ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 shows how debates about the origin and development of language offered imaginative solutions to the question of women’s participation in the political and the domestic spheres. I argue that Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s juvenile poem An Essay on Mind (1826), her verse play A Drama of Exile (1844), and her epic Bildungsroman Aurora Leigh (1856) build on Carlyle’s language of incarnation and on the language-philosophy of John Locke and Étienne Bonnot de Condillac in order to claim a voice for the politically engaged woman poet.
