At the heart of Aurora Leigh there is a book. It's the book that Aurora sits down to write when she begins her story (1.1-9). It's the new and brave book that she attempts in the center of the poem (5.351-357). It's the manuscript book that she leaves with her publisher before setting out for Italy (5.1212-1213 and 5.1261-1266). It's the book that Romney reads and that makes him realize, ten years too late, that Aurora really is a poet (8.261-262 and 8.278-297).

...

This Norton Critical Edition of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s 1856 verse-novel is based on Margaret Reynolds’ variorum edition, which the British Academy awarded the 1993 Rose Mary Crawshay 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.

"Criticism" collects twenty-five assessments of Aurora Leigh from the period 1899–1993.

A wide range of opinion is provided by George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Ellen Moers, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Angela Leighton, Deirdre David, Dorothy Mermin, and Margaret Reynolds, among others.

Preface

The Text of Aurora Leigh

 Frontispiece of the 1859 Revised Fourth Edition

 Title Page for the Revised Fourth Edition

 Aurora Leigh

A Note on the Text

Selected Textual Notes

Backgrounds and Criticism

 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 Blackwood’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 my mother’s name": K?nstlerromane by Women Writers

　　Susan Standford 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 Zanona, "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-Novel: Experimental Bricolage]

Elizabeth Barrett Browning: A Chronology

Selected Bibliography