SOURCE: "'If orphaned, we are disinherited': The Making of the Poet," in Elizabeth Barrett Browning, The Harvester Press, 1986, pp. 114-40.

In the following essay, Leighton claims that in Aurora Leigh Browning traces the liberation of her own creative abilities through Aurora's "failed quest" for her father and her subsequent acceptance of her "disinherited state. "

Barrett Browning first projected the composition of Aurora Leigh as early as 1844. She wrote to her cousin and friend, John Kenyon, of her wish to write another poem like 'Lady Geraldine's Courtship'. Such a poem would be longer and more ambitious, but similarly 'comprehending the aspect and manners of modern life, and flinching at nothing of the conventional' (Kenyon, I, 204). Some months later, she embellished this first description in a letter to Miss Mitford: 'And now tell me,—where is the obstacle to making as interesting a story of a poem as of a...