SOURCE: Peterson, Linda H. “‘For My Better Self’: Auto/biographies of the Poetess, the Prelude of the Poet Laureate, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh.” In Traditions of Victorian Women's Autobiography: The Poetics and Politics of Life Writing, pp. 109-45. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999.

In the following essay, Peterson treats Aurora Leigh as an autobiography, emphasizing the literary influences of Wordsworth's Prelude and Letitia Elizabeth Landon's biographical sketches.

Aurora Leigh is not, by any strict definition, the autobiography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Unlike her eponymous heroine, Elizabeth Barrett was not born in Italy of an English father and a Florentine mother; she was not orphaned at age thirteen, raised by a spinster aunt, or (so far as we know) proposed to by a wealthy English cousin. To pursue her career as a writer, she did not move to London, take up residence in an attic garret, “a...