The first edition of Aurora Leigh (dated 1857) was published in London by Chapman and Hall on 15 November 1856. The need for a second edition became apparent almost immediately, and on 2 December Robert Browning informed Edward Chapman that he could
print tomorrow, if you please. There is nothing whatever to correct, that we are able to see at present, the book having been settled for some time to come while we were in London [during the summer and early autumn of 1856] for that purpose. My wife made up her mind to it as it is, and for the present … cannot reconsider the subject. All the ‘modern’ passages, illustrations, are vitally necessary, she thinks … and could not be detached without capital injury to the rest of the poem.1
Barrett Browning’s letters, however, tell a somewhat different story. It is clear from her correspondence that as late as mid-June she was still struggling to finish her enormous poem, and that well into October she was reading proofs under great pressure. It is therefore not surprising that in February 1857 she told a correspondent:
I certainly will, when the time comes, go over the poem carefully, and see where an offence can be got rid of without loss otherwise. The second edition was issued so early that Robert would not let me alter even a comma, would not let me look between the pages in order to [make] the least alteration. He said (the truth) that my head was dizzy-blind with the book, and that, if I changed anything, it would be probably for the worse; like arranging a room in the dark … Oh, that there are faults in the book, no human being knows so well as I; defects, weaknesses, great gaps of intelligence. Don’t let me stop to recount them.2
Demand for Aurora Leigh remained high, and a third edition was in print by the middle of 1857. It was not until late the following year that the opportunity arose for Barrett Browning to correct the text of her poem. Chapman had decided to bring out a fourth edition in a new format, and on 7 October 1858 Robert Browning informed him that ‘my wife wants particularly to change a word or two’.3 Before her revisions were complete, however, Elizabeth had changed considerably more than a word or two. Early in January 1859 she told a correspondent:
Aurora Leigh I despatched to England [from Rome] by a queen’s messenger three days since, all except the last two books which are not quite finished. I have worked hard at it as if my conscience were in my eyes and fingers bodily; and though probably I have not removed much which you wish away, I have put out a few expressions trenching on coarseness … as far as I could, without affecting the life of my own conception.4
And on 7 January she gave a similar report in another letter: ‘Very busy I have been … having dizzied myself with the “ifs” and “ands”, and done some little good I hope at much cost.’5
The ‘fourth edition, revised’, was published on n June 1859. Most of the 200 or so substantive changes in the 10,938 lines of the poem involved a single word or phrase. Some were clearly intended to mitigate the ‘coarseness’ of the first-edition text; others to make the poem more topical. The more significant of these changes are indicated in the notes. The vast majority of the alterations, however, were stylistic, affecting punctuation rather than the choice of words. Many commas were deleted; semi-colons were changed to commas or full stops; and many of the dashes, ellipses, and exclamation marks with which the first edition was sprinkled were eliminated. The cumulative effect of these changes was to make the 1859 text seem less agitated and spasmodic than that of the first edition.
The fourth edition was the last to be seen through the press by the author, and thus represents her final intention for the poem. This is the text reproduced here. It has been set from a copy in the University of Illinois Library. Corrections in the author’s hand in a presentation copy in the Beinecke Library, Yale University, have been consulted; obvious misprints have been silently corrected; punctuation and spelling have been made consistent and, in some cases, to conform with current usage (e.g. ‘sat’ for ‘sate’, ‘today’ for ‘to-day’); and redundant commas preceding dashes and parentheses have been omitted.
The working manuscript of the poem is in the Wellesley College Library; a fair-copy transcription in the author’s hand is in the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Like the substantive changes for the fourth edition, the changes in the Houghton manuscript for the first edition show the poet tempering the ‘coarseness’ of her text and increasing its topicality. The more significant of these are also indicated in the notes, as are a small selection of the variant readings in the Wellesley manuscript. A detailed account of the manuscripts is found in James Borg’s dissertation, ‘The Fashioning of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh’ (Ph.D. diss. Northwestern, 1979); and Margaret Reynolds’s edition of the poem (Athens, Oh., 1992); the publishing history of the poem is given in Warner Barnes’s A Bibliography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Austin, Tex., 1967).