The resemblance between the Brownings, although many exist, are often more fancied than real. They did not revise each other’s writings. Neither knew what the other had been doing until it was done. ‘Aurora Leigh’ was two-thirds written before her husband saw a word of it. Nor did he know of the existence of the ‘Portuguese Sonnets’ till a considerable time after the marriage, when she showed them to him for the first time, and he, in his delight, persuaded her to put them in print. Otherwise they might never have been published; for with her characteristic modesty she at first thought them unworthy even of his reading, to say nothing of the whole world’s. She felt so doubtful of the merit of ‘Aurora Leigh’ that at one time she laid even that aside with the idea never to publish it.
Method of writing.
Her method of writing was to seize the moment when the mood was upon her, and to fix her thought hurriedly on the nearest slip of paper. She was sensitive to interruption while composing, but was too shy to permit even her friends to see her engaged at her work. When the servant announced a visitor, the busy poet suddenly hid her paper and pen, and received her guest as if in perfect leisure for the visit. Giving her mornings to the instruction of her little son, and holding herself ready after twelve o’clock to give welcome to any comer, it was a wonder to many how she could find the needed time to study or write.
Her revisions.
She made many and marked changes in her poems in successive editions. These show her fastidious taste. She was never satisfied to let a stanza remain as it was. Most of these amendments are for the better, but some for the worse, as orators who correct their printed speeches sometimes spoil the best parts. In many cases she substituted not only new rhymes but new thoughts, turning the verses far out of their old channels; in others she struck out whole lines and passages as superfluous; in others she made fitter choice of single words, so adding vividness to the expression.
Theodore Tilton: Memorial Preface to ‘Last Poems of Mrs. Browning’.
How ‘Aurora Leigh’ was written.
I am still too near ‘Aurora Leigh’ to be quite able to see it all; my wife used to write it, and lay it down to hear our child spell, or when a visitor came,—it was thrust under a cushion then. At Paris, a year ago last March, she gave me the first six books to read, I never having seen a line before. She then wrote the rest, and transcribed them in London, where I read them also. I wish, in one sense, that I had written and she had read it.
Robert Browning: Letter to Leigh Hunt. ‘Correspondence of Leigh Hunt,’ edited by his son.