SOURCE: Egan, Susanna. “Glad Rags for Lady Godiva: Woman's Story as Womanstance in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh.” English Studies in Canada 20, no. 3 (September 1994): 283-300.

In the following essay, Egan describes Aurora Leigh in terms of its novelistic and poetic qualities, and highlights Barrett Browning's use of Lady Godiva and Danae as feminist figures.

Tensions between gender and genre remain central to discussion of the writing of nineteenth-century women both because we are now reading the dilemmas embedded in their subject matter and because of the generic choices that they made. For no work can this discussion be more heated at the moment than for Aurora Leigh, Barrett Browning's generic anomaly, novelized epic, collage, or hybrid novel-poem.¹ Aurora Leigh demonstrates close ties with the traditions of novel and of poetry, but combines these genres in order to achieve a double purpose: presentation of a narrative familiar to readers...