SOURCE: "Genre and Gender in Aurora Leigh, in The Victorian Newsletter, No. 69, Spring, 1986, pp. 7-11.

In this essay, Mermin contends that Aurora Leigh transgresses the distinction between poetry and fiction, and between males and females, claiming that the "novel in verse" ends "with an assertion of the primacy of poetry's world and values over the novel's, and of women over men. "

Elizabeth Barrett Browning devoured novels voraciously and indiscriminately, especially French ones of a kind that a respectable Englishwoman could hardly admit to knowing. In novels she found some of the experience of life that her sex and seclusion had denied her, and that she felt she needed to give color and reality both to her life and to her art. She was thinking of prose fiction in these terms in 1845 when she described the project that was to issue twelve years later as Aurora Leigh. "My chief...