Aurora Leigh, a novel in verse, is Elizabeth Barrett Browning¹s tour de force. It describes, with vigor and brilliance, Aurora¹s successful rebellion against her conventional Victorian childhood: to travel to Italy, to find love, and to pursue her career as a writer. This volume, which also includes some of Browning¹s short political poems, ³embodies, like all enduring literature, truths that transcend historical particulars.² (The Guardian) Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) married the poet Robert Browning in 1846; they spent the next 15 years in Italy, where she published Sonnets from the Portuguese, her love poems to Robert Browning, and Aurora Leigh.