Elizabeth Barrett Browning, E.B.B. (1806-1861)
Aurora Leigh (1856): Background and Reading Questions
Background
“It was in the middle of these two Italian volumes [Casa Guidi Windows (1851) and Poems Before Congress (1860)], though, that Barrett Browning published her most extensive, controversial, challenging and thought-provoking work, Aurora Leigh (1856). A nine-book epic which follows the development of the eponymous heroine into a successful poet, Aurora Leigh is radical both in terms of content and style. Dealing with issues such as industrialization, women’s education, the fallen woman, socialism, and life in the new urban spaces, and full of intricate imagery and challenging rhetoric, the work is a hybrid form which Barrett Browning termed her “novel-poem.”[1] And right at the very heart of this poem is Barrett Browning’s assertion of the need to tackle modern concerns and not be caught in the past:
… if there’s room for poets in this world
A little overgrown, (I think there is)
Their sole work is to represent the age,
Their age, not Charlemagne’s,—this live, throbbing age,
That brawls, cheats, maddens, calculates, aspires,
And spends more passion, more heroic heat,
Betwixt the mirrors of its drawing-rooms,
Than Roland with his knights at Roncesvalles. (Book V, ll. 200-07)
‘Never flinch,’ Aurora asserts (l. 213), but deal boldly with modern life. Certainly, it was this unflinching stance that Barrett Browning herself adopted, both in her major poem and throughout her career overall. Her style may not have been conventional and reception of her work would therefore always be mixed – the Dublin University Review considered Aurora Leigh ‘coarse in expression and unfeminine in thought,’ for example, while the novelist George Eliot considered it “the greatest poem” by “a woman of genius”[2]– yet Barrett Browning was never fazed by criticism and would continue to be a risk-taker in both style and subject matter to the end.
Background Text is a derivative of “Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Style, Subject, and Reception,” ©The British Library Board, licensed under CC-BY-4.0
- Is the first book of Aurora Leigh primarily a text about:
-
- Parenting;
- Art and artworks;
- Nation and home, specifically Italy/England; or
- Education?
Choose one and be prepared to explain why you see this issue/concern as the primary focus of the book. Use specific examples (quoted by book and page number) from the text to support your answer. [Page numbers are indicated in the text in brackets.]
2. If you were to write an essay about the books of Aurora Leigh that we’ve read (1, 2, 5) what would your focus be? What is the predominant concern that connects these three books? Sketch out what ground your essay would cover, and note passages that you would use to develop your claims.
3. If you have read Jane Eyre, what connections do you see between E.B.B.’s Aurora Leigh and Brontë’s Jane Eyre?
- The Browning’s Correspondence, ed. by Phillip Kelley and Scott Lewis, 20 vols. (London: Wedgestone Press, 1992), x, p. 102. ↵
- Dublin University Review, quoted in Aurora Leigh, ed. by Cora Kaplan (London: Virago, 1978), p. 13; George Eliot, Westminster Review, January 1857, quoted in Aurora Leigh, ed. by Margaret Reynolds (New York: Norton, 1996), p. 407. ↵
