Aurora Leigh, now available in the first critically edited and fully annotated edition for almost a century, is the foremost example of the mid-nineteenth century poem of contemporary life. It is an amazing verse novel which provides a panoramic view of the early Victorian age in London. The dominant presence in the work however, is the narrator Aurora Leigh, as she develops her ideas on art, love, God, the "Woman Question," and society.
About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each...

"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 A...

With an Introduction and Notes by Dr Sally Minogue

Elizabeth Barrett Browning was such an acclaimed poet in her own lifetime that she was suggested as a candidate for the Poet Laureateship when Wordsworth died in 1850. Yet today we have only a limited knowledge of her considerable life's work as a poet, in part because of a lack of representative but accessible editions of her work. Readers will find here not only her well-known sonnet sequence of love poems, Sonnets From the Portuguese, but also lesser known sonnets, some in praise of the cross-dressing...