A review by eheslosz
Aurora Leigh by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

challenging reflective slow-paced

4.5

 This was at times wonderful and compelling and a page-turner, and also at other times extremely slow and tedious and unexciting. EBB has some wonderful poetic moments; so many quotes and passages of blank verse that I would happily learn by heart and have stored in me forever. I particularly loved Book Five where Aurora is philosophising about writing and art and the role of the poet and the woman poet. Also the way she illustrates the beauty of Italy and compares it to England, and the way she talks about reading and writing is always exquisite. 

 

Sometimes I struggled to follow the plot (and there is actually quite a lot of plot, and dialogue, and this didn’t interest me as much as the philosophising) because I would read ‘Aurora Leigh’ closely the way I always read poetry, soaking up the language and the sounds. But this is not just poetry, it’s a verse novel, and there is plot to follow. I loved Marian Erle, but didn’t care much for Romney Leigh and how all relationships seem to circle around him. Then again, this is subverted quite interestingly towards the end – but no more, no spoilers! 

 

Still, what EBB did with the form is so impressive. From her letters (included in this Norton Critical Edition) I could tell that she had come up with the concept of the form of ‘Aurora Leigh’ before its plot. She uses the epic poem form but makes the story modern, female and domestic, not a grand masculine battle narrative. This is satisfyingly relevant to the “philosophising”, as I now call it, of Aurora about poetry in Book Five, as she argues that poets’ ‘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.’ Apparently this is an attack at Tennyson? Haven’t read into it myself. 

 

The inner life of women is properly explored, in all its elevated moments (Aurora Leigh as an artist and spiritual being) but also the gritty domesticity and disturbing abuse experienced by lower class women (Marian Erle, whose name is an indicative pun: marry an Earle). Arguably EBB is condescending and privileged in that regard. Virginia Woolf has an interesting take on this in ‘Flush’, which is a comic retelling of EBB losing her dog (Flush) to Victorian dog-nappers in the slums of London, demanding a ransom for the pets of ladies. 

 

I also really enjoyed the metaphysical aspect of ‘Aurora Leigh’: the eponymous protagonist is the narrator of the novel, and starts with much self-awareness (‘I, writing thus…’) in a wonderful empowering way, but ALSO the fictional Aurora Leigh is a poet who writes an autobiographical verse novel about herself called “Aurora Leigh”. Confusing, yes. And kind of funny that EBB gives the fictional Aurora a popular readership and fans whose letters she responds to etc, almost as if manifesting her own success with this book! 

 

Next long verse text I want to read is ‘Paradise Lost’, which will be difficult but I’m looking forward to it, and I think it will be interesting to read alongside ‘Middlemarch’, which I will probably have on the go for a good while.