SOURCE: Review of Aurora Leigh, in Westminster and Foreign Quarterly Review, Vol. XI, No. 1, January, 1857, pp. 306-10.

In the following excerpt, Eliot praises Aurora Leigh's emotive power, claiming that it is Browning's infusion of "genuine thought and feeling" that distinguishes the work from those of her contemporaries.

Foster, the essayist, has somewhere said that the person who interests us most is the one that most gives us the idea of ample being. Applying this remark to books, which are but persons in a transmigrated form, we discern one grand source of the profound impression produced in us by Aurora Leigh¹. Other poems of our own day may have higher finish, or a higher degree of certain poetic qualities; but no poem embraces so wide a range of thought and emotion, or takes such complete possession of our nature. Mrs. Browning is, perhaps, the first woman who has...