In the last chapter I explored some of the ways in which EBB shaped and reconfigured her poetics across the course of her career, demonstrating how she engaged with and revised inherited traditions in order to establish herself as a major poet who examines, questions and critiques her ‘live, throbbing age’ (Aurora Leigh, 5:203). The ‘home’ which she found for herself as a poet was carefully and precisely fashioned and it subsequently enabled her to master a wide range of forms and styles and to speak out on a wide range of social and political concerns. As with Aurora Leigh, EBB viewed poetry as her true vocation from the outset and would always confidently assert, ‘I too have … work to do’ (2:455).

In this chapter, I start to consider the ways in which the speakers and protagonists of EBB's poems are also often depicted in the search for a ‘home’, the nature of which, as I suggested in the preface, is shifting and fluid and defined in multiple ways. I pay particular attention here to four poems that EBB wrote across the 1830s and 1840s – two of them the lead poems of key volumes – which explore what I have termed in the chapter title the search for a spiritual home. Religion was always important to EBB's poetics and yet this is an area which has only recently received serious critical attention. In her 1989 study, Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Origins of a New Poetry, for example, Dorothy Mermin suggested that EBB's religious poems are somewhat simplistic and naïve in their treatment of spiritual issues, and certainly far more so than the works of other religious poets of the period such as Christina Rossetti and Gerard Manley Hopkins. This reading may partly arise because, as Julia Neuberger notes in the introduction to her anthology of women's spiritual poetry, The Things That Matter (1992), feminist critics have often tended to react against the seemingly ‘private, unassertive nature’ of religious writing. Over the last ten years or so, however, EBB's religious poetry has started to be reassessed through the work of critics such as Linda M. Lewis and Karen Dieleman, work which reveals EBB's theological and spiritual engagement to be far more nuanced, intellectual and potentially radical than previously suggested.