The Victorian Woman and E. Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh

In an age where, as Caroline Norton put it, “the husband and wife are one person, and the husband is that one person,” Barrett Browning boldly creates an independent, intelligent young woman: Aurora Leigh. However, in doing this she also weaves together for us not only an entertaining story, but also effectively lays bare to the reader what the expected nature and sphere of a Victorian age woman should be: a decoration fit only for the trifles of a home. The first glimpse of this we get in Book 1 lines 47-64:

… 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,
And kissing full sense into empty words,
Which things are corals to cut life upon,
Although such trifles . . .

Here Barrett Browning places in our minds a strikingly vivid image of a woman doing, as she herself said, “…such trifles…” Isabella Beeton adds to this image in The Book of Household Management: “a mistress must be thoroughly acquainted with the theory and practice of cookery, as well as be perfectly conversant with all the other arts of making and keeping a comfortable home.” This image—the woman engaged in the trifles of the home—is exactly what the proper sphere of the Victorian woman was. Women were expected to run the home, tend to all the trivial matters, and make sure their husbands lives where comfortable. 

Barrett Browning, while satirizing this role that woman hold, again puts a very clear image in our minds eye of what the Victorian woman was expected to do: 

We sew, sew, prick our fingers, dull our sight,
Producing what? A pair of slippers, sir,
To put on when you're weary - or a stool
To tumble over and vex you… ‘curse that stool!’
Or else at best, a cushion where you lean
And sleep, and dream of something we are not,
But would be for your sake (Book I. 456-463).