SURELY, POOR POMPILIA IS PRETTILY DONE, PLEADED ROBERT BROWNING, concluding letter to his proofreader, Julia Wedgwood. (1) The remark makes strange digression, for Browning devotes rest of his commentary to justifying darkness, bulk, and realism of The Ring and Book, of which goes so far as to claim at one point: think this world as it is (Curle, p. 152). Yet if it now seems curious that at critical moment, Browning would defer to purely aesthetic defense of his poetry, it certainly more curious that in century following poem's publication, critics so often engaged in this same defense, insisting that it precisely pretty figure of Pompilia which balances and redeems this most dark, uncompromising of poems. (2) The Athenaeum, which before 1868 had ravaged Browning's poetry, now dotingly proclaimed Pompilia perfect every way, and claimed that it her figure that made The Ring and Book beyond all parallel supremest poetical achievement of our time (pp. 399-400). Only in last few years have scholars seriously questioned this conception of poem. This essay written to address contrivance of Pompilia's status as center and redemptress of The Ring and Book. I wish to show that The Athenaeum's sympathetic and perhaps naive reading, which prevailed for well over century and continues to influence us, less an historical accident or misreading of text than it calculated effect of Pompilia's use of generic features of virgin martyr hagiography, histories of virgin saints. My examination of Browning's generic method uncovers some of Browning's intellectual debt to his friend Anna Jameson, whose researches into hagiography have been undervalued by Victorianists. It also advances our understanding of Browning's perspective on sacred texts and sacred histories, including Bible. And finally, it deepens our understanding of his complex literary relationship to his wife Elizabeth. Modern scholarship, like Victorian scholarship, often responds to generic weight of Pompilia without analyzing cultural power of its s pecifically literary elements. (3) Yet Pompilia designed to reveal manner in which literature, and in particular sacred literature, uses its aesthetic and generic properties to become experience, the world as it is. 2 That Pompilia's history resembles story from Book of Saints, or that Pompilia saintly heroine, not, of course, news. The other half Rome announces it in Book 3 (111-112), Caponsacchi insists on it in Book 6 (1880-1883), Pope Innocent accepts it in Book 10 (1002-04), and in his final ravings, even Guido imagines it in Book 11 (2424-2425). (4) Such consensus in poem notorious for its conflicting testimonies helps explain why Browning's early suggestion that the woman that slaughtered was saint, / Martyr and miracle! (1.207-208) met with such uniform approbation in years following poem's publication, uncontested through most of twentieth century because it was so successfully maintained in nineteenth. Even as little as two decades ago, Kay Austen could argue without irony that Pompilia essentially was hagiographic text. As his central character in struggle between virtue and vice for souls of men and women, affirmed Austen, he [Browning] creates Pompilia, Christian saint (p. 290). Yet what might it mean for mid-Victorian poet like Browning to create a Christian saint who will redeem souls of his readers? Austen's celebration ignores that disjunction could exist between generic and historical terms of her story (Pompilia of Pompilia does not equal Pompilia historical woman), and she plainly misses that Browning exploits this disjunction as an element of his poetry. Yet Austen's perspective remains essential to legitimate historical critique of Pompilia because she rightly accounts for enthusiasm behind century of less well-formulated encomia on Pompilia's saintly virtue. …