Aurora Leigh, A Life-Drama, and Victorian Poetic Autobiography

This essay identifies A Life-Drama, a long poem by the working-class poet Alexander Smith, as a model for Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s epic Aurora Leigh. Barrett Browning wrote Aurora Leigh in part to protest the unevenness of the literary playing field. Since Smith and Barrett Browning became the most salient exceptions to the respective marginalization of working-class and female poets from the highest levels of mid-Victorian critical praise, her strategic reliance upon his techniques becomes a noteworthy point of analysis.