ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the accuracy of Elizabeth Barrett Browningand (EBB) recollection at thirty-six of reading Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley in adolescence, however, than on the cultural, conscious, and unconscious associations that led her to couple the radical vindicator of women’s rights with Lord Byron. Significantly, while EBB’s first mention of her plan to write the work that would become Aurora Leigh includes an explicit comparison with Byron’s Don Juan, it appears in a letter to Mary Russell Mitford in which she recalls, her adolescent experience of reading Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Woman. One extended epistolary exchange with Boyd on William Wordsworth and Byron provides a particularly illuminating index of EBB’s views of both Romantic poets. The most direct evidence for Wollstonecraft’s impact on EBB’s adolescent formation is found in family letters comprehensively available in The Brownings’ Correspondence. The image of Byron prostrate the ‘Crucified’ seems to have lingered in the poet’s mind.
