Aurora Leigh is Barrett Browning's epic poem of the woman writer and her most sustained treatment of the Victorian Woman Question. It is a novel-in-verse which combines the topicality of the contemporary novel with the lofty moral and aesthetic aims of poetry and the sage writer's direct pronouncements on areas of public debate. It was phenomenally popular, selling out its first edition within two weeks of publication, and was admired by a wide range of readers from feminists like Frances Power Cobbe to aesthetes and decadents such as Swinburne.
First published in 1856, with an 1857 imprint.