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A review by sarahheidt
Aurora Leigh by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
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.