Blake, Kathleen. "Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Wordsworth: The Romantic Poet as a Woman." Victorian Poetry (Winter 1986).

Donaldson, Sandra. " 'Motherhood's Advent in Power:' Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Poems About Motherhood." Victorian Poetry 18 (1980): 51-60.

Gelpi, Barbara Charlesworth. "Aurora Leigh: The Vocation of the Woman Poet." Victorian Poetry (Spring 1981): 35-48. PRSOO.V5

Gelpi argues that EBB used Aurora Leigh (and Aurora Leigh) to express her concerns about being a woman artist in Victorian society (Cora Kaplan's introduction to the 1978 Women's Press edition of Aurora Leigh makes a similar argument; Kaplan focuses on the intertextualities within the poem as well as its outward political implications). Gelpi's essay is pretty straightforward, but it offers a more positive interpretation of Romney's blinding. EBB stated that "'He had to be blinded, observe, to be made to see... I am sorry, but indeed it seemed necessary;"' Gelpi argued that through his blinding he became Aurora's Muse, the "dramatic projection of the faith in self — blind faith, if you will — and self-acceptance which underlie all true creativity, whether in the arts, in social endeavor, or in human interaction." [Jonathan Fasman '97 Brown University]

Holmes, Alicia E. " Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Construction of Authority in Aurora Leigh by Rewriting Mother, Muse, and Miriam." Centennial Review 36 (Fall 1992): 593-606.

Dorothy Mermin. "The Damsel, the Knight, and the Victorian Woman Poet." Critical Inquiry (Autumn 1986): 64-81. NX1.C64

This essay wonders why there were so few Victorian women poets, when there were so many women novelists; it examines the works of EBB and Chtistina Rossetti, and, secondarily, Emily Bronte and Emily Dickinson. Mermin posits that Victorian women were expected to be the damsel — waiting to be rescued, the object of poetic affection — but that in Aurora Leigh Browning' s heroine becomes a rescuer of Marian Erle, the poor seamstress, and, by marriage, Romney Leigh. She also argues that the humiliation, subjugation, and blinding of Romney that precedes the marriage shows that Browning had indulged in "a revenge fantasy" rather than a genuine reconceptualization of the "damsel/knight" dichotomy. [Jonathan Fasman '97 Brown University]

Rosenblum, Dolores "Face to Face: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh and Nineteenth-Century Poetry," Victorian Studies (Spring 1983): 321-38. PR1.V5

This article focuses of facial imagery and scenes of recognition in Aurora Leigh and in nineteenth-century poetry generally. She argues that "the iconic female face is the matemal face," and that Aurora herself redefines the maternal (and, more generally, the feminine) role: she introduces female subjectivity by poetically destroying false and falsifying masks. [Jonathan Fasman '97 Brown University]

Steinmetz, Virginia V. "Images of 'Mother Want' in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh." Victorian Poetry 21 (Winter 1983): 351-367.

Stone, Marjorie. "Genre Subversion and Gender Inversion in Aurora Leigh and Tennyson's 'The Princess,'" Victorian Poetry (Summer 1987)

Note: PR500.V5 is the call number for Victorian Poetry.


Last modified 1998