Love forms the highest of religious imperative, as we have seen in her Drama of Emile. But in this life an on this earth the ways of love prove difficult to follow. To the probings of its injuries, inequities and conflicts found in her other poems and her personal writings, E.B.B. adds the question of its role for the woman artist. Aurora Leigh tells the story of the development of a woman poet largely as the story of her struggle to understand how her life and art can accommodate love. To be an artist means living as a lone woman.
Men literally consume women in the poem.
Aurora Leigh gained notoriety and went into multiple editions for its treatment of prostitution. Marion Erle's mother tries to sold her to a man, and later she is conveyed unknowingly into the hands of a bawd, raped in a continental brothel, and made mad with the indignity. No complete recovery can follow such a thing. Some power of feeling perishes. Only her child can rouse response, and Marion refuse to marry the noble-hearted Romney Leigh, even though marriage would redress dishonour.