SOURCE: Hoeckley, Cheri Larsen. “Anomalous Ownership: Copyright, Coverture, and Aurora Leigh.” Victorian Poetry 36, no. 2 (summer 1998): 135-61.

In the following essay, Hoeckley documents debates over issues of marital property and copyright in Victorian England, highlighting their impact on Barrett Browning and her characterization of Aurora Leigh.

Of the many aesthetic proclamations that Elizabeth Barrett Browning's heroine Aurora Leigh declares, perhaps the most complexly innovative is her insistence that a poet must represent her immediate milieu:

Nay, if there's room for poets in this world A little overgrown, (I think there is) Their sole work is to represent the age, Their age, not Charlemagne's—this live, throbbing age, That brawls, cheats, maddens, calculates, aspires, And spends more passion, more heroic heat, Betwixt the mirrors of its drawing-rooms, Than Roland with his knights of Roncesvalles. To flinch from modern varnish, coat or flounce, Cry out for togas and the picturesque, Is...