Aurora Leigh
It is a first-person narration, from the point of view of Aurora; its other heroine, Marian Erle, is an abused self-taught child of itinerant parents.
The author styled the poem "a novel in verse", and referred to it as "the most mature of my works, and the one into which my highest convictions upon Life and Art have entered".
The scholar Deirdre David asserts that Barrett Browning's work in Aurora Leigh renders her "a major figure in any consideration of the nineteenth-century woman writer and of Victorian poetry in general".
Her father died when she was thirteen, and she was sent to England to live with his sister, her aunt, in Leigh Hall, her family's ancestral home.
Her aunt tried to educate her in what she considered a ladylike manner, but Aurora discovered her father's old library and read scholarly books on her own.
She read many of Shakespeare's famous works and fell in love with his writing style, and aspired to be a great writer like him one day in her life.
He is skeptical about her poetic ability, telling her that women do not have the passion, intellectual capacity, or redemptive qualities to be true artists.
Romney attempts to give Aurora money, but she refuses it, deciding to go to London to make her living as a poet.
She has been writing small popular poems for magazines, which have earned her an enthusiastic following among romantic young men and women, but she is dissatisfied.
At a stifling, insipid evening party at one of her well-born friend's houses, she learns that Romney is engaged to marry Lady Waldemar, and bitterly reflects that "He loved not Marian, more than once he loved/Aurora."
She decides that to find inspiration, she must travel to Italy, her mother's land, and in order to get the money sells some of her father's old books, as well as her own unfinished manuscript.
She is shocked, but resolves not to judge her harshly and tries for a week to find her, finally running into her by chance at a flower market.
Marian continues to tell Aurora her story: she was taken in by a kind lady as a maid, but was summarily fired when her pregnancy became apparent.
Aurora, somewhat shocked both by the letter's contents and the angry rhetoric, dazedly asks Romney what he will do now, and he answers that he will marry Marian and raise her child as his own.
Marian refuses him, however, stating that she prefers to remain as her child's only guardian and devote her life to him, rather than a husband, and that she has realized that what she thought was love for Romney was rather hero-worship.
The poem ends with Aurora and Romney in a loving embrace, as she describes the landscape for his unseeing eyes in Biblical metaphors.
