This Norton Critical Edition of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s 1856 verse-novel is based on Margaret Reynolds’ variorum edition, which the British Academy awarded the 1993 Rose Mary Crawshay Prize and which is reprinted here by special arrangement with the Ohio University Press. Preface vii The Text of Aurora Leigh 1(326) Frontispiece to the 1859 Revised Fourth Edition 2(1) Title Page for the Revised Fourth Edition 3(2) Aurora Leigh 5(322) A Note on the Text 313(2) Selected Textual Notes 315(12) Backgrounds and Contexts 327(74) Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning on Aurora Leigh 329(20) [The Declining Character of the Women of England and How It Might Be Rectified] 349(8) Sarah Stickney Ellis [Women's Rights and Duties] 357(4) Catherine Napier A Woman's Thoughts About Women 361(6) Dinah Mulock [A Trial Phalanx] 367(6) Charles Fourier Prostitution 373(14) William Rathbone Greg [Poetry and the Poetess] 387(4) M. A. Stodart [Elizabeth Barrett on Thomas Carlyle and the ``Prophet-Poet''] 391(10) Elizabeth Barrett Richard Hengist Horne Criticism 401(157) Contemporary Critical Reception 403(28) The Athenaeum (November 22, 1856) 403(4) H. F. Chorley Westminster Review (January 1857) 407(2) George Eliot Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (January 1857) 409(14) W. E. Aytoun North British Review (February 1857) 423(2) Coventry Patmore Westminster Review 68 (October 1857) 425(6) John Nichol Essays in Criticism 431(127) [The Lyrical Philosophy of Aurora Leigh] 431(1) Lilian Whiting [The Negative Approach] 432(7) Marjory A. Bald ``Aurora Leigh'' 439(8) Virginia Woolf [Aurora's Mistakes] 447(2) J. M. S. Tompkins [The Myth of Corinne] 449(4) Ellen Moers [The Right to Write] 453(5) Cora Kaplan [Reconciling Love and Work] 458(5) Sandra Gilbert Susan Gubar To ``bear my mother's name'': Kunstlerromane by Women Writers 463(3) Rachel Blau DuPlessis Gender and Genre Anxiety: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and H. D. as Epic Poets 466(7) Susan Standford Friedman ` ``Come with me, sweetest sister'' ': The Poet's Last Quest 473(11) Angela Leighton Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy 484(10) Deirdre David Genre Subversion and Gender Inversion: The Princess and Aurora Leigh 494(12) Marjorie Stone [Structure and Narrative in Aurora Leigh] 506(2) Helen M. Cooper [The Idea of the Mother in Aurora Leigh] 508(6) Dorothy Mermin Gender and Narration in Aurora Leigh 514(6) Alison Case ``The Embodied Muse'': Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh and Feminist Poetics 520(14) Joyce Zanona Aurora Leigh: An Epical Ars Poetica 534(6) Holly A. Laird [Men and Women: Poetry and Politics] 540(12) Angela Leighton [Allusion in the Verse-Novel: Experimental Bricolage] 552(6) Margaret Reynolds A Chronology 558(5) Elizabeth Barrett Browning Selected Bibliography 563