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He was a prophet, she a poet. In spite of constant complaints about bad digestion and poor health, he lived a long and robust life that nearly spanned the century. Her delicate health led to a much too early death, but not before she became one of the immortals of Victorian literature. They could not have been more different in terms of both their personalities and their approaches to literature. He denied the value of modern poetry, and she represented it. But they were, perhaps inexplicably, friends. Much as her work overshadowed that of her husband in life, the friendship between Robert Browning and Carlyle has eclipsed the relationship of Barrett Browning and Carlyle. And although recent critical work has affirmed what has been long known, that Carlyle's ideas are essential to a full understanding of Barrett Browning's poetics, especially as she expresses them in their most extended and complex form in Aurora Leigh, their friendship has remained of secondary importance.
Even less has been known about Carlyle's opinion of Aurora Leigh. As fortune would have it, the Senate House Library at the University of London holds Carlyle's annotated copy of the first edition (London: Chapman and Hall, 1857). Amazingly, these annotations have gone unstudied by Barrett Browning and Carlyle scholars since its acquisition from Sir Louis Sterling in 1956. Thus, critics such as Bina Freiwald, Marjorie Stone, Margaret Reynolds, Simon Avery, Rebecca Stott, Elizabeth Woodworth, all of whom recognize the importance of Carlyle's idea of the hero in Barrett Browning's masterpiece, have done so without knowledge of an essential document that establishes the need for reassessment. Resituating the relationship and the incorporation of Carlyle's ideas into Aurora Leigh within the context of Carlyle's response in his annotations results in a much clearer vision of Barrett Browning as a Victorian poet and prophet who sought to subvert the patriarchal ideologies of her Age.
Before there was a friendship, there was a loftily held opinion. In 1842, shortly after Carlyle extolled the virtues of the poet and poetry in Heroes, Elizabeth Barrett asked her friend Mary Russell Mitford, 'Do you know Carlyle's writings? I am an adorer of Carlyle. He has done more to raise poetry to the throne of its rightful inheritance than any writer...