Progressivist Issues in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, Research Proposal Example

This paper will seek to discuss progressivist issues present in the long-poem Aurora Leigh, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The intent of this paper is to delve into the meaning of this poem with fellow English students and discuss some of the feminist issues which are inherent in the work, and how those issues apply to women’s issues even today. It is my hypothesis that Aurora Leigh is a poem largely centered around the challenges and issues by women – particularly women artists and writers – in the Victorian Age. In detailing the adventures and misadventures of the heroine, Aurora Leigh, who is a poet by trade, Elizabeth Barrett Browning is writing about the concerns of all women, particularly women who create. My primary source will be the poem “Aurora Leigh” itself. Other sources will include the article by Jason Isaacs entitled Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Women’s Issues, and Aurora Leigh, which on The Victorian Web (www.victorianweb.org), a website dedicated to the study of Victorian literature, and an article by Joyce Zonana entitled The Embodied Muse: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh and Feminist Poetics published in the magazine Tulsa Studies for Women’s Literature. Both of the articles go deeply into the themes and social commentary which Elizabeth Barrett Browning wove throughout this nine-volume work.

Work Cited

Greenblatt, Stephen. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 2. New York and London: 2000

Isaacs, Jason. “Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Women’s Issues, and Aurora Leigh”. The Victorian Web. 1992. Web. 1 April, 2013

Zonana, Joyce. “The Embodied Muse: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh, and Feminist Poetics”. Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature. Vol 8 No. 2 pp 240-262