SOURCE: A review of Elizabeth Barrett Browning: A Biography, in Victorian Studies, Vol. 34, No. 1, Autumn, 1990, pp. 112–13.

In the following review, David offers a positive assessment of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, calling it an “exemplary biography.”

In Aurora Leigh, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's self-termed “novel-poem,” the misogynistic hero, Romney Leigh, observes that women “So sympathetic to the personal pang” are incapable “Of deepening, widening a large lap of life / To hold the world-full woe.” Therefore, he concludes, “this same world, / Uncomprehended by you, must remain / Uninfluenced by you.” In the world of the poem, Romney later learns the error of his patriarchal ways and in the world of Victorian publishing, Aurora Leigh established Barrett Browning as a phenomenally successful author: the first edition sold out in a week and the second in a month. Moreover, recent feminist examination of Barrett Browning's career has persuasively argued for a Victorian woman intellectual whose...