SOURCE: Case, Alison A. “‘My Broken Tale’: Gender and Narration in Aurora Leigh.” In Plotting Women: Gender and Narration in the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Novel, pp. 107-24. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999.

In the following essay, Case probes Aurora Leigh's conflicting role as the heroine-narrator of both a conventional love story and a Künstlerroman.

With Aurora Leigh, Elizabeth Barrett Browning set out to write what she called a “novel-poem” about the growth of a woman artist. As several critics have pointed out, Barrett Browning used her crossbreeding of novel and verse to break out of the gendered restrictions imposed on her by a male poetic tradition.¹ The novel, with its long tradition of female authors and protagonists, provided a less anxious precedent for a poetic narrative centered on a woman than the unrelentingly masculine tradition of epic poetry. But viewing the novel form as a largely...