Study guide
Aurora Leigh
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Overview
- Published
- November 1856 by Chapman and Hall, London, with 1857 on the title page; revised in later editions, most fully in the fourth (1859)
- Author
- Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861), then living in Florence with Robert Browning
- Genre
- A 'novel in verse': a first-person Künstlerroman (the story of an artist's growth) that also claims the scope of a modern epic
- Form
- Blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter), some 11,000 lines in nine books
- Dedication
- To the poet's cousin and benefactor John Kenyon, who died a few weeks after publication
- Narrator
- Aurora Leigh, a poet, writing her own life; the early books are retrospective, the later ones read almost like a journal
- Setting
- Florence and the Tuscan hills; rural Shropshire; London in the 1840s; Paris; Florence again (Bellosguardo)
- Main characters
- Aurora Leigh; her cousin Romney Leigh; Marian Erle; Lady Waldemar
- Key themes
- The woman poet and her vocation; art and love; poetry against social reform; class and the 'fallen woman'; motherhood; sight and blindness
- References
- By book and line (AL 5.213–15), counting whole verse lines as in the standard editions
Context
Elizabeth Barrett was born in 1806 at Coxhoe Hall, County Durham, and grew up at Hope End, her father's estate under the Malvern Hills in Herefordshire, the landscape in which she would later set the birth of Marian Erle. Largely self-taught, she read Greek with passion, published an epic on Marathon at fourteen and a translation of Aeschylus in her twenties, and by the time of her Poems of 1844 she was among the best-known poets in England. Chronic illness and a possessive father kept her for years an invalid in Wimpole Street, until in 1846 she secretly married Robert Browning and left with him for Italy. They settled in Florence, at Casa Guidi, where their son was born in 1849 and where most of Aurora Leigh was written (Forster 1988).
The idea was old. In a letter to Browning early in 1845 she spoke of wanting to write a kind of novel-poem, one that would enter the drawing-rooms of modern life and speak its truth plainly, without the mask of antiquity. The poem she finished a decade later is exactly that: a long first-person narrative, in blank verse, about a contemporary woman who becomes a poet. It was published by Chapman and Hall in November 1856, though its title page bears the date 1857, and it was dedicated to John Kenyon, the cousin whose generosity had given the Brownings independence. It went through several editions within a few years (Browning 1992).
The poem belongs to a crowded moment. Its concerns with factory hands and seamstresses, with charity and its failures, link it to the 'condition of England' novels of Gaskell, Kingsley and Dickens; its heroine's struggle for a vocation answers Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), which it echoes openly at its close; and its heroine-poet descends from Madame de Staël's Corinne (1807), the improvising genius of Italy whom Barrett Browning had read in her youth. The figure of Romney, the earnest reformer who tries to remake society by systems, draws on the Christian socialism of the 1840s and on the French socialist Charles Fourier, whose planned communities (phalanstères) the poem names and mocks (Moers 1976) (David 1987).
Barrett Browning wanted the poem to be her most mature work, 'the most mature of my works', as the dedication puts it, and she thought of it as an argument as well as a story. Through Aurora she claims that poetry must deal with its own age rather than with knights and togas, that a woman can be a great poet, and that the inner life of the spirit matters more to social change than any programme of reform. These claims made the poem a success and a scandal at once: readers were thrilled by its energy, while reviewers were shocked by its frankness about prostitution, rape and illegitimate birth (Browning 1996).
After a long eclipse, in which the poet was remembered chiefly for Sonnets from the Portuguese and for her romance with Browning, Aurora Leigh was recovered in the 1970s by feminist criticism. Ellen Moers, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, and above all Cora Kaplan's edition for the Women's Press (1978) made it a central text in the history of women's writing, and it is now read as one of the major long poems of the Victorian age (Moers 1976) (Gilbert 1979) (Browning 1978).
Plot overview
Aurora Leigh, writing in her late twenties, tells the story of her life. She was born in Florence to an English father and an Italian mother who died when she was four. Her father, a scholar, brought her up in the Tuscan hills and died when she was thirteen, leaving her to be sent to England. There, in Shropshire, his sister trains her in the polite accomplishments thought fit for a young lady, while Aurora secretly educates herself among her father's books and discovers that she is a poet. On her twentieth birthday her cousin Romney Leigh, heir to the family estate and a passionate social reformer, finds her crowning herself with ivy, dismisses women's poetry, and asks her to marry him and help in his work. She refuses. When her aunt dies she goes to London to live by her pen.
Some years later, now a known writer, Aurora is visited by the beautiful, worldly Lady Waldemar, who is in love with Romney and wants Aurora to stop his marriage to Marian Erle, a seamstress born to brutal, wandering parents. Aurora meets Marian and is moved by her story, and Romney explains that he will marry her as a sign of the union of classes. On the wedding day, before a church crowded with rich and poor, Marian fails to appear; she has written that she cannot marry him, and the poor guests riot. Aurora suspects Lady Waldemar's hand.
Two years later Aurora, successful but lonely and believing Romney about to marry Lady Waldemar, sets out for Italy. In Paris she glimpses Marian's face in the crowd and finds her living in poverty with a baby son. Marian tells her story: a former maid of Lady Waldemar took her abroad with a promise of a new life and delivered her to a brothel, where she was drugged and raped; she escaped, half mad, and bore the child alone. Aurora takes mother and child to Florence and makes a home with them in a tower at Bellosguardo, convinced that Romney is now Lady Waldemar's husband.
One evening Romney himself arrives. He has read Aurora's latest book and been changed by it; his phalanstery at Leigh Hall has failed, the villagers he tried to help have burned the house, and he has been gravely ill. He is not married to Lady Waldemar. He offers to marry Marian and adopt her child, but Marian, who has given her life to her son, refuses him. Aurora at last confesses that she has always loved Romney, and learns that he was blinded in the fire. The poem ends at dawn, as the two pledge themselves to a shared work of love and art, and Aurora describes for the blind man a vision of the New Jerusalem rising over the hills.
Book by book
Book 1: First Book
Summary
Aurora announces that, having written much for others, she will now write her story for herself. She recalls her Florentine childhood: a mother who died when she was four, a grieving English father who withdrew with her into the mountains above Pelago, and a portrait of her mother painted after death, in which the child sees by turns a Muse, a Madonna, a Medusa and a Lamia. When she is thirteen her father dies with the words 'Love, my child, love, love!' and she is sent to England.
Her father's sister, a correct and narrow Englishwoman in Shropshire, sets out to make her a lady: some French and German, a little music, cross-stitch and the conduct books that teach a woman her place. Aurora survives by pretending to submit while living an inner life of her own. She finds her father's books in a garret and reads everything; poetry seizes her, and she begins, clumsily, to write. The book also introduces her cousin Romney Leigh, the grave young heir of Leigh Hall, and the painter Vincent Carrington, and it ends with Aurora's adolescent apprenticeship to verse.
Analysis
Book 1 rewrites the opening of a Bildungsroman, the novel of education, for a girl. Its comedy is aimed at the aunt's programme, which treats womanhood as a set of decorative skills, and its pathos at the motherless child, who must find in books, nature and her own imagination what a mother might have given. The portrait of the dead mother, which shifts from angel to monster as the child looks at it, has become a famous emblem in feminist criticism of the contradictory images through which women are seen and must learn to see themselves (Gilbert 1979).
The book also lays down the poem's double inheritance. From her Italian mother Aurora takes passion and the warmth of the south; from her English father, learning and the habit of grief. The scenes of reading in the garret, where she reads her way through everything she finds, make literary vocation a matter of the body as well as the mind, and set up the poem's long argument that a woman's gifts are wasted by an education designed to make her pleasing (Leighton 1986) (Mermin 1989).
I write. My mother was a Florentine, Whose rare blue eyes were shut from seeing me When scarcely I was four years old;
The two words 'I write' come before the mother, the birth, everything: the poem's first act is to assert a woman's authorship of her own story.
The works of women are symbolical. We sew, sew, prick our fingers, dull our sight, Producing what? A pair of slippers, sir,
Aurora's irony about women's needlework: it 'symbolises' a life spent serving men's comfort. The phrase looks forward to the debate in Book 2 about whether women can make real works of art.
Book 2: Second Book
Summary
On the June morning of her twentieth birthday Aurora crowns herself in the garden with a wreath of ivy, playing at the laurel of a poet, and is caught by Romney. He has found her book of verses. In a long debate he argues that the world's suffering needs action, not poems, and that women, being 'personal and passionate', can produce neither a Christ nor a poet; then he asks her to marry him and share his work for the poor. Aurora refuses: he wants a helper for his cause, not a woman he loves, and she will not give up her vocation.
The aunt is furious at the refusal, which throws away the estate that Aurora might have shared. Soon afterwards she is found dead in her chair. Aurora discovers that Romney had tried to settle a fortune of thirty thousand pounds on her by a deed he hoped would pass for the aunt's bequest; she refuses it, keeps only her small inheritance of three hundred pounds, and leaves for London to live by her writing.
Analysis
The proposal scene is the poem's central debate and is carefully balanced. Romney is not a villain: his horror at poverty is sincere and his scorn for idle art has force. Aurora's case is that he loves an idea and wants a wife as a means to it, and that art is itself a kind of work for the world. The dispute pits two Victorian answers to social misery against each other, the reformer's and the poet's, and the rest of the poem will test both (David 1987) (Armstrong 1993).
The ivy crown is a delicate symbol. Aurora rejects the classical bay, which she has no right to yet, and the myrtle of love, and chooses ivy, which clings and climbs; the gesture is both a child's game and a prophecy. The book's opening lines, in which she stands 'Woman and artist,—either incomplete', name the tension the poem sets out to resolve: whether a woman may be both lover and poet without sacrificing one to the other (Cooper 1988).
And looked before and after, as I stood Woman and artist,—either incomplete, Both credulous of completion.
Aurora at twenty: the self is divided between two callings, each of which hopes to be fulfilled. The poem's ending will claim to complete both.
What you love, Is not a woman, Romney, but a cause: You want a helpmate, not a mistress, sir,— A wife to help your ends ... in her no end!
The heart of her refusal. 'Helpmate' echoes the woman made for Adam in Genesis; Aurora insists that a woman is an end in herself, not an instrument.
Book 3: Third Book
Summary
Years have passed. Aurora lives alone in a high room in Kensington, writing for the magazines to pay for the poems she cares about. She describes the drudgery and the small fame of her life, the letters of admirers and cranks, and her dissatisfaction with what she has written so far. A letter from Vincent Carrington mentions Romney's friend Lord Howe and a pretty young admirer, Kate Ward.
Then Lady Waldemar calls. Frank to the point of shamelessness, she confesses that she loves Romney and asks Aurora to stop his marriage to a working girl, Marian Erle. Aurora, refusing to plot, goes to see Marian in a squalid court in St Giles and hears her history: born in a squatter's hut on the Malvern Hills to a drunken father and a brutal mother, beaten, half-starved and taught nothing but what she could pick up from scraps of print, she ran away when her mother tried to sell her to a squire, and fell ill by the roadside. In a hospital she was visited by Romney, who found her work as a seamstress.
Analysis
Book 3 turns the poem into a novel of London. Aurora's account of literary labour is unglamorous and exact, and it treats writing as a trade practised by a single woman for money, a remarkable thing to put at the centre of a poem in 1856. The lark image at the book's opening, in which the bird rises with its song while the human singer stays on earth, expresses her doubt whether art can lift the artist as well as the reader (Leighton 1986).
The book also sets up the poem's triangle of women. Lady Waldemar, sensual, clever and amoral, embodies a society that treats love as appetite and the poor as decoration; Marian embodies the poor as they really live. Aurora's retelling of Marian's story 'with fuller utterance' raises a problem critics have often discussed: the working-class woman's life reaches us in the cultivated idiom of the middle-class narrator, who both gives her a voice and takes it over (Browning 1978).
The music soars within the little lark, And the lark soars. It is not thus with men.
A compact image of the gap between art and its maker: the bird's song carries the bird, but the poet's song leaves the poet behind, in a cold room in London.
Marian Erle Was born upon the ledge of Malvern Hill To eastward, in a hut, built up at night To evade the landlord’s eye, of mud and turf,
Marian's life begins in a squatter's hut, outside property and law. The Malvern Hills were the landscape of the poet's own childhood at Hope End.
Book 4: Fourth Book
Summary
Marian's story continues. Working as a seamstress, she nursed a dying fellow-worker, Lucy Gresham, and there met Romney again; he asked her to marry him, not with romantic love but as a partner in his work and a living sign that rich and poor could be joined. Aurora meets Romney at Marian's lodging and, though uneasy, honours his intention. Lady Waldemar visits Marian, and Aurora suspects that she means harm.
The wedding is held in a fashionable London church. The aristocratic guests sneer and gossip; the poor of St Giles, whom Romney has invited, fill the other side. Marian does not come. A letter is read out in which she says she cannot marry him and will go away for ever. The poor, believing that the girl has been murdered or wronged by the gentry, riot, and Romney is hurt in the confusion. Afterwards Aurora tries to comfort him, and they quarrel again over the uses of art.
Analysis
The wedding scene is the poem's great set piece of social comedy turning to violence. The satire of the drawing-room voices, chattering about Romney's eccentric 'actor-piece', and the grotesque description of the poor, whom even the narrator presents as a frightening mass, show the limits of Romney's dream of union. Critics have been divided about the passage: some read it as a bitter exposure of upper-class contempt, others as evidence of the poem's own fear of the crowd (Browning 1978) (David 1987).
The argument at the end of the book returns to the debate of Book 2 on new ground. Aurora defines art as 'life upon the larger scale', a spiral ascent that rises out of daily experience rather than escaping it. Romney, defeated and bruised, is beginning to doubt his methods, but the reconciliation the poem promises is still far off.
The terrible people, old and poor and blind, Their eyes eat out with plague and poverty
A society guest describes the poor wedding guests in the language of tragedy. The word 'blind' looks forward, unknowingly, to Romney's fate.
What is art, But life upon the larger scale, the higher,
Aurora's reply to Romney's contempt for poetry: art is not an escape from life but life raised and enlarged, a claim the poetics of Book 5 will develop.
Book 5: Fifth Book
Summary
Aurora pauses to reflect on her art. Can she speak in tune with nature and with God? What should a modern poet write? She rejects the view that the age of epic is over: every age seems unheroic to those who live in it, but the poet's task is to represent her own time, its drawing-rooms and streets, rather than Charlemagne or King Arthur. She considers drama and decides that the true modern stage is the soul. Then she returns to her story: she has finished a long, serious book and it has been a success.
At a party at Lord Howe's she meets Lady Waldemar, hears that Romney is to marry her, learns that his community at Leigh Hall is run on Fourier's lines, and declines a proposal from a wealthy suitor brought by Lord Howe. Alone, she feels that her success means nothing without love, and resolves to go home to Italy. She sells her father's books to pay for the journey and leaves for Paris.
Analysis
The first part of Book 5 is the poem's ars poetica, its statement of poetics, and it is one of the most cited passages in Victorian poetry. Against the prestige of classical subjects, Aurora demands an epic of the present, written with the body as well as the mind: the age is imagined as a woman with 'full-veined, heaving, double-breasted' life, whose image the poet must catch 'upon the burning lava of a song'. The maternal figure is deliberate. The woman poet claims epic, the most masculine of genres, by recasting it as nourishment, a breast that later generations will recognise as the one they 'have sucked' (Laird 1991) (Tucker 2008).
The poetics passage also explains the poem's own form. Its rejection of drama for a theatre of the soul and its insistence on contemporary detail justify the mixture of novelistic incident and philosophic reflection that readers then and since have found both exhilarating and baggy. Many critics see in it a deliberate answer to Carlyle's call for heroes and to Tennyson's turn to Arthurian legend (Mermin 1989) (Armstrong 1993).
The critics say that epics have died out With Agamemnon and the goat-nursed gods— I’ll not believe it.
Aurora refuses the common Victorian view that epic belongs to the heroic past. Homer's heroes, she goes on, were only men, and every age is potentially heroic.
Never flinch, But still, unscrupulously epic, catch Upon the burning lava of a song, The full-veined, heaving, double-breasted Age:
The manifesto of the poem. 'Unscrupulously' means without fastidious scruple about what is fit for poetry; lava fuses the poet's molten feeling with the hot, living present, and the 'double-breasted' age is pictured as a nursing mother.
Book 6: Sixth Book
Summary
In Paris Aurora reflects on the French and on the English habit of calling them light. Walking in the city she sees, among the flower-sellers, a face she knows: Marian's. She loses her in the crowd, spends days searching, and at last finds her, and with her a baby. Aurora's first reaction is cold suspicion; Marian answers with fierce dignity and takes her home to her poor lodging, where the child lies asleep.
There Marian tells what happened after she left Romney. Lady Waldemar had worked on her fears that the marriage would ruin him and arranged for a former maid of hers to take Marian to a new life in Australia. Instead the woman brought her to France and sold her into a brothel, where she was drugged and raped. She escaped, wandered the country half mad, found work in France, and bore her son alone. She insists that she was not 'seduced' but murdered.
Analysis
Book 6 confronts head-on the figure of the 'fallen woman', a staple of Victorian fiction and reform writing, and refuses its moral. Marian is not a sinner who must repent and die, as in so many novels, but a victim of violence who survives, and her motherhood is presented as a source of strength and even holiness. Her distinction between seduction and murder rejects the language of feminine weakness and puts the guilt where it belongs (Leighton 1992) (Stone 1995).
The book is also a test of Aurora. Her first, conventional judgement of Marian shows that the woman poet is not free of the prejudices she satirises; her conversion, as she listens, is the beginning of a sisterhood across class. Critics have noted that Marian speaks here with an eloquence close to the narrator's own, a choice that dignifies her but blurs the class difference the poem means to bridge (Browning 1978).
When something floats up suddenly, out there, Turns over ... a dead face, known once alive— So old, so new!
The simile for Aurora's recognition of Marian in the Paris crowd likens it to a drowned face rising to the surface: the girl everyone thought lost returns as if from the dead.
I was not ever, as you say, seduced, But simply, murdered.
Marian rejects the word 'seduced', with its suggestion of consent and sin. The rape is a killing of the self she was, and she will speak of herself afterwards as dead.
Book 7: Seventh Book
Summary
Marian completes her story, and Aurora resolves to take her and the child to Italy as her sister. She writes to Lord Howe, and sends Lady Waldemar a letter of cold accusation. The three travel south through France, by Marseilles and the sea, to Florence, where Aurora settles in a hillside tower at Bellosguardo.
Florence is full of memories, and Aurora is lonely and restless. A letter from Vincent Carrington brings news of his engagement to Kate Ward, of the admiration Aurora's book has won, and of Romney's serious illness, during which Lady Waldemar nursed him. Aurora assumes the marriage has taken place. She reflects at length on the relation of the natural and the spiritual, and of art to truth, in one of the poem's most famous meditations.
Analysis
Book 7 is the poem's still centre. Its journey south reverses the journey of Book 1 and brings Aurora back to the country of her mother; it is no accident that she now becomes a kind of mother herself, in a household of women and a child. The book's meditation on art insists that the spiritual is present in the material world for those who can see it, and that the poet's task is to make others see; the view reflects the interest in Swedenborg's doctrine of correspondences that Barrett Browning shared with many of her contemporaries (Mermin 1989) (Stone 1995).
The narrative here is driven by misunderstanding and by letters, a device of the epistolary novel. Aurora's belief that Romney is married, which the reader may begin to doubt, keeps her love hidden even from herself. Her loneliness in success, contrasted with Carrington's happy and slightly comic courtship of Kate, prepares for the poem's conclusion that art without love is incomplete.
They tell me Lady Waldemar mixed drinks And counted grains, like any salaried nurse, Excepting that she wept too.
Carrington's letter reports Romney's illness. Lady Waldemar's devoted nursing confirms Aurora's mistaken belief that she has become his wife.
Earth’s crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God: But only he who sees, takes off his shoes; The rest sit round it, and pluck blackberries,
The burning bush of Exodus, where Moses removed his shoes on holy ground, becomes every bush in nature. Most people see only blackberries; the poet sees God. The lines are among the most quoted in Victorian verse.
Book 8: Eighth Book
Summary
One evening, as Aurora sits on her terrace, Romney appears. A long night conversation follows, full of crossed purposes: she thinks he has come as Lady Waldemar's husband, he thinks she knows what he has suffered. He tells her that he has read her book and that it lives in him, that her arguments of years ago were right, and that his social schemes have failed because they ignored the inner life.
He also tells her what Vincent's letters left out. The villagers and vagrants he had gathered into his phalanstery at Leigh Hall, turned against the gentleman reformer, set the house on fire and burned it to the ground, destroying with it his ancestors' portraits. He has given up systems and wishes only to do what good he can. Aurora, still believing him married, speaks of Lady Waldemar, and he hands her a letter from that lady which will explain everything.
Analysis
Book 8 reverses the debate of Book 2. Romney now repeats Aurora's own words to her, that 'it takes a soul / To move a body', and concedes that reform must begin within. The burning of Leigh Hall, a revolt of the poor against their benefactor, is the poem's harshest judgement on paternalist reform, and it marks the collapse of the Fourierist experiment the poem has treated with suspicion throughout (David 1987) (Armstrong 1993).
Yet the book does not simply make Aurora the winner. She too has learned that art without love is empty, and her misunderstanding of Romney's situation, held up through the whole book, is a kind of pride. The scene is constructed like a recognition in drama, delayed until the letter of Book 9; many readers find it overlong, others see in the slow approach of the two speakers the poem's insistence that their reconciliation must be earned (Cooper 1988).
He answered,—‘for the book is in my heart, Lives in me, wakes in me, and dreams in me:
Romney, who once dismissed women's verse, now says that Aurora's poem has entered his life. Her art has done the work of conversion his schemes could not.
It takes the ideal, to blow an inch inside The dust of the actual: and your Fouriers failed, Because not poets enough to understand That life develops from within.
Romney quotes back Aurora's own argument from Book 2. The image is of God breathing life into Adam's dust; the social reformers failed because they lacked a poet's understanding of the soul.
Book 9: Ninth Book
Summary
Aurora copies out Lady Waldemar's letter: she did not marry Romney, she nursed him because she loved him, and she denies having intended Marian's ruin, while hating Aurora for having won what she could not. Romney declares that he has come to claim Marian and her child as his wife and son. Marian, entering, refuses him with tenderness and firmness: she does not love him as a wife should, her life belongs to her child, and she will not let him marry her out of pity.
Left alone with Romney, Aurora confesses that she has always loved him. Only then does he reveal that he is blind, struck by a falling beam on the night Leigh Hall burned. They resolve to work together, she as poet and he as her companion in the service of the world, and as dawn breaks over the Tuscan hills Aurora describes to him the vision of a new city of God, whose foundations shine with the twelve precious stones of Revelation.
Analysis
The ending has divided readers more than any other part of the poem. Romney's blindness, after a fire in a great house, clearly recalls the maiming of Rochester at the end of Jane Eyre, and in both cases the hero's humbling makes a marriage of equals possible. Some critics read it as punishment, the patriarch symbolically castrated; others as a necessary humbling of the reformer's worldly vision before he can see spiritually; still others are uneasy that Aurora's achievement seems to culminate in love and service rather than in art (Gilbert 1979) (Browning 1978) (Cooper 1988).
The final lines lift the private love story into a religious and social vision. The couple's union is presented as the reconciliation of the poem's oppositions, art and work, love and duty, spirit and matter, and the New Jerusalem rises in the place of the burned Leigh Hall and the failed phalanstery. Marian's refusal is equally significant: the poem does not marry off its 'fallen woman' but leaves her as an independent mother, a choice that seemed scandalous to some Victorians and has seemed bold to modern readers (Leighton 1992).
Art is much, but love is more. O Art, my Art, thou’rt much, but Love is more!
Aurora's confession. The repetition, capitalised the second time, gives love priority over art, though the poem's last lines will join them rather than rank them.
I saw his soul saw,—‘Jasper first,’ I said, ‘And second, sapphire; third, chalcedony; The rest in order, ... last, an amethyst.’
The poem ends with the foundations of the New Jerusalem (Revelation 21:19–20). The blind Romney 'sees' through Aurora's words, a final image of the poet's office as making others see.
Characters
Aurora and family
- Aurora Leigh
- The narrator and heroine, a poet who tells her life from her Florentine childhood to her late twenties. Proud, ambitious, witty and sometimes harsh in judgement, she refuses to marry Romney at twenty because she will not sacrifice her vocation to his cause. She makes her way as a writer in London, rescues Marian Erle, and learns that her success is incomplete without love. Her name, 'dawn', anticipates the poem's closing sunrise.
- Aurora's father
- An Englishman of the Leigh family and a scholar, who married a young Florentine against his family's wishes. After her death he withdraws with his daughter into the Tuscan mountains, teaches her from his books, and dies when she is thirteen, telling her to love. His library, shipped to England, becomes the source of her self-education.
- Aurora's mother
- A Florentine woman who dies when Aurora is four. She survives in her daughter's memory and in a posthumous portrait onto which the child projects every image of womanhood she meets in her reading, and her absence shapes Aurora's sense of a 'mother-want about the world'.
- Aurora's aunt
- Her father's sister, an unmarried Englishwoman in Shropshire who lives a 'cage-bird life' of propriety. She brings Aurora up as a conventional young lady and hopes to see her marry Romney; she dies soon after Aurora's refusal. She is a comic figure, but the poem also pities her.
- Assunta
- Aurora's Italian nurse in childhood, a warm presence in her memories of Florence.
Romney and his world
- Romney Leigh
- Aurora's cousin and the heir of Leigh Hall, a serious, generous and rather humourless reformer who wants to cure social misery through practical schemes. He proposes to Aurora, then to Marian, as part of his mission, and turns Leigh Hall into a community on Fourier's model. Its burning and his blindness humble him; converted by Aurora's book, he returns to her in Florence as a man who has learned that reform must begin with the soul.
- Lady Waldemar
- A beautiful, witty and unscrupulous aristocrat who loves Romney and takes up his causes to win him. She schemes to break his marriage to Marian, and a former maid of hers betrays Marian into a brothel. Her letter in Book 9 shows a woman more complicated, and more wounded, than the villain Aurora imagined.
- Lord Howe
- A liberal nobleman and friend of Romney and Aurora, given to theories and good will. He is present at the failed wedding, hosts the party in Book 5, and carries messages and proposals between the characters.
- Vincent Carrington
- A rising young painter and friend of Aurora, whose letters keep her informed about London. His love affair with Kate Ward gives the poem a lightly comic subplot of happy courtship.
- Kate Ward
- A young admirer of Aurora who wants to be painted in a cloak like hers and who marries Vincent Carrington.
Marian and others
- Marian Erle
- A working-class girl born in a hut on the Malvern Hills to violent, vagrant parents. Self-taught, gentle and fiercely honest, she becomes a seamstress and agrees to marry Romney, then flees on the wedding day. Betrayed into a brothel and raped, she bears a son whom she loves with total devotion. She refuses Romney's offer of marriage at the end and remains an independent mother.
- Marian's child
- Marian's son, born in France after the rape. For Marian he is the whole meaning of her surviving life; for Aurora, a living rebuke to the morality that would call him illegitimate.
- Marian's mother
- A brutal woman, herself a victim of poverty and drink, who beats her daughter and tries to sell her to a squire, the act that drives Marian to run away.
- Lucy Gresham
- A dying seamstress whom Marian nurses and at whose bedside Romney meets Marian again.
- The maid
- A former servant of Lady Waldemar who takes Marian abroad with promises of a new life and delivers her to a brothel in France.
Themes
The woman poet
Aurora Leigh is the first major English poem to make a woman poet its hero and to follow her from childhood to maturity. It shows the obstacles in her way: an education designed to make her decorative, the contempt of men like the young Romney who think women cannot think universally, and the assumption that a woman must choose between love and art. Aurora's story is an answer to all of these, and the poem's own existence is the proof of its argument (Moers 1976) (Mermin 1989).
The poem is frank about the costs. Aurora's independence leaves her lonely; her pride makes her misjudge others; her success brings praise but not happiness. The poem's resolution, in which love and art are reconciled in a marriage of equals, has struck some readers as a retreat and others as the poem's real radicalism: the claim that a woman need not be maimed in either sphere to excel in the other (Leighton 1986).
Art and social reform
The debate between Aurora and Romney runs through the whole poem. He believes that misery must be fought with practical means, and that poetry is an idle luxury; she believes that only the spirit can transform the world and that the poet works for humanity by changing how people see. The poem gives Romney's case real force, but its plot proves Aurora right: his phalanstery is burned by the people it was meant to help, while her book converts him.
This is not a rejection of social concern. The poem is full of the poor, it exposes the hypocrisy of the rich, and it attacks the sexual double standard. Its claim is rather that reform imposed from above, by systems, neglects the inner life of those it means to help, a view shared with Carlyle and with the Christian socialists (Armstrong 1993) (David 1987).
Class
Marian Erle brings into the poem a world of squatters, seamstresses, drunken labourers and brothels rarely seen in Victorian verse. Through her the poem shows how poverty degrades parents into brutes and makes girls into commodities, and it lets a working woman speak at length. Yet her story reaches the reader through Aurora, and the poem's descriptions of the poor at the wedding betray a horror of the mob. Readers since Kaplan have discussed how far the poem transcends the class assumptions of its narrator (Browning 1978).
Motherhood
The poem begins with a lost mother and ends with a household of mothers. Aurora's 'mother-want' shapes her childhood; Marian's devotion to her son makes her, in the poem's eyes, sacred rather than fallen; and the poetics of Book 5 imagine the age itself as a nursing mother. Critics have read the poem's maternal imagery as a way of claiming for women's experience the authority usually reserved for male genres and institutions (Gilbert 1979) (Stone 1995).
Love and work
Romney's first proposal offers Aurora work without love; Lady Waldemar offers him love without understanding; Aurora's career offers art without love. The poem's final pledge, 'let us love so well, / Our work shall still be better for our love', insists that love and work belong together and that neither partner is merely the other's helper.
Seeing and blindness
The poem is full of eyes: the dead mother's shut eyes, the 'blind' poor at the wedding, Aurora's failure to see Marian truly at first, and finally Romney's literal blindness. Sight in the poem is spiritual as well as physical; the poet is one who sees the bush 'afire with God'. That the reformer who once looked only at material facts should end blind, seeing through the poet's words, gives the theme its final turn.
Motifs
Books and reading
Aurora's self-education among her father's books, Romney's reading of her poems, the book that converts him, the letters that misinform her: the poem is full of written texts, and it repeatedly shows reading as a force that shapes lives.
Letters
Much of the plot is moved by letters: Romney's deed, Marian's letter on the wedding day, Carrington's news, Aurora's letters from Paris, and Lady Waldemar's confession in Book 9. They create misunderstandings and resolve them, borrowing a device of the novel.
Breasts and nursing
Images of nursing recur, from the child at its mother's breast in the portrait to the 'double-breasted Age' and Marian with her son. They give the poem's account of poetry and of social care a strongly bodily, maternal character.
Fire
Fire runs from the 'burning lava' of true poetry to the bush 'afire with God' and the burning of Leigh Hall. It can be the energy of art, the presence of the divine, or destructive revolt.
Italy and England
Italy stands for the mother, passion, beauty and freedom; England for the father, duty, coldness and convention. Aurora's life moves from one to the other and back, and the poem ends in the Tuscan dawn.
Symbols
The ivy wreath
In Book 2 Aurora crowns herself with ivy rather than the poet's bay. It is a mock coronation and a modest prophecy of the poetic laurel she has not yet earned; Romney recalls it in Book 8.
The mother's portrait
Painted after the mother's death, it becomes a screen for every image of woman Aurora meets in books, from Muse and Madonna to Medusa and Lamia: a symbol of how women are seen through men's myths.
Leigh Hall
The ancestral house of the Leighs, turned by Romney into a Fourierist community and burned by its inhabitants. It stands for inherited property, paternalist reform and their collapse.
The New Jerusalem
The city of God of Revelation 21, whose precious foundations Aurora names in the last lines. It replaces Leigh Hall and the phalanstery as the image of a just society built from heaven down, not from systems up.
Critical debates
Novel or epic?
Barrett Browning called the poem a 'novel-poem', and much of its matter, from the London drawing-rooms to the plot of letters and misunderstandings, belongs to the Victorian novel. But Book 5 claims the dignity of epic for the poem of modern life, and the work's length, its nine books, its invocation-like reflections and its final vision all invite comparison with Milton and Homer. Critics debate whether the poem fuses the two genres into a new form or alternates uneasily between them.
Holly Laird reads Book 5 as an 'epical ars poetica', a theory of epic that redefines the genre in female terms; Herbert Tucker places the poem in a long history of nineteenth-century attempts at British epic, as one of its most original solutions (Laird 1991) (Tucker 2008) (Mermin 1989).
The feminist recovery
For much of the twentieth century the poem was little read. Its rediscovery came in the 1970s. Ellen Moers, in Literary Women (1976), placed it in the tradition of 'heroinism' descending from de Staël's Corinne; Cora Kaplan's introduction to the Women's Press edition (1978) read it as a document of Victorian sexual and class politics; and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, in The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), made the mother's portrait a key image of the woman writer's divided self.
Later critics, among them Angela Leighton, Dorothy Mermin and Marjorie Stone, built on and qualified this work, stressing the poem's place in a history of women's poetry and the originality of its form rather than reading it chiefly as feminist testimony (Moers 1976) (Browning 1978) (Gilbert 1979) (Leighton 1986) (Stone 1995).
Marian Erle, class and the 'fallen woman'
Marian is the poem's boldest creation: a working-class girl, raped and an unmarried mother, who is presented not as fallen but as pure. Victorian readers were shocked; modern critics have praised the poem for refusing the convention by which such women must die or repent. Angela Leighton and others read her as the heart of the poem's challenge to sexual morality (Leighton 1992).
Others are more sceptical. Kaplan noted that Marian's story is told in Aurora's voice and that the poem's sympathy for one poor woman coexists with fear of the poor as a mass; Deirdre David argued that the poem's feminism is bound up with a conservative social vision. The question is whether Marian is a subject or a symbol (Browning 1978) (David 1987).
The ending: punishment or partnership?
Romney's blindness after the fire at Leigh Hall unmistakably echoes Rochester's at Thornfield in Jane Eyre. Gilbert and Gubar read such endings as the woman writer's revenge on male power, a symbolic maiming that levels the lovers. Others see Romney's blindness as a spiritual purification, turning him from the material world to the inner sight the poem values.
A third group of readers is troubled less by Romney's fate than by Aurora's: having argued for the independence of the woman artist, the poem ends with a declaration that love is more than art. Helen Cooper and others reply that the close is a partnership in which Aurora remains the poet and Romney her collaborator, not a surrender of vocation (Gilbert 1979) (Cooper 1988).
The poem's politics
How radical is Aurora Leigh? Its attacks on the education of women and on the sexual double standard are fierce, and its portrait of the poor is unusual in poetry. Yet it rejects socialism, satirises Fourier, presents the poor as a dangerous mob and puts its faith in the individual soul and in Christian love.
Isobel Armstrong reads the poem as a sophisticated engagement with the political debates of its time, its 'double' poetry questioning the categories it uses; Deirdre David sees in it the work of a woman intellectual who serves, even as she challenges, a patriarchal and conservative order (Armstrong 1993) (David 1987).
Reception
The poem sold well and was quickly reprinted. Ruskin, in an appendix to The Elements of Drawing (1857), called it the greatest poem the century had produced in any language, and many readers, Swinburne and George Eliot among them, admired it. Reviewers, however, objected to its coarseness and indecency: to Marian's rape, to the brothel, to the frank speech of a woman narrator, and to its mixture of poetry with the matter of novels.
In 1932 Virginia Woolf published an essay on the poem in The Second Common Reader. She lamented that no one read it any more, mocked its faults of excess, and yet praised its vitality and its attempt to bring modern life into poetry, calling it, in effect, a masterpiece that never quite took form. Her essay, both affectionate and ironic, became a starting-point for the poem's revival (Woolf 1932) (Browning 1996).
Texts and editions
Barrett Browning revised the poem after publication, especially for the fourth edition of 1859. Margaret Reynolds's Ohio edition (1992) prints the text with a full record of variants and manuscript readings, and her Norton Critical Edition (1996) adds contemporary reviews and modern criticism. The text used on this site is the first edition, whose line numbering agrees closely with these editions (Browning 1992) (Browning 1996) (Browning 1856).
Key passages
Of writing many books there is no end; And I who have written much in prose and verse For others’ uses, will write now for mine,— Will write my story for my better self,
The poem begins by echoing Ecclesiastes 12:12, a weary remark about the endless making of books, and turns it into a declaration of independence. Aurora has written for others; now she writes for herself, and her life will be the subject. The opening establishes the poem as an autobiography of a woman writer and as a work that reflects on writing itself.
She had lived A sort of cage-bird life, born in a cage, Accounting that to leap from perch to perch Was act and joy enough for any bird.
Aurora's portrait of her aunt is both satirical and sad. The caged bird, a common image for women's confinement, does not know it is caged; for the aunt the narrow round of propriety is the whole of life. Aurora's own story will be her flight from that cage.
Women as you are, Mere women, personal and passionate, You give us doating mothers, and chaste wives, Sublime Madonnas, and enduring saints! We get no Christ from you,—and verily We shall not get a poet, in my mind.
Romney's case against women's art: women think only of the personal, so they cannot reach the universal sympathy of a Christ or a great poet. The list of female roles he offers in place of art is exactly the range of images the poem sets out to break. The whole poem, written by a woman, is the reply.
What you love, Is not a woman, Romney, but a cause: You want a helpmate, not a mistress, sir,—
Aurora refuses Romney because his proposal makes her an instrument of his mission. 'Helpmate' recalls Eve's creation in Genesis as a help for Adam; 'mistress' here means a beloved woman to be served and honoured. The refusal sets in motion the plot that will teach both of them what love means.
Their sole work is to represent the age, Their age, not Charlemagne’s,—this live, throbbing age, That brawls, cheats, maddens, calculates, aspires,
The poet's duty is to the present, with all its noise, dishonesty and ambition. The string of verbs makes the age a living, contradictory creature. This is the core of the poem's claim to be a modern epic and an answer to poets who turned to the medieval past.
Never flinch, But still, unscrupulously epic, catch Upon the burning lava of a song, The full-veined, heaving, double-breasted Age:
The most famous lines of the poem. The poet must seize her age in molten verse, like an impression taken in hot lava, without fastidiousness about what is fit for poetry. The age is a living woman with a nursing body, and later generations, Aurora goes on, will recognise in the poem the breasts that fed them: epic is reclaimed for a woman's voice.
I was not ever, as you say, seduced, But simply, murdered.
Marian corrects Aurora's assumption. 'Seduced' implies weakness and complicity; Marian insists she was the victim of violence that destroyed her former self. The words reject the stock Victorian story of the fallen woman and put blame on those who drugged and sold her.
Earth’s crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God: But only he who sees, takes off his shoes;
God's presence is everywhere in nature, as in the burning bush of Exodus, but only a few see it and respond with reverence. The poet's vocation is to see and to make others see. The lines sum up the poem's sacramental view of the world and its claim for the spiritual power of art.
Art is much, but love is more. O Art, my Art, thou’rt much, but Love is more!
Aurora's confession to Romney. After a life devoted to art, she acknowledges that art alone has left her incomplete. Critics differ on whether this is a defeat of her ambition or its fulfilment; the lines that follow join art and love rather than sacrificing one to the other.
Beloved, let us love so well, Our work shall still be better for our love, And still our love be sweeter for our work,
Romney's vision of the marriage to come: a partnership in which love and work strengthen each other. It answers his own proposal in Book 2, which asked for a wife to help his work, and Aurora's refusal; now neither is the other's helper, and both work together for the world.
Questions for study
Why does Barrett Browning tell the story in the first person, through Aurora herself?
Think about the poem as an autobiography of a woman writer, the shift from retrospect to near-journal in the later books, and how Aurora's limitations as a narrator shape what we see of Marian and Romney.
How does the poem portray women's education in Book 1?
Compare the aunt's programme with Aurora's reading in her father's garret. What does each assume a woman is for?
Is Romney right in Book 2? Assess the arguments on both sides of the proposal scene.
Consider his case for practical action, her case for art, and how the plot of Books 4 and 8 tests both.
What does Book 5 claim about the poetry of modern life, and how does the poem itself put those claims into practice?
Look at the rejection of 'togas and the picturesque', the image of the 'double-breasted Age', and the poem's use of contemporary London and Paris.
Is Aurora Leigh a novel or an epic?
Weigh its novelistic plot of letters and misunderstandings against its nine books, its reflective passages and its final vision. Laird and Tucker are useful here.
How does Marian Erle challenge the Victorian stereotype of the 'fallen woman'?
Consider her distinction between seduction and murder, her motherhood, and her refusal of Romney in Book 9.
Does Aurora speak for Marian, or does she speak over her?
Think about Aurora's retelling of Marian's story 'with fuller utterance', her first suspicion in Paris, and Kaplan's comments on class.
What is the role of Lady Waldemar in the poem?
Is she simply a villain? Consider her frankness in Book 3, her nursing of Romney, and her letter in Book 9.
Why is Romney blinded? Discuss the ending in relation to Jane Eyre.
Weigh readings of the blindness as punishment, purification and equalisation, and consider the role of seeing throughout the poem.
Does the ending reconcile art and love, or subordinate one to the other?
Compare 'Art is much, but love is more' with Romney's 'Our work shall still be better for our love', and ask who the poet is at the close.
Further reading
- Armstrong, Isobel. Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics. London: Routledge, 1993.
- Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. Aurora Leigh. London: Chapman and Hall, 1857 [issued November 1856].
- Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. Aurora Leigh and Other Poems. Introduced by Cora Kaplan. London: The Women's Press, 1978.
- Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. Aurora Leigh. Edited by Margaret Reynolds. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1992.
- Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. Aurora Leigh. Edited by Margaret Reynolds. Norton Critical Edition. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996.
- Cooper, Helen. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Woman and Artist. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.
- David, Deirdre. Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy: Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987.
- Forster, Margaret. Elizabeth Barrett Browning: A Biography. London: Chatto and Windus, 1988.
- Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.
- Laird, Holly A. 'Aurora Leigh: An Epical Ars Poetica.' In Writing the Woman Artist: Essays on Poetics, Politics, and Portraiture, edited by Suzanne W. Jones, 353–70. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991.
- Leighton, Angela. Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Brighton: Harvester Press, 1986.
- Leighton, Angela. Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992.
- Mermin, Dorothy. Elizabeth Barrett Browning: The Origins of a New Poetry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.
- Moers, Ellen. Literary Women. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976.
- Stone, Marjorie. Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995.
- Tucker, Herbert F. Epic: Britain's Heroic Muse, 1790–1910. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
- Woolf, Virginia. 'Aurora Leigh.' In The Second Common Reader. London: Hogarth Press, 1932.
Written by the Poetry Codex editors. Updated 2026-10-19.