Elizabeth Barrett Browning
From Commonplace Book
Aurora Leigh
Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Aurora Leigh. Pub. 1856. Ed. Kerry McSweeney. Oxford World's Classics, 2008. Print.
Summary
- 1: childhood in Florence; mother died early; scholarly father who died when she was 13; falls in love with Shakespeare when sent to her aunt and expected to get a lady's education
- 2: Romney proposes marriage and is skeptical of women writing poetry (she refuses him); when her aunt dies she refuses Romney's money and goes to London
- 3: Writing poems for popular magazines (not unlike Felicia Hemans or Letitia Elizabeth Landon); Lady Waldemar -> in love with Romney but he decides to marry lower-class Marian; AL and Marian's progress
- 4: Marian continues, about Romney proposing; Romney and AL talk and this confuses how AL feels; Marian stands up Romney with a letter, and Romney's reputation suffers; Romney and AL both disappointed in their missions
- 5: AL reflects - can there be epic poetry in the modern age?; Romney has turned Leigh Hall into a shelter and is engaged to Waldemar; AL sells some of her father's books to go to Italy as well as her own unfinished manuscript
- 6: AL sees Marian in Paris with a child; this child is the product of rape in Paris, where Waldemar sent her with her lady's made, who left her in a brothel
- 7: Marian continues, joyful at having a child even in such terrible circumstances; AL offers to take ME and her child to Italy; informs Romney and Waldemar of what happened; Romney much on her mind; a friend writes to congratulate her on her book, and she finds no inspiration in Italy
- 8: several years pass with AL, ME and her child living in Florence; Romney arrives, telling AL he believes her work to be true Art; Leigh Hall has been burned to the ground by people who misunderstood his mission; he and Waldemar aren't married but he carries a letter from her to AL
- 9: Waldemar writes to AL saying that her scheme to remove ME didn't work and that Romney is in love with AL; Romney tries to propose to ME but she refuses; Romney and AL admit their true feelings to each other, and Romney realizes he's been blind
- potential little connection to Rochester's blindness at the end of Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë, 1847)
Reading Notes
- I.210-1: "Life, struck sharp on death, / Makes awful lightning"
- I.266-9 interpreting England through Shakespeare
- I.340-1 Bourgeoisie - her aunt "hated, with the gall of gentle souls"
- I.455-460 - aside about women's work figured in material handcraft terms - compare to Cranford (Gaskell, 1853), Shirley (Charlotte Brontë, 1849) - domesticity not the stable ground
- I.792: “The world of books is still the world”
- see Piper 2009
- I.1092 more Shakespeare, "my Shakespeare"
- II.243-4 "Stop there, / I answered, burning through his thread of talk"
- II. 372-7 Romney towing the popular, hegemonic Dickensian gender politics line - "If your sex is weak for art...it is strong for life and duty"
- II.692: "Girls blush sometimes because they are alive"
- II.1166-70 self-conscious Milton imitation
- III.302-325: historically what was it like for women poets at this time in terms of success to make a living by publishing? Hack work to sustain poetry
- IV.1152-7 Romney on art as "life upon a larger scale"
- V.138-222 epic and the "modern age" - cites Carlyle directly - Victorian modernity
- V.229-236 tension between textual convention (5-act drama) and "poetic spirit"
- the way her perception of dramatic art, Shakespeare in particular, is structured by this: there are material reasons for this
- "What matter for the number of the leaves, / Supposing the tree lives and grows?" A Platonic, idealist approach to text, like New Anglo-American Bibliographers (W.W. Greg, McKerrow 1928), contra McKenzie 1986, McGann 1991, De Grazia & Stallybrass 1993
Class Notes
- highly diegetic (telling rather than showing) in the way of so many Victorian novels
- it also works through misunderstandings, as does this poem (the whole of Book 8 is a misunderstanding)
- Swinburne thought it was a great poem but a crap novel
- To start to understand AL begin with the novel not having literary cachet in the period, but the poem does, and the epic poem most of all
- EBB notices more people are reading Bleak House (1853) than her husband Robert Browning
- change in the poetry market since Byron and Scott: Tennyson and Longfellow had a market, others were suffering
- "I'm going to write a work that will satisfy the way Dickens does but 'loftier'"
- When she writes this she is the highest regarded woman poet ever in English
- project is major and feminist: Susan B Anthony carried AL with her everywhere
- Getting a proposal (in Bk 2) from a man she does not love and throwing it in his teeth
- Crowning herself - II.37ff
- Romney: "I want to marry you because I want to do something real in the world, and I want you to do it with me"
- pokes at her own social justice poetry
- Romney's critique doesn't make sense: it's dressing up "women can't do art"
- this double standard EBB is protesting still exists obviously in the world: the traits that are devalued are still feminine
- AL does feel for Romney but has a sense of duty to her art
- AL with her books I.778ff
- poetry and religion, "the only truth-tellers now left to God" (I.858)
- III.204ff: there's art and then there's Art: can a woman do the latter?
- SHe can only really write through Romney and this can be disappointing
- like Jane Eyre: but they both have to fall, or realize how wrong they are, in order to be happy
- 9.725-37: conflating great art and romantic love, which were separate at the start
- the drive to heteronormative marriage plots in the Vic novel
- a rebellion against genre to feel disappointment in this - did EBB feel she had to do it?
- AL's agency in the end - 9.608-49ff "Art is much, but love is more" (656)
- Romney as muse, as angel; something more than the conventional
- Compare to ROchester throwing it in Jane's teeth and Shirley in Robert's, but Aurora owns it
- and she still wants to explicate her art: "Art symbolizes Heaven, but Love is god / and Makes heaven. I, Aurora, fell from mine."
- plot work and poetic work: even in moments of compromise there's great ambition (de Stael's Corinne as model): a woman writing ambitious poetry in a book of ambitious poetry
- renouncing art is even in highly crafted blank verse
- 9.910-end: Romney
- "Shine out for two, Aurora"
- 941-on feels like Propsero
- this is hugely ambitious
- art will do the work of society: bringing them together (we don't see without art, Wilde would say)
- Romney conceding in the end
- This is valorization clearly of EBB -- it's not autobiographical in the details but in the women's art department it is
- proleptically inscribing the terms of her own reception
- a marriage ideal here vs Christina Rossetti who never married
- a huge contrast between this and Dickinson's "the soul selects its own society" (she went in the opposite direction from EBB)
- finding a way to show marriage and art are compatible, resisting the Romantic/bohemian ideal
- Why Romney? She loves him from the first, and he finally reciprocates: "Poet, doubt yourself, but never doubt you're a poet to me" (8.590)
