"Hear the Voice of the [Female] Bard": Aurora Leigh as a Female Romantic Epic

In Aurora Leigh (1857), Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–61) appropriates the epic, the quintessential medium for male self-definition and self-assertion, as a vehicle for the construction and expression of a female Romantic bard-hero. Elizabeth Barrett Browning read Greek and Latin and published translations of classical texts; she was well aware of her epic predecessors, and readers may detect many echoes of her classical forebears in Aurora Leigh. Barrett Browning did not simply rush into drawing-rooms with Aurora Leigh; she rushed into traditionally male territory. In Aurora Leigh, she critiques women's "education", marriage as it has been traditionally envisioned, and, through the story of Marian Earle, the inequities of the existing class system, prostitution, and illegitimacy. In Aurora Leigh, Barrett Browning created not just a visionary work, but a revisionary one, a work that causes us to re-view our own conceptual categories.