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3.63 AVERAGE
3.63 AVERAGE
Arguably the first verse-novel. Very interesting read. I love Victorian Poetry but I kept finding it difficult to adjust to reading it as a novel.
challenging
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
challenging
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
I don't know why more people haven't read this.
(I mean, I know why.... It's a Victorian novel in iambic pentameter.... But still...)
(I mean, I know why.... It's a Victorian novel in iambic pentameter.... But still...)
«se necesita algo más que pasión para hacer a un hombre, o un libro, que es un hombre también».
Elizabeth Barrett Browning es un prodigio de la literatura que, a pesar de ser referencia para Virginia Woolf, Edgar Allan Poe y Emily Dickinson, no goza del reconocimiento que se merece. Aurora Leigh es un amanecer de ideas lucidísimas sobre el amor, la independencia de la mujer artista y escritora, y la defensa ferviente de los derechos humanos y de la clase obrera.
¡Leed a Elizabeth, leed a Aurora!
Elizabeth Barrett Browning es un prodigio de la literatura que, a pesar de ser referencia para Virginia Woolf, Edgar Allan Poe y Emily Dickinson, no goza del reconocimiento que se merece. Aurora Leigh es un amanecer de ideas lucidísimas sobre el amor, la independencia de la mujer artista y escritora, y la defensa ferviente de los derechos humanos y de la clase obrera.
¡Leed a Elizabeth, leed a Aurora!
‘Stimulating and boring, ungainly and eloquent, monstrous and exquisite, all by turns, it overwhelms and bewilders; but, nevertheless it still commands our interest and inspires our respect … We laugh, we protest, we complain—it is absurd, it is impossible, we cannot tolerate this exaggeration a moment longer—but, nevertheless, we read to the end enthralled.’
That’s Virginia Woolf about this poem, quoted at the end of the introduction, in which we also read:
All quite true, and the introduction and the notes are helpful.
Readers considering buying the digital version of this edition, though, ought to be warned it has terrible formatting. There's still a small number of OCR mistakes in the introduction at least, but especially the poetry is laid out in such a way that makes it unpleasant to read on a standard e-reader (even on the large 10 inch screen of the Kobo Elipsa). I won't go into the boring detail of it. Suffice to say that I used a free Australian Gutenberg edition to read the text of the poem, and only opened this e-book on another device to consult the notes while doing so. The free edition was much better formatted.
That’s Virginia Woolf about this poem, quoted at the end of the introduction, in which we also read:
Aurora Leigh is made up of a large number of ingredients held together by the creative furia of the author. The poem is a self-confident bravura performance, and it is the performance itself, rather than any single ingredient, that is its most striking feature. Aurora Leigh unscrupulously mixes genres (novel, autobiography, social satire, tract for the times, treatise on poetics, theodicy), subjects (geographically ranging from the slums of London to the New Jerusalem), and themes (sexual, vocational, aesthetic, social, religious), and holds them all suspended in a cornucopian fluency of discourse that makes use of what Hippolyte Taine, an early admirer of the poem, described as ‘a system of notation … created from instant to instant, out of anything and everything’.
All quite true, and the introduction and the notes are helpful.
Readers considering buying the digital version of this edition, though, ought to be warned it has terrible formatting. There's still a small number of OCR mistakes in the introduction at least, but especially the poetry is laid out in such a way that makes it unpleasant to read on a standard e-reader (even on the large 10 inch screen of the Kobo Elipsa). I won't go into the boring detail of it. Suffice to say that I used a free Australian Gutenberg edition to read the text of the poem, and only opened this e-book on another device to consult the notes while doing so. The free edition was much better formatted.
Really enjoyed this, though I didn't get many of the allusions and the flowery language got to be a bit much.
Just don't have the time to really get into it right now, still planning to read eventually
I'm teaching this epic poem in my Victorian Poetry class this month, which has given me a chance to read it again for the first time in several years. I first read Aurora Leigh as a first-year college student in 1994 and was utterly blown away by the fact that a Victorian poem addressed so frankly the kinds of questions I was thinking about as a young woman in the late twentieth century. What kind of work should I do in the world? What kind of work did the world need? Could a poet help make the world better? How could romantic relationships and a vocation or calling go together? Where might child-bearing fit into a creative life? And the wild plot twists also hooked me--the ways that completely unforeseen developments turned up seemingly every twenty pages, yet then seemed completely organic to the poem's narrative as it developed.
I've had to read Aurora Leigh several more times in classes I've taken, and I've taught it four or five times in my own college classrooms. This semester, I've been thrilled by the fact that my 20-year-old students have been saying, "How have we never heard of this before?"
If you think that Victorian literature is all--and that Victorian people (especially women) were all--stodgy and boring and shortsighted and strait laced, this book-length poem will complicate your thinking, as long as you're patient and let yourself get into reading it. It won't take long for it to feel as though you're reading a novel. And then you might find yourself not wanting to put it down.
I've had to read Aurora Leigh several more times in classes I've taken, and I've taught it four or five times in my own college classrooms. This semester, I've been thrilled by the fact that my 20-year-old students have been saying, "How have we never heard of this before?"
If you think that Victorian literature is all--and that Victorian people (especially women) were all--stodgy and boring and shortsighted and strait laced, this book-length poem will complicate your thinking, as long as you're patient and let yourself get into reading it. It won't take long for it to feel as though you're reading a novel. And then you might find yourself not wanting to put it down.