SOURCE: "Aurora Leigh: The Vocation of the Woman Poet," in Victorian Poetry, Vol. 19, No. 1, Spring, 1981, pp. 35-48.

In the essay that follows, Gelpi sees Aurora Leigh as a metaphorical investigation of Browning's changing attitudes toward herself her profession, and womanhood in general

In recent years Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh has reemerged, after more than half a century of neglect, as a strikingly important Victorian poem, historically significant in its interaction with the works of other Victorian writers and immediately relevant in its depiction of a feminist consciousness. Cora Kaplan's essay on the poem uses the earlier insights of Ellen Moers and Patricia Thomson to bring both these aspects of the poem together.¹ She demonstrates that the plot of Aurora Leigh, far from being a pastiche of those scenes and characters from other writers which had caught Barrett Browning's fancy, is in fact "an overlapping sequence of dialogues...