SOURCE: Lawson, Kate, and Lynn Shakinovsky. “Rape, Transgression, and the Law: The Body of Marian Erle in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh.” In The Marked Body: Domestic Violence in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Literature, pp. 105-24. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002.

In the following essay, Lawson and Shakinovsky focus on notions of psychological development, violence, and class in Aurora Leigh as represented through the character of Marian Erle.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, published in 1856, the same year as “The Poor Clare,” appears at first glance to situate itself, like “Janet's Repentance,” firmly in the world of realism, far from the realm of occult haunting. While “The Poor Clare” moves beyond the bounds of realism and into the world of demonic possession and exorcism in order to investigate the violence in and misery of the lives of three generations of women, Aurora Leigh concerns itself with the growth and...