In her lifetime, she wrote the poem Aurora Leigh which became one of the most famous poem in the world

Elizabeth Barrett Browning's epic poem/novel Aurora Leigh was published in 1856. The poem is composed of nine books (the woman's number, the number of the Sibylline Books), and it is written in blank verse. The story is told in the first person from Aurora's perspective; Marian Erle, another main character, is an abused self-taught child of traveling parents. Florence, Malvern, London, and Paris are all mentioned in the poem. The poem makes references to modern books like Corinne ou l'Italie by Anne Louise Germaine de Sand and the works of George Sand as well as biblical and classical history and mythology.

In Books 1–5, Aurora tells the story of her life, from her early years to the age of roughly 27, then in Books 6–9, the story catches up with her, and she reports events in diary form. The author styled the poem "a novel in verse", and referred to it as "the most mature of my works, and the one into which my highest convictions upon Life and Art have entered". The scholar Deirdre David asserts that Barrett Browning's work in Aurora Leigh renders her "a major figure in any consideration of the nineteenth-century woman writer and of Victorian poetry in general". John Ruskin called it the greatest long poem of the nineteenth century.