Elizabeth’s father, though no littérateur, also encourages his young daughter; perhaps she owes her remarkable confidence to him. ‘Literature was the star which in prospect illuminated my future days [;] it was the spur which prompted me .. the aim .. the very soul of my being’, she asserts at fourteen. Born nine years after Mary Shelley and ten before Charlotte Brontë, she starts writing as a child of six, by her own reckoning, and doesn’t stop until five weeks before she dies. Her first surviving poem, ‘On the Cruelty of Forcement to Man’, is written in the Herefordshire country house of her childhood; her last, ‘The North and the South’, almost four decades later in Rome in May 1861, the month before her death.
The eponymous narrator of Aurora Leigh, the masterpiece Elizabeth publishes at fifty, is transfixed by a similar passion:
I may love my art.
You’ll grant that even a woman may love art,
Seeing that to waste true love on anything
Is womanly, past question.
The rhetoric sounds like an own goal. In fact it’s strategic. Lacking both social agency and an education in the classical arts of logic and rhetoric that father, brothers, husband have received, a woman born at the start of the nineteenth century is unlikely to win arguments by reasoning about who or what she is. She must learn instead to be stubborn; irrational. To claim that she too is a poet, she must arm herself with her own weakness, which is to say her enthusiasm:
I lived, those days,
And wrote because I lived—unlicensed else;
My heart beat in my brain.
My heart beat in my brain: it sounds like fury or madness. But the pulse is metrical, not manic. Elizabeth’s success will be indubitable, the kind poets dream of and rarely achieve. Aurora Leigh, with which she crowns that success, will be an instant bestseller, its first edition selling out within a fortnight, and it will go on to be one of the best-read literary works of the second half of the nineteenth century. This verse Künstlerroman – the story specifically of a maker’s development, or Bildungsroman – will influence generations of poets and writers. Among the many women for whom it is immediately formative are George Eliot, Charlotte Mew, the writing duo who make up ‘Michael Field’, and Emily Dickinson – who hangs the Rossetti portrait of Elizabeth in her room. But its success isn’t limited by gender. Leading male writers, among them Rudyard Kipling, John Ruskin, Algernon Swinburne and Oscar Wilde, will celebrate the work for decades to come.
Aurora Leigh is a work of fiction, not memoir. Its nine books map only indirectly onto the nine ‘books’ of its author’s own life. If it is any kind of ‘How to’ vade mecum, it’s less a guide to practical professional steps than to thinking of oneself as a woman writer. Elizabeth’s own life story works in similar ways, that is, not so much guide as inspiration. But in portraying the development of a woman poet, Aurora Leigh does give us clues as to how its author herself managed to emerge.
On her twentieth birthday the verse novel’s protagonist, orphaned Aurora, refuses a marriage both loving and advantageous in order to dedicate herself to writing. Just before she does so, she crowns herself with a poet’s wreath:
What, therefore, if I crown myself to-day
In sport, not pride, to learn the feel of it.
Not pride, but to learn the feel of it: there’s a crucial distinction. If she delayed until she, or the world, felt confident that she deserved poetic laurels, how long would Aurora, or Elizabeth, wait?
In fact, laurel wreaths will crown Barrett Browning’s coffin: what use are they to her by then? But practising, learning the feel of the ‘the tender pricking’ of literary laurels, of how to ‘tie … rhymes’, is a way of doing without having to look at what you’re daring to do. Modest and incremental, it’s like the domestic arts Aurora Leigh already knows. This is how the young woman slips past the gatekeepers of the feminine self and starts to write.
Then I sate and teased
The patient needle till it split the thread,
Which oozed off from it in meandering lace
From hour to hour.
I like that oozing thread, which just doesn’t want to lie down. As it slips out of the needle, between the fingers that try to knot it tight, it’s a little metaphor for creative disobedience.
Practice makes perfect, as many a sampler instructed the girl who was embroidering it. But Elizabeth hasn’t always been patient. At thirteen, in the Preface to her first printed work, The Battle of Marathon, she’s all innocent insouciance:
Happily it is not now, as it was in the days of POPE […]. Now, even the female may drive her Pegasus through the realms of Parnassus, without being saluted with the most equivocal of all appellations, a learned lady; without being celebrated by her friends as a SAPPHO, or traduced by her enemies as a pedant; without being abused in the Review, or criticised in society.
Unfortunately, the reception of her adult work will show that this isn’t always true. And two centuries later, we need to catch on if we find ourselves thinking, ‘Happily it is not now, as it was in the days of ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING.’ For while Elizabeth is very much a creature of her own times, she also fits our own: as a woman working on the problem of how to be herself. And despite the years of practice to come, this early teenager
