Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Aurora Leigh Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Aurora Leigh is an epic poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, written in blank verse encompassing nine books. The story is told in first person, from the point of view of the heroine Aurora and takes place in Florence, Malvern, London and Paris. Marian Erle, the poem's other heroine, is an abused self-taught child of itinerant parents. The author uses her knowledge of Hebrew and Greek, while also playing off modern novels, such as Corinne ou l'Italie by Anne Louise Germaine de Staël and the novels by George Sand. Elizabeth Barrett Browning styled the poem "a novel in verse," and considered it as "the most mature of my works, and the one into which my highest convictions upon Life and Art have entered." Scholar Deirdre David asserts that Barrett Browning's work in Aurora Leigh has made her into "a major figure in any consideration of the nineteenth-century woman writer and of Victorian poetry in general."