Called by critics a confessional “novel in verse,” Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh represented a sustained cry for human intellectual and creative freedom, more specifically, for women’s independence. A Künstlerroman, or story of the maturation of a young writer, the poem combines a range of forms and rhythms, including sonnet, verse drama, ballad, and blank verse, to produce what later critics termed a feminist poetic.

The novel form gave Browning a freer voice than her traditional genre of poetry as she attacked the lack of quality education and the civic freedom granted women in a patriarchal 19th-century Victorian society. Her targets include utopian socialism and poverty. While the poem assumes a first-person narration, it is not autobiographical. However, Aurora’s name symbolizes new life, connected with the dawn of a new day and the early-morning baptismal dew, and Browning suggests that all poets should assume a new voice.

It begins with the death in Italy of Aurora’s Florentine mother, symbolizing a fragmentation of the family and of Aurora’s sense of self-identity. Her grieving English father pays an artist to capture his dead wife’s essence in a painting that chills Aurora. She sees her mother in the portrait as “Ghost, fiend, and angel, fairy, witch, and sprite, / A dauntless Muse,” suggesting the universal mother’s positive and negative effects on her daughters, as she too often trains her daughter to take her place in an oppressive society.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Aurora’s British aunt does just that, when the girl joins her in England at age 13, following her father’s death. She literally enters her father’s land, enduring a further separation from her mother by leaving Italy behind.

When Aurora observes her surrogate mother’s orderly braids, wound tightly “As if for taming accidental thoughts,” she sees her as “A sort of cage-bird” who had been taught that “to leap from perch to perch / Was act and joy enough for any bird.” The discipline exerted on Aurora, mainly by organized religion, does not hobble her imagination, although her aunt “instructed piety” because “She misliked women who are frivolous.” Aurora learns that “The works of women are symbolical” and many “pine / To a sick, inodorous light,” but her soul endures. She “had relations in the Unseen, and drew / The elemental nutriment and heat / From nature, as earth feels the sun at nights,” thus subverting the traditional symbol of the moon as woman who has no light of its own to the stronger female image of nature, that draws the sun’s warmth and stores it as her own. Aurora’s “inner life” sustains her as she exists in isolation to pursue the artist’s life.

The plot contrasts Aurora with her cousin Romney Leigh, a philanthropist who supplies the physical needs of the poor but ignores their spiritual needs. Romney replaces Aurora’s father as head of the family, thus causing more self-identity conflict for Aurora as he becomes her stepfather of sorts. He personifies the authority that England represents for the girl. The conflict between the two escalates as Romney proposes to Aurora in Book II, and she refuses. She answers Romney’s dramatic proposal, “You misconceive the question like a man, / Who sees the woman as the complement / Of his sex merely.” Romney feels Aurora’s need to pursue her art is unseemly and unconventional. She explains that she aspires to the poet’s life, and although Romney may be correct in suggesting her unworthy to be a poet, she will “try out your perhapses, sir, / And if I fail . . . why, burn me up my straw / Like other false works—I’ll not ask for grace.”

Aurora will meet and interact with other women who act as potential wives for Romney, including the orphaned Marian Erle, beaten and abandoned by an alcoholic father and left with a mother who tries to prostitute her, and the vicious, seductive Lady Waldemar. Themes of duplicitous motherhood continue, as Lady Waldemar evokes thoughts of maternity with her full breasts, tricking Marian into believing she will act as the girl’s mother. However, her betrayal lands Marian in a French brothel to be drugged and raped, and as a result, she becomes an unwilling mother.

In Book V, Aurora shares her theories of poetry, emphasizing that poets must write about their own age: “I do distrust the poet who discerns / No character or glory in his times.” She criticizes the popular romance genre as apolitical, sharing her belief that artists have an obligation to reflect on reform issues, when she writes in disgust of the poet who “trundles back his soul five hundred years . . . / To sing—oh, not of lizard of toad / Alive I’ the ditch there . . . / But of some black chief, half knight, half sheep-lifter, / Some beauteous dame, half chattel and half queen.”

Some cite the fact that all characters end up reuniting in Italy as a weak plot convenience, but it is necessary for Aurora Leigh to return to her mother’s land to resolve her issues of reproduction as an artist. Romney has been humbled, as many later Byronic heroes, such as Charlotte Brontë’s Mr. Rochester, would be, through the purification of fire. Romney, like Rochester, is blinded in order to regain some inner vision.

In the end, Aurora recognizes her error in limiting her views only to those of the artist, causing her to reject all personal ties in order to pursue her ambitious vocation, while Romney agrees that his vision of care for the poor has also been too limited.

Aurora Leigh received mixed critical response, as its strong political bent offended some. However, it remained popular with the reading public, appearing in 20 editions before the century’s end. Now widely anthologized in excerpts, it remains a popular work, reminding modern readers of Browning’s importance to her age.

Bibliography

Reynolds, Margaret, ed. Aurora Leigh: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism. New York: W.W. Norton, 1996.
Gilbert, Sandra M. “From Patria to Matria: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Risorgimento.” Publication of the Modern Language Association 99, no. 2 (March 1984): 194–211.
Mermin, Dorothy. “The Female Poet and the Embarrassed Reader: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese.’” English Literary History 48, no. 2 (Summer 1981): 351–67.

Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis

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