Elizabeth Barrett Browning/Aurora Leigh

Elizabeth Barrett Browning started off with a prosperous yet harsh background. She was forbidden by her father to leave the house and get married, so when she married Robert Browning she was banned from the rest of her family by her father. Her poems emphasized the concerns of women's rights. Her poem Aurora Leigh is one of most famous pieces that she composed. This is a very long poem, it almost reads like a novel. This poem was about a young poet who loses her mother and father and has to move away with her aunt. Her cousin Romney, who is very wealthy tries to convince her that it is best to marry him because without him she will make nothing of her life. Early own in her story she illiterated to how women were viewed by men when she stated:

Women know
The way to rear up children (to be just),
They know a simple, merry, tender knack
Of tying sashes, fitting baby shoes,
And stringing pretty words that make no sense, ..(book 1 line 47-51)

She rejected him and his proposal. She spends the rest of her life proving him wrong. She wanted to show that women too had ambitions and dreams, and that they too could make something of theirselves. Romney's idea of a woman is that she needs to be at home and the man needs to take care of her. She was dead set on having the same rights and advantages that men have. Later on in the poem she does end up with Romney because he is blind and both seem to finally learn the roles of what each gender has to offer. In his illness he eventually realized how his way which may not have been the best but it was not the worst, stated to Aurora in the poem:

So much for the necessities of power,
So much for the connivances of fear,
Coherent in statistical despairs
With such a totalof distracted life,....(line 335-338)

They both learn how to adjust to each other by the time the poem is finished, but in contrast women in this time were just beginning to take the steps in having rights in the world.