Rescuing the Magdalen: Aurora Leigh as Social Reform Worker

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the decade before Elizabeth Barrett Browning drafted Aurora Leigh (1856), feminists, politicians, and reformers opened so-called Magdalen refuges, inviting working-class prostitutes and unmarried mothers into their own private homes. Upon entry, destitute women received clothing, private rooms, and humane treatment—and were subjected to the constant supervision of mostly older, socially superior women. Inmates were expected to submit to a strict hierarchical structure that imagined them as incapable of exercising independent moral judgement. Although ostensibly arising from kindness, Magdalen homes coercively upheld the supremacy of the middle-class family and attendant cultural protocols. In this article, I read Aurora Leigh through the lens of such vexed relations between women of different classes, suggesting that EBB’s professional ambitions were linked to elite women writers’ wish to legitimize, and eventually institutionalize, their participation in the Victorian public sphere. Wishing to be taken seriously as observers of social trends, writers such as EBB based on superior moral vision their right to mediate between working-class women’s material demands and the male-dominated political sphere. This mediation came at a cost: Aurora Leigh reduces the visibility of working-class women’s wage labour and political participation.