Elizabeth Barrett Browning: The poet as heroine of literary history

This dissertation begins with a literary historiographic mystery. How could Elizabeth Barrett Browning's verse-novel Aurora Leigh, a scandalous success in its own time and a central text for nineteenth-century women's literary tradition, have virtually disappeared not only from conventional accounts of Victorian literary history, but from print?;In a detailed reception study of Barrett Browning between 1838 and 1901, I present a case study of the growth of one of the most powerful conventions of literary historiography--that of the poet-heroine. My study traces nineteenth-century British and American critics' inscription of their denial of the poet's achievement, and of women's literary tradition as a whole, in the very structure of conventional literary historiography. It documents the means by which a controversial public poet was cast as a series of stock romantic figures, while her most ambitious poem, Aurora Leigh, increasingly appeared as an anomalous work unworthy of its prettified author.;Chapter One draws on a reading of Aurora Leigh and on current feminist research in the iconography of Victorian womanhood to analyze the significance of poet/heroines for Victorians' understanding of women's relation to the production of culture. Chapter Two treats Barrett's portrayal from 1838 to 1850 as what one writer called a "sister/saint," a heroine whose self-presentation subversively blended popular ideas of the suffering of feminine submission and of genius. Chapter Three documents the period between the poet's elopement and Aurora Leigh's publication, during which she emerged as the highly public figure I call "England's Queen of Song." Chapter Four, which begins with Aurora Leigh in 1857 and ends with the poet's death in 1861, demonstrates critics' determination to protect the heroine's reputation from the implications of the poet's increasingly controversial political work, and their resulting portrayal of Barrett Browning as a raving "Pythoness.".;The fifth and sixth chapters document Barrett Browning's reception from her obituaries through the 1901 reviews of the Browning love letters. Between 1861 and 1887, a crucial period in the development of English studies, the poet's biography was transformed into a secular saint's legend. The poet's canonization and the decanonization of her work merged as increasing numbers of the poet's works were dismissed, often clearly for the sake of faith in the poet as a sainted epitome of Victorian womanhood--a faith which the final chapter reveals to have been doomed from the start.