Elizabeth Browning's Changed Role Of Women In The Victorian Age Using Poetry During the course of the nineteenth century including the Victorian Age, the rights and roles of women were widely controversial and debated. The controversy and debates relating to the Victorian roles for women were particularly centered on middle-class women. There were concerns on whether these women should be educated, allowed to work in other settings other than the home, and have a political voice. As these debates continued, many Victorian women such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning made significant contributions to the roles and rights of women through their literary works. As one of the most prominent writers during this period, Browning made powerful and engaging contributions based on her belief that educational training was a crucial factor towards the success of women in the society. Through poetry, Elizabeth Browning explored and challenged the conventional rights and roles for women using spirituality and religion.

Britain's social and political agendas in the nineteenth century were dominated by the Woman Question, which basically focused on the roles and rights of women in the Victorian Age. Through her works, Browning sought to address this social and political issue as shown in the challenging and combative poems she wrote regarding the need for gender equality. Browning's poems are largely viewed as an expression of her heart...

Most of her poems have a religious theme because one of the early influences to her works was spirituality and religion. She used spirituality and religion to speak against male chauvinism, which set the agenda of much poetry by Victorian women across several successive decades (Farhana p.69).
Browning's exploration of the social roles prescribed for Victorian women was evident in her series of poems between 1930 and 1940. She criticized the secondary role of women in the society and how marriage oppresses women in poems like The Romaunt of Margret, A Romance of the Ganges, The Romaunt of the Page, and The Romance of the Swan's Nest (Avery par, 4). The dominant themes in these works included loss, betrayal, and duplicity because of brutal and problematic power games in love and sexual relations. Browning's major poem Aurora Leigh (1856) highlighted the different aspects of her concerns and interests in the Woman Question. This poem has been considered as a feminist work because of the bold and dominant feminine theme. However, feminism is not the focus of this Aurora Leigh as depicted in contemporary understandings of this poem. Through this, she demonstrated her awareness of the challenges faced by economically and sexually vulnerable women during this period. Aurora Leigh is not geared towards creating independence through isolation from men but to close the gap between…