SOURCE: "New Yet Orthodox: Female Characters in Aurora Leigh," in International Journal of Women's Studies, Vol. 3, No. 5, September/October, 1980, pp. 479-89.

In the following essay, Hickok explores Browning's feminist inversion of conventional literary and social norms in Aurora Leigh.

I

Interest in Aurora Leigh, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, has revived during the last few years, chiefly because of the feminist perspective from which this remarkable "verse novel" examines nineteenth-century England. In turn, renewed interest in Aurora Leigh has led to re-evaluation of Barrett Browning's¹ other poems, especially those depicting female figures, a process rewarded with rediscoveries of numerous of her poems long ago allowed to disappear from the literary canon of Victorian poetry.² We must not forget, however, that just as Aurora Leigh exists in the context of Barrett Browning's other poetry, her other poetry itself exists in the context of the nineteenth-century feminine poetic tradition in England...