SOURCE: A Prefatory Note to Aurora Leigh, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, William Heinemann, Ltd., 1898, pp. 3-8.

In the following essay, Swinburne recalls his first reading of Aurora Leigh, and claims that the book pays adequate tribute to the genius of its author.

Coventry Patmore, in a Letter to Poet William Allingham, February 18, 1857:

Aurora Leigh is a strange book for a modest sensible little woman like Mrs. Browning to have written. It is full of "fine things" of course; but I am inexpressibly sick of such under such conditions. . . .

Coventry Patmore, in Memoirs and Correspondence of Coventry Patmore, by Basil Champneys,Vol. II, George Bell and Sons, 1900.

The hardest task to which a man can set his judgment is the application of its critical faculty to the estimate of work neither classical nor contemporary. It is not now of the present, and as yet it is not of the...