Aurora Leigh

Aurora Leigh charts the narrator’s struggle with the oppressive social roles of her time and ascension to the rank of respected poet. Barrett Browning hails the poem as the “most mature” of her works, and there is a reciprocity between Barrett Browning’s success as a poet and the success of her protagonist, Aurora. Crowning herself precociously with a wreath in Book 2, Barrett Browning herself ironically only just misses the title of Poet Laureate, which instead was given to Tennyson. Nonetheless, the celebrated literary critic John Ruskin pronounced Aurora Leigh to be “the greatest poem in the English language […] not surpassed by Shakespeare’s sonnets” and the “Poem of the Age,” with politician Robert Lytton concurring: “a true Aurora […] that will leave an everlasting light with us.” 

It is noteworthy that Book 1 elides the notion of an escape into nature with the escape into literature. Travel writing had been a fashionable genre since Cowper’s 1785 poem, “The Task,” and just like Wordsworth’s more prominent works, Aurora Leigh is as much a part of this tradition as the Romantic one, for lines like the following go so far as to posit that literature itself as a form of travel: