Being observed, When observation is not sympathy, Is just being tortured.  —Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh, 1857. In her lifetime, Elizabeth Browning was hailed as Britain’s greatest ever woman poet and Aurora Leigh was considered first significant literature on female independence. According to Virginia Woolf: “Rather it (Aurora Leigh) is a masterpiece in embryo: a work whose genius floats diffused and fluctuating in some prenatal stage waiting the final