Published in London in 1856, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh is a verse novel of nine books that follows a female poet's intellectual and artistic coming-of-age, explicitly challenging the social and bodily constraints imposed on Victorian women. Browning herself suffered for much of her life from chronic illness and spent years as an invalid, confined to her room — a condition she associated with the suffocating expectations placed on women. Aurora Leigh caused a sensation, selling out three editions within months, and became a central text in the movement for women's education and independence.

Aurora Leigh stands as the most sustained poetic critique of Victorian femininity's constraints, including the domestic and bodily expectations symbolised by the corset. Browning's heroine explicitly refuses the model of woman-as-ornament, asserting the poet's vocation as incompatible with corset-tight social conformity. The poem was cited by generations of women writers, including Virginia Woolf, as the work that proved a woman's epic was possible.