The feminism of Aurora Leigh is produced as a complex of objections to a liberal male response to the 'woman question' as well as a revaluation of the concepts of self-determination as they were dealt with by contemporary women writers and feminists. The rejection of male left politics, 'Fourier's void,/And Comte absurd, - and Cabet puerile.! Subsist no rules of life outside of life' is marked by Romney's failure and his capitulation to a new trinity: Art, a very feminised Christianity and Love. A male discourse denying female experience and wisdom, which attempts to co-opt women into a male-designed version of utopia, must fail as certainly as Ida's University. However there is a congruence between Barrett Browning's feminist perspective and that of the utopian socialists for both deny to the working classes any self-generating consciousness. Marx notes the latter in the Communist Manifesto. Nowhere in the literature of the mid-century is the bourgeois rejection of working-class consciousness more glaring than in Aurora Leigh, though it is certainly present in Charlotte Bronte, Gaskell and Stowe, among others. Aurora Leigh reminds us that there is a female as well as a male version of liberal bourgeois ideology. The feminist analysis in the poem is in some ways so advanced and so piercing that we forget it is central partly because the political analysis of the poem is so weak, so over-dependent on the vacillations of Barrett Browning's favourite thinker, Carlyle. It exists by creating a vacuum around it which whirls away problems of class oppression. Centred is the woman as speaker-poet. In the text she has virtually replaced all male prophets. The 'woman's figure' dominates the symbolic language of the poem just as women's experience dominates its narrative. Yet for all its difficulties the poem remains radical and rupturing, a major confrontation of patriarchal attitudes unique in the imaginative literature of its day.

When we reach for later texts to compare it to we can look at Emily Dickinson's lyrics about love and art, lyrics which were so directly influenced by all Barrett Browning's work, and Aurora Leigh in particular, that Ellen Moers has suggested they be read as parallel texts. After Dickinson there are scores of feminist poets who celebrate women's experience with the 'woman's figure'. That most difficult venture for women, writing about women writing, is still rarely attempted in imaginative literature. Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook (1962) and Kate Millet's Flying (1975) are major attempts to discuss the relationship between women's experience, politics and creativity. Aurora Leigh stands behind them as the first and most powerfully sustained literary effort to engage these issues.

Returning to the frame of the Victorian world we should remember that the description of Aurora as an independent author living and working in London was possibly the most 'revolutionary' assertion in the poem, the item more likely to corrupt the daughters of the gentry than Barrett Browning's sympathetic reference to the plight of prostitutes, for it affected the real possibilities and conditions of the lives of middle-class women. She does not suggest that the literary life lived single is romantic or exciting. More subversively and seductively she indicates that it is possible, interesting and productive, a fact that was beginning to be true for the generation of women who came after the mid-century.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning saw the representation of her age of steam as a kind of duty to the future. Her sense of the 'age' is both wider and narrower than that of the contemporary social novel. Aurora Leigh combines the pleasures of the Victorian novel with those of the Victorian poem. Our obsession is with the Victorian and Edwardian worlds themselves. They are our middle-ages. There, in fancy dress, the still-present hierarchies of class and gender are displayed without shame, unsuppressed by the rhetoric of equality which glosses our own situation. Class conflict and the inequality between sexes were the spoken subjects of much of that literature and sexual transactions across class lines the erotic subtext of many popular works. In modern fiction sexuality is the spoken subject, power relations the subtext which must wear a fig leaf, Consequently our literary appetite for the Victorians is easily explained. They give us two kinds of coarseness: a coarse drama of class against class and men against women, picked out in strong colours and even coarser interpretations of these conflicts. They offer solutions which swing between the compassionate and cowardly, the needle often poised at silly. They are our fairy-tales; the Brontes, Mrs Gaskell, George Eliot, Christina Rossetti, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning our sisters Grimm.