The theme I have chosen for this essay is related with the situation of the women in England during 19 th century. To do this I will focus my essay in the figure of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, a woman who criticised the feminine “compassion” and saw the marriage as a disastrous institution. It is worthy of remark that Elizabeth did not receive the conservative education of the girls of her age. She studied Italian, Greek and Hebrew instead of learning how to sew or to be a perfect wife.

In the first decades of 19 th century women suffered exclusion in the labour and public area. Besides, the medical and science opinion of the epoch declared the subordination of the personality of the woman to her condition of reproductive animal of the specie. Therefore, the “territory” of the women was the home; she had to take care and to decorate it, and, of course, she had to care and to embellish herself.

There were some works such as the domestic service or the dressmaking industry which were suitable for many married women to allow them to increase the family incomes without breaking their role expected for housewives. But we have to keep in mind that the wages that were given to women were scarce because their work was worst-paid than the male. Besides an aspect worthy to be remarked is the fact that in the last decades of the Nineteenth Century the growth of new professions such as teaching or health carers offered new job opportunities to women. These new professions were suitable works for women in the sense that they did not break with the ‘female ideal' although either way women had lots of difficulties to get one of these employments.

Another feature I would like to stress is female illiteracy. During Nineteenth Century the average of women's illiteracy was higher than men's. Only the daughters of accommodated families received education in their own home. The daughters of middle-class families which had not too many resources used to go to small “schools”. In these “schools” there were personnel who were not qualified and they only taught a very basic culture and some abilities to be handled in their future as housewives or low rank workers.

All this features made women socially inferior to men in all classes and here is where accommodated and well educated women of the time (as it is the case of Elizabeth Barrett) fought for equality between sexes, denouncing in some of their writings, the injustices that women had to suffer.

One of the texts that criticize these injustices is the narrative poem of Elizabeth Barrett Browning called “ Aurora Leigh” .

“Aurora Leigh” was published in 1857. This book is a novel written in verse, and it deals with women and children oppression. In this work, Elizabeth writes about the triumph of the woman poet and about her work. In “ Aurora Leigh” the intimate space of the heart is explored as only a woman could do. The desire of love of Aurora goes along with the desire of being recognized as great poet as it is clearly reflected in line 4 of the second book “ Woman and artist,–either incomplete ” and in lines 29-31 of the same book “ The worthiest poets have remained uncrowned/Till death has bleached their/foreheads to the bone, /And so with me it must be ” and in line 1233 of the second book too “ I'm writing like a poet ” . This passionate desire was Elizabeth 's aspiration. Elizabeth Barrett would make use of the language of the heart, very sentimental, and this language will be understood like feminist writing.

Unfortunately, Elizabeth was also discriminated and demised. After the death of William Wordsworth, Elizabeth was proposed to become a Poet Laureate. This distinction was never before offered to a woman although finally it was granted to Tennyson. This fact was also reflected in her long poem “ Aurora Leigh ”.

Another feature that we can see in this poem is that during the first half of the 19 th Century the woman had lost the legal identity inside the marriage that would be partly recovered again in 1857 with Divorce Act. This could be seen in “ Aurora Leigh” too where ideas of treason against husband have been developed. This fact could be cause of scandal among the society of her time as it is shown in lines 91-93 of the seventh book “ Yet she herself, /A wife, I think, had scandals of her own, /A lover, not her husband .” In short, the marriage, with its charms and disenchantments, the desired maternity or the unwanted one, the religious and sexual passion, the ‘lost woman' (the single mother woman) and the prostitute would become the fundamental topics that nourished her work.

In order to finish with my essay, I would like to say that Barrett largely employed the symbol of the bird in a cage through all her work. Just one of those examples can be seen in book 1 lines 307-310: “ She had lived/ A sort of cage-bird life, born in a cage/Accounting that to leap from perch to perch /Was act and joy enough for any bird ” . This symbol was not only used by Elizabeth but also by some other important artists of the epoch. Several paintings, such as The Pet (1853) by Walter Howell Deverell explored the precariousness of women's social roles.

Let's take a look at this painting trying to find out answers to ambiguous questions like: Who is the real ‘pet' in this picture? Is it the caged bird, the bird perched beside the young woman, the dog at her feet, or the woman herself? In the picture shown beneath, we can extract several conclusions. The cage bird is held by a woman, not by a man what it could mean that the situation of women in this epoch was very close to the situation of a bird in a cage. Both of them are deprived of their liberties, now that the bird is in a cage as well as the woman, whose cage is the house. Furthermore, in the picture, the woman is placed inside a house, not in the open air, in an open space; in my opinion the house is symbolizing the women's cage.

Other observation is that, the woman seems to kiss the cage where the bird is. It could be seen like an act of mutual compassion because, they are two beings that, were born in freedom, but the society has been the responsible of their imprisionment.