Thoroughly interested in the social and political conditions of struggling
Italy, she gave vent to her views and sympathies in a volume of poems,
entitled _Casa Guidi Windows_. Casa Guidi was the name of their residence
in Florence, and the poems vividly describe what she saw from its
windows--divers forms of suffering, injustice, and oppression, which
touched the heart of a tender woman and a gifted poet, and compelled it to
burst forth in song.
AURORA LEIGH.--But by far the most important work of Mrs. Browning is
_Aurora Leigh_: a long poem in nine books, which appeared in 1856, in
which the great questions of the age, social and moral, are handled with
great boldness. It is neither an epic, nor an idyl, nor a tale in verse:
it combines features of them all. It presents her clear convictions of
life and art, and is full of philosophy, largely expressed in the language
of irony and sarcasm. She is an inspired advocate of the intellectual
claims of woman; and the poem is, in some degree, an autobiography: the
identity of the poet and the heroine gives a great charm to the narrative.
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