Aurora Leigh

“I who have written much in prose and verse

For others’ uses, will write now for mine,–

Will write my story for my better self,

As when you paint your portrait for a friend,

Who keeps it in a drawer and looks at it

Long after he has ceased to love you, just

To hold together what he was and is.”

Aurora Leigh opens by framing the poem as a portrait of a lover who has been forgotten but whose likeness is kept in a drawer. This note of nostalgia, lament, and longing is common to many Romantic poems, but most prominently recalls Christina Rosetti’s famous poem “Remember,” which prevails upon the reader to remember its speaker, when they have “gone far away into the silent land” (“Remember.” Poetry Foundation, Line 2). Though “Remember” was first published in 1862, the two women poets were friends and dedicated poems to one another throughout their literary careers. Both Barrett Browning and Aurora travel “far away,” and the poem opens with the deaths of Aurora’s parents. However, the “foreign land” also contains the “outer infinite” and evokes the sublime, an awareness of which concludes the poem.

“You never can be satisfied with praise

Which men give women when they judge a book

Not as mere work, but as mere woman’s work.”

In Book 2, Romney Leigh articulates one of the central problems with which the poem engages: the fact that contemporary society did not view female artists on the same level as male artists. In invoking a new age of female artists at the close of Aurora Leigh, Barrett Browning discredits Romney’s argument here.