The Miseducation of Victorian Women Elizabeth Barrett Browning expresses her views on the education or lack of education of Victorian women in her verse novel, Aurora Leigh. In this work, she reflects how Victorian women are not educated for the purposes of becoming capable, enlightened human beings, but are instructed to be ornamental, informed-but not intelligent, compliant housewives. Although, Barrett Browning does not directly state this, I think that she would agree that the “education” that Aurora Leigh and many women of the Victorian era received was not a true education at all. Webster’s dictionary defines “educate” as, “to deve