From the time when Elizabeth Barrett Browning dashed off the greater part of 'Lady Geraldine's Courtship' in response to a demand from her publisher for 'more copy,' she had cherished the design of writing a complete poetical romance, of which the scene should be laid in the present time amid the seemingly unromantic surroundings of modern society. When, therefore, she had become a little wonted to married life in Italy and had delivered her soul of the first ardent though fluctuating emotions excited by the earlier stages of the Italian struggle for independence, she set about the execution of her previous project. The narrative poem of Aurora Leigh, her most sustained and considerable if not her most symmetrical and beautiful work, was begun in Florence, or at the Baths of Lucca, in the early fifties, and continued during the summers of 1855 and 1856, which the Brownings passed in England, and the intervening winter, when they were living in Paris, in a small apartment on the Rue du Colisée. It was finally completed in England, in the London house of John Kenyon, Elizabeth's generous cousin, and the faithful friend of both poets, who lived only a few weeks after "Aurora Leigh" had received its dedication to him, in October, 1856. The first edition appeared during the Christmas holidays of that year, and bears the imprint London: Chapman & Hall, 1857.