SOURCE: Tasker, Meg. “Aurora Leigh: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Novel Approach to the Woman Poet.” In Tradition and the Poetics of Self in Nineteenth-Century Women's Poetry, edited by Barbara Garlick, pp. 23-41. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002.

In the following essay, Tasker addresses Barrett Browning's contribution to the verse-novel genre in Victorian literature.

What is it about Aurora Leigh that allows Cora Kaplan to claim it as “radical and rupturing, a major confrontation of patriarchal attitudes unique in the imaginative literature of its day”,¹ and Deirdre David to insist that the poem is an example of “women's art as servant of patriarchy”, in which “the sexual politics of Aurora Leigh are coherent with all of Barrett Browning's conservative politics in general”?² According to David, Kaplan's reading endows Barrett Browning with a feminist mission she would not have endorsed herself. Where Kaplan talks of the poet's celebration of women's language and experience, David...