Elisabeth Barrett Browning

Elisabeth Browning was not one of the Victorians I particularly cared for. While she certainly is deserving of the prominence she is awarded for her poems and writing, I personally did not care for them. Perhaps this is merely because I had a hard time grasping what she was saying about her family and herself in her poem "Aurora Leigh." Many of my ideas concerning Browning's poetry are unfounded and are merely suppositions, but still I see fit to describe them. When Browning writes about her Aurora Leigh's life, she says that "Aurora Leigh, was born to make my father sadder, and myself not over joyous, truly" (Browning 533). I believe this to be a confession of sorts on Browning's part about her life with her father. Browning's father apparently did a lot for his daughter, he encouraged her to learn and to express herself and yet he tyranically forbid her from marrying. Perhaps Elizabeth thought of herself as a burden upon her father, a good man who had a daughter not quite to his liking. As I said, this is unfounded, yet they are still the only ideas I have. Also, in the poem Aurora Leigh, the eponymous character's father dies when Aurora is still of a young age. This may yet be another confession of Browning's about her desire for her father to have died when she could still have loved him and when he had not yet become villainous towards her in forbidding her from marrying. Truthfully I have no ideas worth defending in any great extent. As I said, I did not care for Browning nor did I understand her poetry or connect with it to any great extent.