It is a woman's voice, sire, which dares to utter what many yearn for in silence. [unsent letter to Napoleon III re: Victor Hugo]

But fate has not been kind to Mrs. Browning as a writer. . . In short, the only place in the mansion of literature that is assigned to her is downstairs in the servants' quarters, where, in company with Mrs. Hemans, Eliza Cook, Jean Ingelow, Alexander Smith, Edwin Arnold, and Robert Montgomery, she bangs the crockery about and eats vast handfuls of peas on the point of her knife.
Virginia Woolf (The Second Common Reader)

The hard truth in Woolf's lament cannot be easily denied, for Elizabeth Barrett Browning's most ambitious, and perhaps finest work, languished out of print until this essay appeared in 1931. The work is Aurora Leigh, a poem known for being longer than Paradise Lost, although it possesses merit apart from such pat categorization. First published in 1856, the blank verse novel was met with mixed reviews and frequent reprinting, only to fade in the popular light of Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese. Some hostility was present, and only The Globe, The Daily News and The Literary Gazette specifically praised it, with George Barrett declaring it was "a pity the authoress had written a book which is almost a closed volume for her own sex." But other critics such as Ruskin disagreed, declaring it "the greatest poem in the English language and the first perfect poetical expression of the Age" (99). Reclaimed by Virginia Woolf, the text has been recently analyzed via a feminist reading, and remains subject to warring interpretations as a result. Despite these disparate critiques, however, what remains evident are the words of Elizabeth Barrett Browning in the voice of Aurora Leigh: "By the way, / The works of women are symbolical. / We sew, sew, prick our fingers, dull our sight, / Producing what? A pair of slippers, sir, / To put on when you're weary-- or a stool / To tumble over and vex you . . 'curse that stool!' / Or else at best, a cushion where you lean / And sleep, and dream of something we are not, / But would be for your sake" (15).

The concept of female artist as independent, as well as Barrett Browning's reclamation of poetry in the feminine voice, fosters questions regarding how woman is defined as artist, and how definition of form is constituted. What can these approaches tell us about Aurora Leigh and Barrett Browning's own perspectives? Is her strength and power as artist/poet/social critic compromised by her love for Romney/Robert, or augmented? In autobiographical terms, an appropriate resource for Barrett Browning's own perspective of her work is contained within letters she wrote to family and friends, like Mrs. Martin, to whom she declares, "I was saying to Robert the other day that after all I felt content to be a woman. If it had been otherwise and I had been drawn into public life, it would have gone hard with me in my fits of disgust at the injustice and chicanery of men."1

Disagreeing with this interpretation, Deirdre David writes in Browning Studies that "Aurora Leigh is neither revolutionary nor compromised: rather, it is a coherent expression of Barrett Browning's conservative sexual politics, and I shall argue that female imagery is employed to show that the 'art' of the woman poet performs a 'service' for a patriarchal vision of the apocalypse" (113). Yet the background elements of the text seem to partially belie that notion, for Barrett Browning had been thinking of this work before her relationship with Robert, and though a "patriarchal vision" may be present, it should necessarily be filtered through the greater poetic vision that she espouses as indicative of her own verse: "Nay, if there's room for poets in the 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," (163). The Victorian age of Jane Eyre and Villette was just as present in Aurora Leigh, but also transformed by the woman who recorded it in verse. Barrett Browning's lived experience, and those who "lived" through her reading fuel the narrative as well as stoke truth within her poetic fire. Her own epistle to Mrs. Jameson in February 1857 attests to this:

What has given most offence in the book, more than the story of Marian--far more! has been the reference to the condition of women in our cities [prostitution], which a woman oughtn't to refer to, by any manner of means, says the conventional tradition. Now I have thought deeply otherwise. 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. I have spoken therefore, and in speaking have used plain words--words which look like blots, and which you yourself would put away--words which, if blurred or softened, would imperil perhaps the force and righteousness of the moral influence. (Letters ii. 254)

To be sure, Aurora Leigh was not always read as a feminine text with a female protagonist, as exemplified by William C. Coupland's Aurora Leigh. A Discourse Delivered in South Place Chapel, Finsbury, E. C. (1887), where Barrett Browning is initially praised above Shelley and her husband as a poet who is a "completer human being and the safer guide" (96). Yet in the same sermon, the speaker eloquently posits Romney as the true "hero" of the text, effectively negating the title and the import of the work! Other such interpretations of the era include John Nichol's assertion regarding Barrett Browning where he describes in his book Fragments of Criticism :

In recoil from mincing fastidiousness, she now and then becomes coarse. She will not be taxed with squeamishness, and introduces words unnecessarily which are eschewed in familiar conversation. To escape the imputation of over-refinement, she swears without provocation. Those are grave accusations; but the authoress would be the first to disclaim the shield of that spurious gallantry which accords her sex an exemption from the full severity of legitimate censure. (117)

I would argue that the imagery, subject matter and characterizations within Aurora Leigh reflect the interests and circumstances of Barrett Browning in her relationships to her artistic pursuits. A reading of the work with an autobiographical agenda in mind creates a subtext that is unmistakable in tone. Aurora Leigh is not the work of a woman pining away for the love of a fellow poet, or the mythos of a relationship tethered by family, but an account of a feminine quest for independence despite the encroachment of masculine society. Molly Hite writes of such self-writing in her foreword to Gender and Genre in Literature:

The notion of fictional self-writing seems in ways even more congenial to the marginal subject, in that it implies an acknowledgement that the self is always to some extent (and in some senses) a fiction and a correlative freedom to engage in self-invention without regard for the external standards of truth or authenticity. (xv)

And then the biographer is parsimonious of her letters, - which always tell a story of life better than the best abstract of it, elaborated by the cold hands of another - EBB to George Barrett July 25, 1841

Through the voice of Aurora the character, the circumstances, the idiosyncrasies, of Elizabeth Barret Browning ring in our ears. Mrs. Browning could no more conceal herself than she could control herself, a sign no doubt of imperfection in the artist, but a sign also that life has impinged on art more than life should. Again and again in the pages we have read, Aurora the fictitious seems to be throwing light upon Elizabeth the actual. (185)

Faulty assertions and coarse assumptions regarding Robert Browning's influence and subsequent role regarding AL are numerous. Since AL was published in 1856 and the Brownings had been married at that point for ten years, such comments were to be expected due to the patriarchal perspective of the time, but that such rumors still persist are ridiculous in light of the evidence in Barrett Browning's own letters. On December 30, 1844, twelve years before publication, she wrote to Miss Mitford:

"I want to write a poem of a new class, in a measure, a Don Juan, without the mockery and impurity, . . . under one aspect, - and having unity, as a work of art, -and admitting of as much philosophical dreaming and digression (which is in fact a characteristic of the age) as I like to use. Might it not be done, even if I could not do it? - and I think of trying at any rate . . . " (231-2)

But my chief intention just now is the writing of the sort of novel-poem - a poem as completely modern as 'Geraldine's Courtship,' running into the midst of our conventions, and rushing into drawing rooms and the like 'where angels fear to tread;' and so, meeting face to face and without mask the Humanity of the age, and speaking the truth as I conceive of it plainly. That is my intention. It is not mature enough yet to be called a plan. 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. (Letters 32)

The poem you propose to make for the times; the fearless fresh living work you describe, is the only Poem to be undertaken now by you or anyone that is a Poet at all; the only reality, only effective piece of service to be rendered God and man; it is what I have been all my life intending to do, and now it shall be much, much nearer doing, since you will along with me. (37)

Of particular interest, however, is the poet Aurora Leigh speaking Barrett Browning's own thoughts. Writing to Mr. Chorley on January 7, 1845, Barrett Browning clearly elucidates, in an ironic fashion, the current perceptions of a woman poet:

Because, you see, what you call the 'bad dispensation' by no means accounts for the want of the faculty of poetry, strictly so called. England has had many learned women, not merely readers but writers of the learned languages, in Elizabeth's time and afterwards women of deeper acquirements than are common now in the greater diffusion of letters; & yet where were the poetesses? The divine breath which seemed to come & go, and ere it went, filled the land with that crowd of true poets whom we call the old dramatists - why did it never pass, even in the lyrical form, over the lips of a woman? How strange! And can we deny that it was so? (231)

Nay, if there's room for poets in the 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," (163)
Aurora Leigh goes on to declare, "What form is best for poems? Let me think / Of forms less, and the external. Trust the spirit, / As sovran nature does, to make the form" (164).

Unfortunately, AL has not been readily available for inspection. The text that was issued in thirteen editions before 1873 (Woolf 183) is seldom available in the twentieth century. In order to bolster my argument regarding the importance of the work, it is painfully necessary to reiterate the plot of the text with accompanying poetic passages. Finally, in 1992, 138 years after its initial publication, a definitive book on AL is in publication. The irony of this lapse notwithstanding, it becomes imperative to understand the relationship of the text to other women's publications of the era. That Barrett Browning's work was superseded by her husband's over the course of time is not the issue, but that her body of work was neglected because of her spouse's success is abhorrent by all dictates of literature (but, not perhaps, to an institutionalized canon). This is not to assert AL is perfected poetry, for parts of the text remain problematic, but to argue the breathtaking originality of design, and sheer genius of Barrett Browning within the parameters of a poem longer than most novels, is by Barrett Browning's own assertion, an attempt at synthesis of two forms - the novel and the poem. Her other agendas include the offering of lived experience as legitimate subject matter for poets, and perhaps most importantly, the relationship of women to art and love. Forster notes:

The next three books of her poem saw her developing her main theme: can women be happy with only their art to fulfil them or do they need men? She explores this question within an intricate plot . . . Elizabeth wanted to defend the Marians of the world and to indict a society which could exploit their need but she had no desire to condemn the entire male sex . . . (309) No one was left in any doubt that that Aurora was after all unable to reach complete self-fulfillment through creative work alone. It was Elizabeth's own conclusion. She had found, in her own life, that she could not in all honesty claim she had been entirely fulfilled only through her work or only because of Robert: both were essential" (311)

The idea of the poem, we must remember, came to her in the early forties when the connexion between a woman's art and a woman's life was unnaturally close . . . as everybody knows, the life of Elizabeth Barrett was of a nature to affect the most authentic and individual of gifts. Her mother had died when she was a child;[2] she had read profusely and privately; her favourite brother was drowned; her health broke down; she had been immured in almost conventual seclusion in a bedroom in Wimpole Street. (206)

Aurora goes off to make her own fortune after the death of their aunt, pursuing personal fulfillment as poet and individual. Here the first person narrative of Aurora Leigh conveys a sense of purpose and discovery, and the poetic voice of Aurora Leigh lends vision to the concept of poet shared by Barrett Browning. "But poets should / Exert a double vision ; should have eyes / To see near things as comprehensibly / As if afar they took their point of sight, / And distant things, as intimately deep, / As if they touched them" (163).

During this period, Romney devotes himself to social causes, and Aurora to her poetice endeavors. He does take Aurora to meet his betrothed, a woman of a lower class named Marian Erle. Although beginning to realize an unspoken affinity for Romney, Aurora supports his decision to wed, but Romney falls victim to a riot when Marian does not show up for the ceremony, and he is nursed back to health by Lady Waldemar, a woman Aurora does not trust. Aurora decides to leave England and return to Italy, only to find Marian Erle there with her child. Marian had fled England hoping to spare Romney the "shame" of marrying below his class, only to fall within the machinations of Lady Waldemar, who convinced her she was not "worthy" of Romney. Waldemar told Marian "'That Romney could not love me, if he would, / As men call loving; there are bloods that flow / Together, like some rivers, and not mix / Through contraries of nature" (231). So Marian decided to flee the country under Lady Waldemar's direction, only to wind up forced to work in a brothel. Pregnant, she manages to escape after a difficult experiences, and relates the tale to Aurora. Sympathetic to her cause and horrified by her treatment, Aurora gives Marian and her child shelter as well as support.

To her chagrin, Aurora discovers that in the interim Romney has resolved to marry Lady Waldemar, who has nursed him back to health. Aurora attempts to send him a letter warning him of her conduct, but is careful not to reveal Marian's misfortunes. At the last, Romney comes to Italy to confront Aurora and declare his love, though partially blinded in the fire that destroyed his home and emotionally scarred by fate,[3] he openly disabuses the concept of marriage to Lady Waldemar and describes his enduring love for Aurora, after first offering to marry Marian. But Marian does not want marriage, her child is ample compense. In this, Marian and Aurora's roles are reversed, for Marian rejects Romney's proposal because she no longer wants it, and although she doubts she is worthy of it, that is no longer the issue as she tells him:

. . . A woman poor or rich,
Despised or honoured, is a human soul;
And what her soul is, - that, she herself,
Although she should be spit upon of men,
As is the pavement here,
Still good enough to pray in . . . (331)
. . . Here's a hand, shall keep
For ever clean without a marriage-ring,
To tend my boy, until he cease to need
One steadying finger of it, and desert
(Not miss) his mother's lap, to sit with men. (334)

That may be the bare course of the narrative vein, but the content has greater import than mere storytelling to offer. Aurora Leigh is a woman and a poet and she will not compromise her idealism nor her poetic dreams for mere security, for her ongoing office to garner these despite societal expectations testifies to her sincerity.

The public response to the tale is varied, with many contemporary critics agreeing the independence and resolve exhibited by Aurora in the first seven books is thwarted by Romney's reemergence in the text. However, the ending does not negate the whole of the book and verse, though it does create some inconsistency on the part of Barrett Browning. Her reaction to publication took many forms:

"I really had not the heart to sit down and talk of my 'Aurora,' even in reference to the pleasure and honour brought to me by the expression of your opinion . . .
I have had many of such letters from persons loved less [praising the book], and whose opinions had less weight; and you will like to hear that in a fortnight after publication Chapman had to go to press with second edition. In fact, the kind of reception given to the book has much surprised me, as I was prepared for an outcry of quite another kind, and extravagances in a quite opposite sense. This has been left, however, to the 'Press," the 'Post,' and the 'Tablet,' who calls 'Aurora' 'a brazen-faced woman,' and brands the story as a romance in the manner of Frederic Soulie-in reference, of course, to its gross indecency. (to Mrs. Jameson Florence: December 26, 1856 [postmark]).

With renewed interest in the text today, Elizabeth Barrett Browning continues to give people "a motive for reading it," although there is ample room for further critiques and thorough examinations of the text. Woolf ends her essay about AL with a vivid accounting of Barrett Browning's prowess:

Her bad taste, her tortured ingenuity, her floundering, scrambling, and confused impetuosity have space to spend themselves here without inflicting a deadly wound, while her ardour and abundance, her brilliant descriptive powers, her shrewd and caustic humour infect us with her own enthusiasm. We laugh, we protest, we complain - it is absurd, it is impossible, we cannot tolerate this exaggeration a moment longer- but, nevertheless, we read to the end enthralled. What more can an author ask? But the best compliment that we can pay to Aurora Leigh is that it makes us wonder why it has left no successors. (192)

It is a valid point that attests to Barrett Browning's artistic gifts. As a poet and as a woman, her works have been too easily categorized without being read. Her marriage was not her artistic life, and that it should remain her legacy would indeed be a crime against her literary skill. Her poetry should not be diminished because of her love for Robert, but rather commended because her gift is not subsumed despite it. As Aurora declares to Romney in book two, why should she keep another's house, instead of building one for herself?

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