economic, social, and political complexities that have emerged as people of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds have moved within her borders, or when her own citizens have emigrated among...
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While England has been strengthened by a proud isolationism, she has simultaneously been enriched by the economic, social, and political complexities that have emerged as people of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds have moved within her borders, or when her own citizens have emigrated among those foreigners to live or rule. This book explores the foreign element in English culture and the attempt by English writers from the early 19th to the mid 20th century to portray their complex and often ambiguous responses to that doubly foreign element among them: the foreign woman. While being foreign may begin with national or ethnic difference, the contributors to this book expand it to include other forms of alienation from a dominant culture, resulting from gender, race, class, ideology, or temperament.
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6.

Women's Poetry and Religion in Victorian England: Jewish Identity and Christian Culture ("Marrying off Miriam: Christian Conversion in Aurora Leigh" begins on p. 85) » Read Now
by Cynthia Scheinberg. 275 pgs.

Collections: Religious Studies, Literature, Entire Library

Victorian women poets lived in a time when religion was a vital aspect of their identities. Cynthia Scheinberg examines Anglo-Jewish (Grace Aguilar and Amy Levy) and Christian (Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti) women poets, and argues that there are important connections between the...
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Victorian women poets lived in a time when religion was a vital aspect of their identities. Cynthia Scheinberg examines Anglo-Jewish (Grace Aguilar and Amy Levy) and Christian (Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti) women poets, and argues that there are important connections between the discourses of nineteenth-century poetry, gender and religious identity. Broadly interdisciplinary, the book's methodology relates to studies in poetics, religious studies, feminist literary criticism, and little-known Anglo-Jewish primary sources.
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7.

"The Least 'Angelical' Poem in the Language": Political Economy, Gender, and the Heritage of Aurora Leigh, in Victorian Poetry » Read Now
by Lana L. Dalley. 17 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
8.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Religious Poetics: Congregationalist Models of Hymnist and Preacher, in Victorian Poetry » Read Now
by Karen Dieleman. 23 pgs.

Collections: Religious Studies, Literature, Entire Library
9.

Germaine de Stael, George Sand and the Victorian Woman Artist (Chap. 3 "Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh and the Labors of Psyche") » Read Now
by Linda M. Lewis. 278 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
10.

Barrett Browning's Poetic Vocation: Crying, Singing, Breathing, in Victorian Poetry » Read Now
by Steve Dillon. 23 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
11.

Written in Blood: The Art of Mothering Epic in the Poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, in Victorian Poetry » Read Now
by Olivia Gatti Taylor. 11 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

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