SOURCE: "The Aesthetics of Renunciation," in The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, Yale University Press, 1979, pp. 539-80.

In the excerpt that follows, Gilbert and Gubar claim that Aurora Leigh "may well have been the most reasonable compromise between assertion and submission that a sane and worldly woman poet could achieve in the nineteenth century."

Elizabeth Barrett Browning also made most of her finest poetry out of her reconciliation to that graceful or passionate self-abnegation which, for a nineteenth-century woman, was necessity's highest virtue. But because she had little natural taste for the drastic asceticism [Christina] Rossetti's temperament and background seem to have fostered, Barrett Browning ultimately substituted a more familiar Victorian aesthetic of service for the younger woman's somewhat idiosyncratic aesthetic of pain. Her masterpiece, Aurora Leigh (1856), develops this aesthetic most fully, though it is also in part an epic of...