SOURCE: Thum, Maureen. “Challenging Traditionalist Gender Roles: The Exotic Woman as Critical Observer in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh.” In The Foreign Woman in British Literature: Exotics, Aliens, and Outsiders, edited by Marilyn Demarest Button and Toni Reed, pp. 79-93. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999.

In the following essay, Thum considers Barrett Browning's critique of gender roles in British society as presented through Aurora Leigh's outsider perspective.

The critical reception of Elizabeth Barrett Browning has been characterized by remarkable gaps and silences. Her poems dedicated to Robert Browning, particularly her Sonnets from the Portuguese, have never been eclipsed. Her Sonnet 43, “How do I love thee?” is one of the most anthologized and best known nineteenth-century love poems. But her novel poem, Aurora Leigh, presents a very different picture. Celebrated after its publication in 1857, the “novel poem”¹ went through thirteen editions in England by 1873. After the turn of the century...