This Norton Critical Edition of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's 1856 verse-novel is based on Margaret Reynolds's variorum edition, which the British Academy awarded the 1993 Rose MaryCrawshay Prize and which is reprinted here by special arrangement with the Ohio University Press. The text is accompanied by both explanatory annotations and textual notes.
"Backgrounds and Contexts" includes thirty letters or letter excerpts by Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning that trace Aurora Leigh's inception, evolution, and publication. Seven contemporary documents--on the "woman question," prostitution, socialism, and poetic theory--place the text historically.
A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.
Preface
The Text of Aurora Leigh
Frontispiece to the 1859 Revised Fourth Edition
Title Page for the Revised Fourth Edition
Aurora Leigh
A Note on the Text
Selected Textual Notes
Backgrounds and Contexts
Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert
Browning on Aurora Leigh
Sarah Stickney Ellis · [The Declining Character of
the Women of England and How It Might Be Rectified]
Catherine Napier · [Women's Rights and Duties]
Dinah Mulock · A Woman's Thoughts About Women
Charles Fourier · [A Trial Phalanx]
William Rathbone Greg · Prostitution
M. A. Stodart · [Poetry and the Poetess]
Elizabeth Barrett and Richard Hengist Horne ·
[Elizabeth Barrett on Thomas Carlyle and the
"Prophet-Poet"]
Criticism
Contemporary Critical Reception
H. F. Chorley, From The Athenaeum (November 22,
1856)
George Eliot, From Westminster Review
(January 1857)
W. E. Aytoun, From Blaekwood's Edinburgh Magazine
(January 1857)
Coventry Patmore, From North British Review
(February 1857)
John Nichol, From Westminster Review 68 (October
1857)
Essays in Criticism
Lilian Whiting · [The Lyrical Philosophy of Aurora Leigh]
Marjory A. Bald · [The Negative Approach]
Virginia Woolf · "Aurora Leigh"
J. M. S. Tompkins, [Aurora's Mistakes]
Ellen Moers · [The Myth of Corinne]
Cora Kaplan · [The Right to Write]
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar · [Reconciling Love and Work]
Rachel Blau DuPlessis · To "bear nay mother's name":
Kiinstlerromane by Women Writers
Susan Stanford Friedman · Gender and Genre Anxiety:
Elizabeth Barrett Browning and H. D. as Epic Poets
Angela Leighton · ' "Come with me, sweetest sister" ':
The Poet's Last Quest
Deirdre David · From Intellectual Women and
Victorian Patriarchy
Marjorie Stone · Genre Subversion and Gender
Inversion: The Princess and Aurora Leigh
Helen M. Cooper · [Structure and Narrative in
Aurora Leigh ]
Dorothy Mermin · [The Idea of the Mother in
Aurora Leigh ]
Alison Case · Gender and Narration in Aurora Leigh
Joyce Zonana · "The Embodied Muse": Elizabeth Barrett
Browning's Aurora Leigh and Feminist Poetics
Holly A. Laird · Aurora Leigh: An Epical Ars Poetica
Angela Leighton · [Men and Women: Poetry and Politics]
Margaret Reynolds · [Allusion in the Verse-Noveh
Experimental Bricolage]
Elizabeth Barrett Browning: A Chronology
Selected Bibliography
