Aurora Leigh

Aurora Leigh, born in Florence to an English father and an Italian mother, is orphaned young and raised by a stern aunt in England, where she secretly reads her father's books and decides to be a poet. On her twentieth birthday she refuses her cousin Romney, a serious social reformer, who tells her that women can write no great poetry. She goes to London to live by her pen, while Romney tries to marry Marian Erle, a poor seamstress, as an act of social reform, and the lives of the three are tested by betrayal, violence and disaster before they meet again in Italy.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning published this 'novel in verse', in nine books of blank verse, in 1856, and called it the most mature of her works; it is one of the great Victorian statements on women and art. Her love sequence is Sonnets from the Portuguese, and her husband's collection of the same years is Men and Women.