Because of its importance in the history of the verse novel and the history of women’s writing, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856) has overshadowed the works of other female verse novelists in Victorian studies scholarship. By focusing on non-canonical works by four understudied women poets writing in the late nineteenth century— Augusta Webster’s “Lota” (1867), Violet Fane’s Denzil Place: A Story in Verse (1875), Emily Pfeiffer’s The Rhyme of the Lady of the Rock, and How It Grew (1884), and Emily Hickey’s “Michael Villiers, Idealist” (1891)—this dissertation expands our understanding of both women’s poetry and the verse novel in the Victorian period. It demonstrates that the genre was taken up in multiple ways after Aurora Leigh by women poets who, like EBB, addressed urgent and controversial social and political issues—such as parliamentary enfranchisement, adultery, marital rape, political sovereignty and land use in the Scottish Highlands, as well as socialism and the Irish Question— through inventive and complex generic combinations. This dissertation does not outline a teleological development of genre but, rather, recovers works through case studies that offer microhistories of verse novels at particular historical moments in order to expand the canon and definition of the Victorian verse novel. / Graduate / 2020-04-25