Michele Gordigiani's 1858 painting of Elizabeth Barrett Browning

It is important to recognize that Elizabeth Barrett Browning was not committed to a feminist interpretation of womanhood that regarded women as intellectual equals to men in her poem Aurora Leigh (1856). Instead, she agreed with her husband Robert Browning that women's existence as the softer sex" is the "softer sex," according to Deidre David (2008).

Some claim that Browning's thematic evocation of rape, female misery, and the struggle for female professional recognition proves Aurora Leigh to be a necessary revolutionary poem and a passionate condemnation of the Victorian patriarchy; however, it is important to consider her more women conservative views when analyzing the poem.

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