SOURCE: Renk, Kathleen. “Resurrecting the Living Dead: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Poetic Vision in Aurora Leigh.” Studies in Browning and His Circle 23 (May 2000): 40-9.

In the following essay, Renk illuminates Barrett Browning's interest in the theology of Emanuel Swedenborg, drawing parallels between Swedenborg's philosophy and Aurora Leigh's spiritual views.

Following her transformative marriage to Robert Browning in 1846, Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote the following to her lifetime friend Mrs. Martin regarding her life before her marriage:

I was buried and that was the whole … a thoroughly morbid and desolate state it was which I look back now to with a sort of horror with which one would look back to one's graveclothes if one had been clothed in them by mistake during a trance.¹

Barrett Browning candidly and succinctly refers to her life before her marriage as a trance-like living death, one inclusive of illness, invalidism, and self-imposed isolation. Notwithstanding...