Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Possible Lines of ApproachNotes on Approaching Particular Works

“The Cry of the Children”“To George Sand: A Desire” and “To George Sand: A Recognition”“The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point”Sonnets from the PortugueseAurora Leigh

Questions for DiscussionCritical Viewpoints / Reception History

OverviewH. F. Chorley, Review of Aurora Leigh, from The Athenaeum (22 November 1856)George Eliot, Review of Aurora Leigh, from Westminster Review (January 1857)Coventry Patmore, Review of Aurora Leigh, from North British Review (February 1857)from W. E. Aytoun, Review of Aurora Leigh, in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine

(January 1857)Letter from William Makepeace Thackeray to Elizabeth Barrett Browning (2 April 1861)Virginia Woolf, “Aurora Leigh,” from The Common Reader, Second Series (1932)

AppendicesAppendix 1: Initial correspondence of Robert Browning and Elizabeth BarrettAppendix 2: Summary of the story line of the nine books of Aurora LeighAppendix 3: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “Lord Walter’s Wife” (1861)

Possible Lines of Approach

Barrett Browning as a woman writer• An emphasis on Aurora Leigh is obviously appropriate to this approach. Related

contextual materials (from Catherine Napier, Woman’s Right’s and Duties) appear in theElizabeth Barrett Browning “In Context” section of the website component of theBroadview anthology. Other Barrett Browning works of interest include the two “ToGeorge Sand” poems and the Sonnets from the Portuguese.

Barrett Browning as a political writer• In addition to Aurora Leigh, works that may lend themselves to this approach include “The

Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point,” “The Cry of the Children,” and “A Curse for aNation.”

Barrett Browning as a popular writer• One interesting avenue of approach may be a discussion of the enormous popularity of

Barrett Browning’s writings—both of political poems such as “The Cry of the Children”and of love poems such as the Sonnets from the Portuguese.

Barrett Browning as a writer’s writer• Barrett Browning’s abiding interest in the form, the process, and the significance of writing

is an important theme both in Aurora Leigh (notably in the famous passage on poets andthe present age in Book Five) and elsewhere in her work—including “A Curse for aNation” and “A Musical Instrument.”

Notes on Approaching Particular Works

“The Cry of the Children”

Form: 13 stanzas, each of 12 lines, rhymed ababcdcdefef. The lines do not follow a fully regularrhythmic pattern. Longer and shorter lines alternate; the element that comes closest to being fullyregular is line length in the second, fourth, tenth, and twelfth lines, each of which comprisesseven syllables in almost every stanza.

Backgrounds/Approaches: Since the late eighteenth century the employment of children inmines and factories (and the conditions of employment) had been vigorously debated. The 1833Report on the Employment of Children in Factories had led to the Factory Act of 1833,restricting working hours for children to no more than nine hours a day. In the early 1840sRichard Hengist Horne’s Report of the Children’s Employment Commission inspired works suchas “The Cry of the Children” and helped to bring about the Factory Act of 1844, which restrictedworking hours for children in certain factories to no more than 6 1/2 hours per day. Controversyover the issue continued throughout the century, with further incremental change coming withthe Factory Acts of 1867, 1874, 1878, and 1901. (See the Texts and Contexts ChronologicalChart in the website component of the anthology for more on these Acts.) Not until the passageof the 1901 Factory Act was the employment of children under the age of 12 in factories andworkshops unequivocally forbidden.

“The Cry of the Children,” first published in Blackwood’s Magazine in August 1843, wasincluded in Barrett Browning’s 1844 Poems, the volume that first established her popularity.

Connections: Excerpts from the report to which the poem was a response appear in theElizabeth Barrett Browning “In Context” section of the website component of the anthology(“Children in the Mines: Richard Hengist Horne’s Report of the Children’s EmploymentCommission”). Other relevant materials on the of industrialization may be found in the Contexts:Work and Poverty section of the anthology that appears following Macaulay. Charles Dickens’sA Christmas Carol and the accompanying “A Walk in the Workhouse” may also be of interestfor comparative purposes.

The 1912 film The Cry of the Children, a picture directed by George D. Nichols criticizing childlabor in the early twentieth century, was inspired by Barrett Browning’s poem. Controversial inpart for its inclusion of actual footage from places of employment, the film was the most popularrelease of the Thanhouser Company, a significant early film studio.

“To George Sand: A Desire” and “To George Sand: A Recognition”

Form: Two sonnets, each rhymed abbaabbacdcdcd.

Backgrounds/Approaches: One of the leading French authors of the day, George Sand was alsowhat today would be called a “cross-dresser”; more generally, she was notorious for her floutingof the conventions of gender and sexuality. Margaret Morlier’s article, “The Hero and the Sage:Elizabeth Barrett’s Sonnets ‘To George Sand’ in Victorian Context” (Victorian Poetry 41 [2003]319-32), provides a useful overview of the debate in the 1830s and 1840s over the “moralcontagion” that Sand was claimed by some to be spreading, and a helpful discussion of thesonnets themselves, described by Morlier as “two of Barrret’s most difficult poems.”

Connections: Of interest here may be “Images of Georges Sand,” found in the Elizabeth BarrettBrowning “In Context” section of the Broadview Anthology website. See also the mentions ofBarrett Browning’s fondness for Sand in Virginia Woolf’s essay on Aurora Leigh (reproducedbelow), and the comment of the reviewer of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine concerningAurora Leigh that Aurora “is made to resemble too closely some of the female portraits ofGeorge Sand, which never were to our liking” (also included below).

“The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point”

Form: Dramatic monologue in 36 stanzas, each of 7 lines rhymed ababccb.

Backgrounds/Approaches: One piece of biographical background may be of interest inconnection to Barrett Browning’s passionate opposition to slavery: Barrett Browning’s fatherhad owned a slave plantation in Jamaica.

Another biographical angle that has interested some scholars is the question of the degree towhich Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning may have worked collaboratively onsome poems. Some have interpreted markings by Robert Browning on the manuscript of “TheRunaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point” as indicating he had contributed certain lines. For adiscussion see Corinne Davies and Marjorie Stone, “‘Singing Song for Song’: The Brownings ‘inthe Poetic Relation,’” in Literary Couplings: Writing Couples, Collaborators, and theConstruction of Authorship, ed. Marjorie Stone and Judith Thompson (2006), 150-74.

More generally, Mary Sanders Pollock’s Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning: A CreativePartnership (London: Ashgate, 2003) provides a close examination of the work of each poet inconnection with the other. (Pollock’s work is important not least of all for the effort it representsto integrate the study of the work of male Victorian poets with that of women Victorianpoets—the two having so often been treated as existing in separate spheres.)

The central events of the poem occur in stanzas 9-11 (in which the narrator and another slave fallin love); 14 (in which the male slave is brutally taken away); 15 (in which the narrator is rapedby one or more of her white masters); 17-22 (in which the narrator kills her child, “too white for

me”); 25-28 (in which the narrator flees with her dead child); and 32-33 (in which the narratoralludes to the punishment inflicted upon her after her capture).

Many of the specifics of the story are not filled in by the narrator, and it may be easy for studentsreading stanza 15 not to realize that a rape has occurred. One possible pedagogical approach is toinquire first into the murder of the child, noting that while this poem is told from the point ofview of someone who has murdered their own child, it nevertheless leads us to sympathize withthe narrator. What are the grounds for such sympathy? What precisely are the facts of the case?How does the first-person narration contribute to the effect?

An interesting question relates to viewpoint: is the adoption by (white, economically andintellectually privileged) Barrett Browning of the voice of a black slave in any way problematic?See below under “Critical Viewpoints” (especially regarding the work of Laura Fish) for moreon this topic.

Connections: Dramatic monologues that may be interesting points of comparison include thoseby Augusta Webster (see “A Castaway,” Broadview Anthology, page 576); Constance Naden(see “A Sister of Mercy” in the website component of the anthology); and Amy Levy (see“Xantippe” and “Magdalen,” Broadview Anthology, pages 766, 769). Of obvious interest as wellare the many dramatic monologues of Robert Browning (see pp. 277ff in the anthology). Thequestion of the ways in which and the degree to which the approach of Victorian poets todramatic monologue was gendered is an interesting one; Glennis Byron has argued that Victorianwomen poets “tend to sympathize more with their speakers” than do Victorian male poets; shealso points out that women poets tend to employ the dramatic monologue more for “purposes ofsocial critique” than do their male counterparts (Glennis Byron, “Rethinking the DramaticMonologue: Victorian Women Poets and Social Critique,” Victorian Women Poets, ed. AlisonChapman [London: Ashgate, 2003]).

For other materials related to race and slavery elsewhere in this volume see Contexts: Race,Empire, and a Wider World (Broadview Anthology, pp. 790-820). In The Age of Romanticism(Volume 4 of the anthology), see Mary Prince (pp. 478-503) and Contexts: The Abolition ofSlavery (pp. 504-26).

Sonnets from the Portuguese

Form: The full sonnet sequence includes 44 poems. The general rhyme scheme isabbaabbacdcdcd, though Barrett Browning often employs partial rhymes.

Backgrounds/Approaches: The romance between Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett—herfather had forbidden them to marry, but the two defied him, eloped, and moved to Italy, neverreturning to England in Elizabeth’s lifetime—is one of the most famous of the Victorian era.(See below under “Connections.”) There can be little doubt that the poems are largely based ontheir unfolding romance; the sonnet sequence expresses the emotional sequence. Yet thesequence is no crude personal record; for all their strength of emotion, the poems are crafted withextraordinarily care and skill.

Sonnet 43 is one of the handful of poems from the Victorian era that has continued to be widelyanthologized and committed to memory on into the twenty-first century. One interesting questionfor discussion of the Sonnets from the Portuguese, and especially of the famous Sonnet 43, iswhether that poem and the sequence as a whole deserves either the enormous popularity it hasenjoyed among the general public since its publication or the lack of attention (and sometimesoutright disdain) that many leading literary and academic figures have shown it. (See also belowunder “Critical Viewpoints/Reception History.”)

An interesting comparison can be made between the desire expressed in Sonnet 24 to hear “nosound of human strife” and the evident concern with political and social strife that is expressed inpolitical poems such as “The Cry of the Children” and “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point,”as well as through much of Aurora Leigh.

Another possible avenue of approach is to explore the expressions of feminine and masculine inthese poems. Are they sentimental expressions of a submissive wife? What is the nature of thefeminine as it finds expression in these poems? Useful points of reference for discussion maywell include the opening lines of Sonnet 21 (“When our two souls stand up erect and strong...”)and the declarations of Sonnet 43 (“I love thee freely, as men strive for Right...”). Alsointeresting in this connection may be the number of strongly stressed syllables in many of thesonnets. (More generally, the sonnets are well suited to close reading for their aural qualities, forthe ways in which line breaks are handled, and for their imagery.)

The sonnet enjoyed a substantial revival in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and itshistory and form were much discussed in the Victorian period. As Nancy Houston has noted, theterm “sonnet sequence” originates in the Victorian period, but it was not used until thepublication of the 1881 version of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s The House of Life sequence. Theterm was more frequently used by late Victorians to refer to sonnets grouped according totheme—not necessarily written in one voice or following one sequence of events or emotionalprogression.

Connections: The sonnet sequence enjoyed a substantial revival in the late eighteenth andnineteenth centuries. Important sequences include:

Mary Robinson, Sappho and Phaeon (1796)George Meredith, Modern Love (1862)Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The House of Life (1870, 1881)Augusta Webster, Mother and Daughter (1895)

For more on the sonnet in general in Victorian poetry, the article on the Victorian Web may be ofinterest: see http://www.sonnets.org/victoria.htm. Several of Nancy Houston’s articles onsubjects relating to the Victorian sonnet may also be of interest—above all in this context her“Affecting Authenticity: Sonnets from the Portuguese and Modern Love” in Studies in theLiterary Imagination 35.2 (Fall 2002), 99-121. A significant recent work on this topic is AmyChristine Billone, Little Songs: Women, Silence, and the Nineteenth-century Sonnet (Athens,OH: Ohio UP, 2007). An important anthology is Paula R. Feldman and Daniel Robinson, eds., A

Century of Sonnets: The Romantic Era Revival, 1750-1850 (New York: Oxford University Press,2005).

More broadly, comparison might be made to the sonnets of Shakespeare—or to recent sonnetssuch as those of Carol Duffy’s 2005 volume Rapture (the title poem of which is included involume 6 of the Broadview Anthology).

Excerpts from the extraordinary initial exchange of letters between Browning and Barrett inJanuary 1845 are included below as Appendix 1. The story of the origin and initial publication ofthe sonnets, as recounted by Edmund Gosse, is included in the Elizabeth Barrett Browning “InContext” section on this anthology’s website.

Aurora Leigh

Form: Nine books of blank verse (i.e., of unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter). The full work isof epic length—several hundred lines longer than Milton’s Paradise Lost.

Backgrounds/Approaches: Backgrounds and various approaches to Barrett Browning’s mostsubstantial work are the primary focus of much of the discussion below under “CriticalViewpoints.” (For that reason rather less space is given to Aurora Leigh in this section thanwould otherwise be the case.) Appendix 2, below, is a summary of the story line of the fullpoem.

In the context of a survey of all of British literature, Aurora Leigh is obviously difficult to teachas a complete work. The fact that it includes many extended passages of discussion on largeissues of aesthetics, of gender, and of politics may make it a suitable work for pedagogicalapproaches that do not emphasize the narrative element. The following are among the passagesof discussion and reflection most frequently focused on critically and pedagogically:

• Book 1, lines 432-471 (on “books on womanhood” and on the worth of “the works ofwomen”)

• Book 2, lines 79-123 (on gender and on literature)• Book 2, lines 398-577 (Aurora’s rejection of Romney includes extended discussion of

gender questions)• Book 5, lines 140-223, beginning “The critics say that epics have dies out...” on page 147

(on poetry and the present age). (NB: In the first printing of the anthology these lines arewrongly numbered 86-173, as if they carried on immediately after the ellipsis followingline 85)

For those wishing to discuss modes of description and narration in the poem, and the viewpointof the narrator, the following passages may merit consideration:

• Book One, lines 289-315 (on the “sort of cage-bird life” of Aurora’s aunt)

• Book One, lines 1049-1171 (“For me, I wrote false poems...”), on what is true, on Aurora’s“quickening inner life,” on England’s natural beauty, and on the pleasures of exploring itwith Romney and Carrington

Connections: A point of comparison for many instructors focusing on Victorian notions ofgender is Coventry Patmore’s long series of poems entitled The Angel in the House, which isexcerpted on page 104 in the section Contexts: The Place of Women in Society that immediatelyprecedes Barrett Browning in the bound book anthology. The other materials in that section mayalso be of interest in this connection. A review by Patmore of Aurora Leigh is included below in“Critical Viewpoints.”

Two points of comparison regarding the literary representation of prostitution in VictorianBritain are Augusta Webster’s dramatic monologue, “A Castaway” (Broadview Anthology, p.576), and Bernard Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession (written in the 1890s but not performedpublicly until the twentieth century, and for that reason included in volume 6 of the anthology).Shaw’s play is accompanied by contextual materials relating to prostitution and attitudes towardprostitution in the later Victorian period.

Questions for Discussion

1. Discuss the difference between sentiment and sentimentality in the context of “The Cry ofthe Children” and/or Sonnets from the Portuguese.

2. Discuss Victorian notions of feminine and masculine in relation to one or more of Sonnetsfrom the Portuguese, the two “To George Sand” sonnets, and Aurora Leigh.

3. To what should we attribute the extraordinary popularity of Sonnet 43?

4. With reference to Sonnets from the Portuguese, to the political poems “The Cry of theChildren” and “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point,” and to Aurora Leigh, comment onthe degree to which—and the ways in which—poetry is capable of reflecting life.

5. Some critics have suggested that Aurora is an unreliable narrator and that we are meant byBarrett Browning to take some of her views skeptically. Many other critics and readers,however, have tended to assume that we are to take her views as Barrett Browning’s own.What evidence can be put forward to support either view?

6. Discuss “true” and “truth” both in relation to lines 1049-1176 of Book One of AuroraLeigh and in relation to other elements in the poem.

7. Comment on Aurora’s rejection of Romney’s offer to marry her. What are her reasons?What reaction does their expression elicit in the reader?

8. To what extent should literature focus on the “coarser” aspects of life? (Discuss withreference to any or all of the following: the aesthetic set out in Book 5 of Aurora Leigh;

early reactions to Aurora Leigh such as those of the reviewer for Blackwood’s EdinburghMagazine; “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point”; and Thackeray’s comments in his 2April 1861 letter to Barrett Browning.

Critical Viewpoints/Reception History

Overview

Contemporary criticism of Barrett Browning’s poetry was very largely positive, albeit with thesort of qualifiers often attached in the Victorian era to the work of woman poets. The peculiarcombination of the obsequious and the condescending that was often displayed by male writersand reviewers toward women writers finds expression both in many of the early reviews and inprivate communications such as the letter from Thackeray to Barrett Browning that is includedbelow. (Several early reviews of Aurora Leigh are also included below.) Aurora Leigh clearlytouched a nerve for some male critics—but it is noteworthy that even largely hostile reviewssuch as that of W. E. Aytoun in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine also had substantial praise forthe work.

Sonnets from the Portuguese is well known to have remained steadily popular (albeit not amongcritics and scholars) since its first publication. Less well known is that Barrett Browning’s moreopenly political and feminist work also remained popular through to the beginning of themodernist period. As Margaret Reynolds has outlined, Aurora Leigh in particular enjoyed a widereadership on a continuing basis:

By the end of the nineteenth century it had been reprinted more than twenty times inBritain and nearly as often in the United States. It became one of the books that everyoneknew and read. Oscar Wilde loved it, ... Algernon Swinburne wrote a gushing preface forit, the novelist Rudyard Kipling borrowed the plot for The Light That Failed (1890), and,in America, the feminist activist Susan B. Anthony presented her treasured copy to theLibrary of Congress and wrote on the flyleaf, “This book was carried in my satchel foryears and read & re-read. The noble words of Elizabeth Barrett ... sink deep into myheart.... I now present it to the Congressional Library ... with the hope that Women maymore & more be like Aurora Leigh.” (Margaret Reynolds, Preface, Elizabeth BarrettBrowning: Aurora Leigh, ed. Margaret Reynolds [New York: Norton, 1996], vii-viii)

It is ironic that the period during which feminism in Britain and America finally achieved thegoal of universal suffrage was a period in which Barrett Browning’s reputation went into severeeclipse. The stridency and the directness of her verse in an age that put a premium onallusiveness and irony no doubt contributed to the decline in her reputation, and the earlytwentieth-century tendency to mock all things Victorian carried particular force when it came towriters such as Barrett Browning who had associated themselves strongly with the “present age”of the Victorian period.

A landmark critical viewpoint is that of Virginia Woolf, whose 1932 essay on Aurora Leigh isreproduced below in its entirety. As she wittily summarized the situation, “fate has not been kind

to Mrs. Browning as a writer. Nobody reads her, nobody discusses her, nobody troubles to puther in her place.” If Woolf’s essay did not launch a full revival of Barrett Browning’s reputation,it at least had the effect of arresting the decline.

Another landmark—in Barrett Browning studies as in so many other areas—was Sandra Gilbertand Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (1979). Gilbert and Gubar were among the firstto use the term Künstlerroman (German: a work tracing the growth of a character as an artist) indiscussing Aurora Leigh—and among the first as well to treat the work as “an epic of feministself-affirmation”:

Elizabeth Barrett Browning made most of her finest poetry out of her reconciliation tothat graceful or passionate self-abnegation which, for a nineteenth century woman, wasnecessity’s highest virtue. But because she had little natural taste for the drasticasceticism Rossetti’s temperament and background seem to have fostered, BarrettBrowning ultimately substituted a more familiar Victorian aesthetic of service for theyounger woman’s somewhat idiosyncratic aesthetic of pain. Her masterpiece, “AuroraLeigh” (1856), develops this aesthetic most fully, though it is also in part an epic offeminist self-affirmation. “Aurora Leigh” is too long to analyze here in the kind of detailwe have devoted to “Goblin Market,” but it certainly deserves some comment, not onlybecause (as Virginia Woolf reports having discovered to her delight) it is so much betterthan most of its nonreaders realize, but also because it embodies what may well havebeen the most reasonable compromise between assertion and submission that a sane andworldly woman poet could achieve in the nineteenth century....

Briefly, “Aurora Leigh” is a Künstlerroman in blank verse about the growth of awoman poet and the education of her heart through pride, sympathy, love, andsuffering.... (Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic [New Haven:Yale UP, 1979], 575)

By the late 1980s feminist readings had taken a leading place. Joyce Zonana expresses thetendency, which became common among many critics and scholars, to treat the Sonnets from thePortuguese and Aurora Leigh in binary fashion—to the detriment of the reputation of thesonnets.

Something about Elizabeth Barrett Browning inspires in her sympathetic readers (and Icount myself among them) a worshipful identification of the artist with her work. Whereonce critics found in Barrett Browning a perfect wife writing exquisite sonnets ofsentimental love, the current generation of feminist critics, using Aurora Leigh as aprimary text, claims her as an originator of loved feminist poetics. Once taken to be anexemplary, submissive wife, Browning is today exalted as a rebellious daughter whoescapes her literal and literary imprisonment in her father’s house. Contemporaryfeminists, for all our revisionary re-readings, still court a risk we deplore: that the critic,confronting the work of a woman artist, will read the life instead of the work. (JoyceZonana, Review of Helen Cooper, Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Woman and Artist, inTulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 9.1 [Spring 1990], 161)

The reaction against the perception of the “an exemplary, submissive wife” writing “exquisitesonnets of sentimental love” (and against the attention which the romantic biographical story ofthe Brownings had continued to attract in popular literary history) has to some extent continuedto the present day. In the 1990s, however, several important books on Victorian poetry extendedthe range of critical insights into Aurora Leigh without neglecting or disparaging Browning’sother verse. Angela Leighton’s Victorian Women Poets aimed to address “the relationshipbetween aesthetics and politics, [which] has remained one of the most contentious areas offeminist criticism”:

It is Barrett Browning who first brings to the somewhat frozen postures of women’spoetry in the early nineteenth century a sense of a reality beyond the claims of the heart.Although she is in many ways a true inheritor of the tradition of female sensibility whichHemans and L.E.L. had popularized (Aurora Leigh, with her long, self-consciousdisquisitions on the nature of female creativity, is the natural descendant of ProperziaRossi and the Improvisatrice), Barrett Browning also rejects, from an early age, the ideaof feeling as a poetic end in itself (Aurora is a poet because she works and writes, notbecause she suffers and dies). Very simply, Barrett Browning takes the story of woman’screativity out of the self-echoing island of books which her predecessors had inhabited,and sets it in the contemporary world; she takes the woman poet off the stage of isolatedself-appreciation, and gives her real work to do in society. No longer a poetry of “loveand love,” hers is a poetry which constantly asks about the conventions of power whichlie behind love, and which affect the improvised expression of the heart.... This is not tosay that Barrett Browning rejects her inheritance altogether. The figures of sensibilityreappear in her poetry, often with startling explicitness, but never as a self-sufficient end.(Angela Leighton, Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart [New York:Harvester, 1992], 80)

Leighton spends some time addressing the play of politics and aesthetics in Aurora Leigh, andthe tensions not only between romance and politics but also within the political sphere betweenliberal and socialist ideals:

For all her faults, Barrett Browning has succeeded in this poem in turning the woman’slyre of private feeling into an instrument of public conscience, and her improvisedepithets of the body into a sexual complexity of desire which denies neither the claims ofthe body nor the claims of the work of art. All the poured, burning hearts of Hemans andL.E.L., which flowed from them so easily, are transformed by her, in a famous passage inBook V, into a statement of her own distinctive aesthetics: into a lava-flow which is notfluent and univocal, but awkward and “double” in its commitment both to “song” and to“true life,” as well as to the differences between them:

... This bosom seems to beat still, or at leastIt sets ours beating: this is living art,Which thus presents and thus records true life. (V, 213-22)

Leighton then turns to the nature of this commitment to “true life,” noting that “Barrett Browningdistrusted socialism,” and that “Romney’s socialistic experiments of setting up a “phalanstery” inhis ancestral home are made to look foolish”:

In 1848, in the midst of ferment and revolution on the continent, Elizabeth expressed herworries to Miss Mitford:

As to communism, surely the practical part of that... is attainable simply by theconsent of individuals ºwho may try the experiment of associating their familiesin order to the cheaper employment of the means of life º & successfully inmany cases. But make a government-scheme of even so much, & you seem totrench on the individual liberty - All such patriarchal planning in a government,issues naturally into absolutism. (MRM: III, 235)

.... “I love liberty so intensely that I hate Socialism” (MRM: III, 302), [she] writeselsewhere. But although she ultimately shows up Romney's socialistic experiments asanother patriarchal scheme, her cherishing of individuality is not to the exclusion of thegeneral good, but remains discrepancy and skeptically juxtaposed with it. In Book V,such a “marriage” of perspectives becomes, explicitly, a poetic theory:

But poets shouldExert a double vision; should have eyesTo see near things as comprehensivelyAs if afar they took their point of sight,And distant things as intimately deepAs if they touched them. (V, 183-8)

In Barrett Browning’s best poems such a “double vision” involves, not so much an easyequivalence of the near and far, the personal and the general, the poetic and the political,as a sense of the difference between them, of the stress and tension of making the twomatch. (Angela Leighton, Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart [NewYork: Harvester, 1992], 108-09)

Another major critical study of the early 1990s was Isobel Armstrong’s Victorian Poetry: Poetry,Poetics, and Politics. Like Leighton, Armstrong is interested in the interplay between theaesthetic and the political. Unlike some others with an interest in politics and ideology, she doesnot ignore or disparage the Sonnets from the Portuguese; she attempts rather to view that workthrough a lens of ideology and of linguistic analysis, suggesting that in this sonnet sequenceBarrett Browning

is interested in a dialectic of subject and object which attempts to represent the strugglefor identity in passion between two people and the struggle for language. ‘Sonnets fromthe Portuguese’ is about idolatry, dependency, the temptation to disappear before theobject of adulation. It is ambitious because it attempts to discover a language to representand to go beyond the structure of an unwilling master-slave relationship. (Isobel

Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics, and Politics [London: Routledge, 1993]356)

Like many others, Armstrong touches on the issue of whether the views of Aurora may fairly betaken for Barrett Browning’s own, concluding that, much as Aurora’s character standsindependent of Barrett Browning, the reflective passages about aesthetic and gender issues maybe taken as expressions of the author’s views:

Poets such as Augusta Webster and Amy Levy, writing later in the century, also adoptedthe mask of the dramatic monologue. But some poets wrote, as Elizabeth BarrettBrowning said of herself in Aurora Leigh, ‘without mask.’ ... [T]he persona of Aurora isvery much a mask: what is not masked are propositions about women, and aesthetics andwomen and society. By the end of the century one finds women's work dividing (thoughthis is a very rough distinction) between the poem written with and without a mask.

We can group the ‘unmasked’ Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s work together withthat of George Eliot and Mathilde Blind (who wrote on George Eliot), incontradistinction to those who used the ‘mask’ of dramatic monologue, but this is a veryapproximate division....

When it comes to politics on ideology, Armstrong focuses on the socialist and feminist ideas notonly in relation to the characters of Aurora, Romney and Marion, but also in the context ofChristianity:

Nearly a decade before the publication of Aurora Leigh (1856), Elizabeth BarrettBrowning had pondered on the possibility of using Christianity as myth in a way thatwould have been unthinkable to Christina Rossetti. In Aurora Leigh she achieves thedouble feat of writing ‘without mask’ and of rewriting Christian myth. Many of theseunmasked opinions are liberatingly and energetically expressed—for instance, the attackon the triviality of women’s education, the aesthetics of the contemporary city poet—butsome are disturbingly reactionary. Aurora Leigh’s hatred of her cousin Romney’sphilanthropy and Christian Socialism, which she sees as abstract and coldly theoretical ...is hard to accept. There is some sign that Aurora modifies her view. Romney’s house isultimately burned down by the mob to whom he has extended philanthropic care, and thisappears to vindicate Aurora’s beliefs, her disgust for the ‘people’ and her sense that theyare degraded almost beyond redemption. On the other hand, at the end of this verse novelRomney is blinded by the fire—rather like Rochester in Jane Eyre... Aurora Leigh doesnot become the domestic nurse of her blinded companion as Jane Eyre does, but ratherhis social vision of a new economy and freedom is fused with Aurora’s imaginativeenergy and transformed by it. It becomes a radicalism suffused with the affective life ofpoetic insight, a vision rather than a theory.

... Aurora is altered, not by a change of theory so much as a transformation of herimaginative perception of the poor through her relationship with Marion Erle, thedestitute girl whom Romney wishes to make his wife through an abstract sense of duty(and because Aurora has rejected him). Aurora discovers Marion Erle in Italy with a childafter she has been lured away from Romney and raped. Through Marion the Christian

myth is transformed, for Marion takes on not only the attributes of Mary as mother withchild but also the attributes of Christ, who is through her persistently gendered as awoman.... [P]aradoxically it is Marion who incarnates a new feminine and demystifiedform of the Christian myth even when she rejects its forms as obsolete and untruthful.

Discussions of Barrett Browning’s poetry in the late 1990s and the early twenty-first centuryhave had several different foci. Comprehensive and very useful reviews of Barrett Browningscholarship and trends in Barrett Browning studies are provided each year in the Fall issue ofVictorian Poetry; for the past several years these review articles have been written by MarjorieStone.

One topic of discussion in this period—with Barrett Browning as with all women poets of theeighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century—has been the poetry of sensibility. For themost part, however, such discussions have not had Barrett Browning as a primary focus; shebegins to write at the end of the period covered by Jerome McGann in his influential The Poeticsof Sensibility, and both in that book and more generally she has fallen somewhat outside themain current of discussions of the poetry of sensibility.

Gender has continued to be a focus for political and ideological discussions of Barrett Browningand her work, but increasingly so have race and imperialism. Not surprisingly, the latter havelooked frequently at “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point.” Of particular interest here may bethe work of Laura Fish, whose “bio-fiction” on Barrett Browning is scheduled for publication in2008. Fish discusses that work in the context of the Brownings and recent Barrett Browningscholarship in an article in Victorian Poetry (appearing in a special issue devoted to EBB):

My novel in progress, Strange Music (Jonathan Cape, forthcoming, 2008), offers afictional exploration of the family of Elizabeth Barrett Browning from Elizabeth's ownperspective and from that of a Creole and a black woman, and juxtaposes the threewomen's experiences at a moment of crisis within the Barrett family itself. Strange Musicmay be more accurately described as a work of bio-fiction, where the distinction betweenfact and fiction becomes clouded. It is set between 1837 and 1840 in Torquay in Devonand at the Great Houses of Cinnamon Hill and Greenwood, former homes of the Barrettfamily in Jamaica. The title is taken from the first letter Robert Browning sent toElizabeth, dated January 10, 1845. [This letter is reproduced in Appendix 1 below.](Laura Fish, “Strange Music: Engaging Imaginatively with the Family of ElizabethBarrett Browning from a Creole and Black Woman’s perspective,” Victorian Poetry 44.4[Winter 2006], 507)

In exploring the degree to which black women’s “experiences of slavery differed significantlyfrom those of men,” Fish looks to historical work that has drawn attention to these differences,and that has shown sexual exploitation of women by white men in positions of authority to havebeen a near-universal practice.

For Barrett Browning this was history that came close to home; according to the historical recordas Fish reports it, “the Barretts of Jamaica actually had numerous mixed race children who were

related to Elizabeth’s own branch of the Barrett family ... The Barrett wills also suggest relationsbetween the white male Barretts and their black female slaves and housemaids” (516). Fishsituates Barrett Browning and “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point” in a broader context,suggesting that an important moral function for literature may be to “address the need foratonement” (515). She also draws on the work of literary scholars—that of Marjorie Stone inparticular—in contrasting the approach taken by Barrett Browning to that of many other whiteswho formed imaginative constructions of the experiences of black slave women:

As Stone observes, “The literature associated with British female societies generallyemphasized the passivity of blacks, their lack of ‘ability to speak for themselves,’ andtheir need for the ‘maternalistic’ intervention of white ladies.” Yet not only does “TheRunaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point” give to a black woman the ‘gift’ of speech; it portrays“a female slave who rebels against her double burden of sexual as well as racialoppression” by depicting the multiple rape of a slave woman by white male slave holders,and, in offering a “detailed representation of infanticide,” it also provides a “strikinganticipation of Francis Harper's ‘The Slave Mother, a Tale of the Ohio’ and ToniMorrison's Beloved.” (513)

Fish recounts that as she began to shape her novel she wanted to “find a way to present womenwho are seeking to discover ways to overcome or change their circumstances and sense of beingtrapped,” and “to find a way to celebrate this, to write a song of liberation, as opposed topresenting characters as victims striving against all the odds” (517). In conclusion, Fish quotesT.S. Eliot’s argument that literature should aim to create not only “a perception of the pastness ofthe past, but of its presence”; it is a goal that harmonizes, too, with that of Barrett Browning’sown insistence that literature look at the realities of “the present age.”

H. F. Chorley, Review of Aurora Leigh, from The Athenaeum (22 November 1856)

Our best living English poetess—our greatest English poetess of any time—has essayed in‘Aurora Leigh’ to blend the epic with the didactic novel. The medium in which the story floats isthat impassioned language—spotted and flowered with the imagery suggested by fancy or storedup by learning,—which has given the verse of Mrs. Browning a more fiery acceptance from theyoung and spiritual, and her name a higher renown than any woman has heretofore gained.

We dwell on the sex of the author of ‘Aurora Leigh’ in no disrespectful spirit of comparison, butsimply because to overlook it is rendered impossible by the poetess herself. ‘Aurora Leigh’ intowhich she says “have entered her highest convictions upon Life and Art,” is her contribution tothe chorus of protest and mutual exhortation, which Woman is now raising, in hope of gainingthe due place and sympathy which, it is held, have been denied to her since the days when Manwas created, the first of the pair in Eden. Who can quarrel with the intent? Who would silenceany struggle made by those who fancy themselves desolate, oppressed, undervalued,—to unlockthe prison-doors,—to melt the heart of injustice? Mrs. Browning is never unwomanly in herpassionate pleadings for women: unwomanly she could not be, after having wrought out thatbeautiful and tender conception of Eve, which gives such peculiar grace to her ‘Drama of Exile.’Her Confession (for like all works of its class, ‘Aurora Leigh’ has in it a tone of confession),

amounts to an admission of failure: its conclusion is that indicated from another point of view byMrs. Hemans, in her ‘Properzia Rossi.’ The moral is the insufficiency of Fame and Ambition, beeither ever so generous, to make up for the absence of Love:—a class-vindication wound up byan appeal against class-separation. Thus, as in all the works of its kind, which women have sofreely poured out from their full hearts during late years, we see the agony more clearly than theremedy. We are shown, at first, restlessness disdaining quiet; till, fevered and forlorn, as timeand grief do their work, the restless heart ends in courting the very repose it so scorned whenfirst tendered. But while Truth closes the tale, in its progress Imagination has been strainedbeyond permissible freedom. In brief, we regret to declare that Mrs. Browning’s longest andmost matured effort, jeweled though it be with rich thought and rare fancies, is in its argumentunnatural, and in its form infelicitous.

Aurora Leigh is a born poetess, the child of an English father and an Italian mother,—on thefather's side connected with wealth and old name. She is sent over to England, when an orphan,to be cared for and educated by a maiden aunt,—that well-worn spectral apparition of conventionin buckram, without which no tale of woman's aspirings, it seems, can be told. Such persons,whose narrow capacities bring on limited views of duty, have been long abused; but their time, itappears, has not yet come. Meanwhile, they serve their turn with those who make fantasticpanoramas of life. Without such aunts (grim substitute for the stepmother of ancient romance!)no woman of genius could be cradled into poetry through wrong; and Mrs. Browning only adoptsa convention in denouncing convention. Aurora is wooed by her cousin, Romney Leigh, a rich,high-hearted philanthropist, to whom her heart is not disinclined. But he is too big in theconsciousness of his own philanthropy; and waywardly she conceives the idea that she is askedto become his wife in a strain of persuasion unworthy the ear of a great and gifted woman,—thatshe is sought from low motives, (as, indeed, are most wives), and that her career, as an unassistedand independent woman of genius, will be brighter if she retains her heart in her own keeping.Accordingly Aurora rejects Romney as a husband,—spurns his generous attempts to smooth thepath of life for her by tendering a share of the family fortune. Putting on poverty as a singingrobe, she adopts authorship in London, becomes famous and admired, and dwells like a starapart. Foiled of his object, Romney Leigh embraces his plans of social reforms with anearnestness, in which there is the intoxication of a wounded spirit as much as the conviction ofone called to the priest's office. He opens a phalanstery, affects only the society of the sick,sorrowful, or guilty, and, willing to attest his superiority to class prejudice by the most solemnact a man can do, prepares to marry one Marian Erle, a milliner’s apprentice,—who is humble,ignorant, but as devoted and as noble in her way as either Romney or Aurora. The latter (in spiteof her having begun to discover that she had made a mistake in rejecting her cousin, and infancying that fame could supply the place of love) seeks out Marian. The girls’ story ispowerfully told, but is unreal in the poetry and holiness of nature it reveals in one nurtured,tortured, and beset as she has been. Such resistance as hers must have hardened the victim in thestruggle,—whereas Marian is soft as a briar-rose, besides being pure as the dew-bead on it.Aurora welcomes and embraces her with enthusiastic devotion. Not so other of Romney's femalefriends. A wicked influence is at work against the poor sempstress:—a woman of fashion, oneLady Waldemar, who has fallen in love with Romney Leigh, (and for his sake, with Christiansocialism) so practices upon Marian, that on the appointed wedding-day, when St. Giles and St.James are bidden to church to see the Socialist gentleman married (a parade somewhat insolent

in its condescension), the bride is not forthcoming, but in her place a mysterious letter. Instead ofthe bridal revel, where Rank and Rags were to sit at the same board, there is a brawl in thechurch:—Marian is gone—no one knows whither.

As years roll on, Aurora’s authorship prospers. She is praised in the reviews—she is a lion inLondon soirees; and from not any of the most common-place and frivolous of these transactions,with all their train of prosaic and poverty-stricken adjuncts, does our artist shrink as a subject forart. Nevertheless, Aurora finds out that she is alone in spirit after all; and more stung than shecares to own, by a rumor in the coteries that Cousin Romney is about to marry this evil LadyWaldemar, she resolves to give up England for a time, and go home to Italy. On her way—inParis—she lights on Marian, now the unwedded mother of a beautiful boy, and learns from herthe sequel to her story: how Lady Waldemar had not only detached her from the noble gentlemanwho would have married her; had not only, as we have seen, prevailed on her to give up CousinRomney; but, under pretext of sending her out to the Colonies, had allowed her to fall into thehands of an infamous woman, by whom Marian—herself innocent—was forced into ruin. In thishideous page of the romance Mrs. Browning puts forth all her power. Aurora at once takes theoutraged Marian to her heart, carries her off with her child to Italy, and writes home herdisclosure of Lady Waldemar's machinations—in order that it may reach Romney. After them, indue course of time, he arrives. By the old trick, well worn in novels and plays, Aurora receiveshim, under the misapprehension that he is Lady Waldemar’s husband; but he presently assuresher that, so far from being so, he has come to Italy still to marry Marian, and to adopt the child ofviolence and misery as his own. Once more, however, and this time unprompted by all excepther own nature, Marian refuses to marry Romney—assuring him that she does not love him now;that indeed she never did love him as he deserved to be loved; that she will live for her child, andno creature else: and it is in this crisis that Aurora and Romney at last come to an understanding.The artist has found the hollowness of Art to fill and to satisfy; and the philanthropist'sexperiences are drearier still. He has been rewarded for his care for the vile and the humble byhaving his father’s house burnt over his head—in the catastrophe having lost his sight, it ishinted, owing to the vengeance of Marian's reprobate father.

Such is a brief sketch of the argument of ‘Aurora Leigh’; and not few who read it will betempted to say, This looks not like a poem but a novel, belonging to the period which hasproduced ‘Ruth,’ and ‘Villette,’ and ‘The Blithedale Romance.’ We will not stop to ask how farthe invention be true to life and to art; since the form of its presentment may be pleaded inexcuse for anything unreal in character, false in sentiment, or exaggerated in incident, whichexists in the plot and the persons working it out. But what are we to say if we waive purpose—ifwe do not discuss the wisdom of the form selected (large concessions these, yet due to one sogifted and so passionately in earnest as Mrs. Browning)—if we treat ‘Aurora Leigh’ as a poeticalromance? Simply, that we have no experience of such a mingling of what is precious with whatis mean—of the voice of clarion and the lyric cadence of harp with the cracked school-roomspinet—of tears and small-talk—of eloquent apostrophe and adust speculation—of the grandeurof passion and the pettiness of modes and manners—as we find in these nine books of blankverse. Milton’s organ is put by Mrs. Browning to play polkas in May-Fair drawing-rooms, andfitted out by her with its Aesthetic Review stop, which drones out lengths and strains of a strangequality. But it yields, too, beneath her fingers those glorious chords and melodies, which

(musicians have fancied) are the real occupation and utterance of that instrument. Is this severe?Let any one that thinks so take the following commencement of the scene in the church atRomney's interrupted wedding as a passage from a poem....‘Aurora Leigh’ contains too many pages as perversely trivial, too many passages as carelesslydry, as the above. We cannot forgive either the flippancy or the dreary disquisition from one likeMrs. Browning, when her theme, too, is of art and artists. Such are affectations, not discoveries.There is humanity even in May-Fair babble; there may be thought in criticism, be it ever so clear;but to bring Mr. Yellowplush, with his powder and calves, into a serious poem of grief andaspiration;—and when we would see Corinna to come upon a Gifford or Conder nibbling his penfor a succinct paragraph,—these things, we repeat, are novelties to which no diffusion of the newlight will reconcile serious readers.

Why these fopperies and mistakes grieve us in Mrs. Browning we will show forthwith; for notone of her former works is richer in passages of power and beauty, in noble lines and loftythoughts than ‘Aurora Leigh.’

Here we must hand over ‘Aurora Leigh’ to those who will wonder at, or decry, orenthusiastically commend, or pass over the differences and discords of the tale; for it will havereaders of all the four classes. To some it will be so much rank foolishness,—to others almost ascriptural revelation. The huge mistake of its plan, the disdain of selectness in its details, couldnot be exhausted were we to write for column and column,—nor would page on page suffice tocontain the high thoughts, the deep feelings, the fantastic images showered over the tale with theauthority of a prophetess, the grace of a muse, the prodigality of a queen. Such a poem, we dareaver, has never before been written by woman; and if our apprehension of its discords anddiscrepancies has been keen and expressed without measure, it is because our admiration of itswriter's genius, and our sympathy with the nobility of her purpose, are also keen and withoutmeasure.

George Eliot, Review of Aurora Leigh, from Westminster Review (January 1857)

Foster, the essayist, has somewhere said that the person who interests us most is the one thatmost gives us the idea of ample being. Applying this remark to books, which are but persons in atransmigrated form, we discern one grand source of the profound impression produced in us by“Aurora Leigh.” Other poems of our own day may have higher finish, or a higher degree ofcertain poetic qualities; but no poem embraces so wide a range of thought and emotion, or takessuch complete possession of our nature. Mrs. Browning is, perhaps, the first woman who hasproduced a work which exhibits all the peculiar powers without the negations of her sex; whichsuperadds to masculine vigor, breadth, and culture, feminine subtlety of perception, femininequickness of sensibility, and feminine tenderness. It is difficult to point to a woman of geniuswho is not either too little feminine, or too exclusively so. But in this, her longest and greatestpoem, Mrs. Browning has shown herself all the greater poet because she is intensely a poetess.

The story of “Aurora Leigh” has no other merit than that of offering certain elements of life, andcertain situations which are peculiarly fitted to call forth the writer’s rich thought and experience.

It has nothing either fresh or felicitous in structure or incident; and we are especially sorry thatMrs. Browning has added one more to the imitations of the catastrophe in “Jane Eyre,” bysmiting her hero with blindness before he is made happy in the love of Aurora. Life has sadnessand bitterness enough for a disappointed philanthropist like Romney Leigh, short of maiming orblindness; and the outflow of love and compassion towards physical ills is less rare in womanthan complete sympathy with mental sorrows. Hence we think the lavish mutilation of heroes’bodies, which has become the habit of novelists, while it happily does not represent probabilitiesin the present state of things, weakens instead of strengthening tragic effect; and, as we said, weregret that Mrs. Browning has given this habit her strong sanction. Other criticisms might bepassed on “Aurora Leigh,” considered as a representation of incident and dialogue, but we arelittle inclined to spend our small space in pointing out faults which will be very slightly felt byany one who has heart and mind enough to respond to all the beautiful feeling, the large thought,and the rich melodious song of this rare poem. “Quel grand homme est le seigneur Pococurante!rien ne peut lui plaire!” is a kind of praise to which we do not in the least aspire. We wouldrather be suspected of obtuseness to many faults than fail in giving the due tribute of reverenceand admiration to a single great merit.

The most striking characteristic of “Aurora Leigh,” distinguishing it from the larger proportionof that contemporary poetry which wins the applause of reviewers, is, that its melody, fancy, andimagination—what we may call its poetical body—is everywhere informed by a soul, namely, bygenuine thought and feeling. There is no petty striving after special effects, no heaping up ofimages for their own sake, no trivial play of fancy run quite astray from the control of deepersensibility; there is simply a full mind pouring itself out in song as its natural and easiestmedium. This mind has its far-stretching thoughts, its abundant treasure of well-digestedlearning, its acute observation of life, its yearning sympathy with multiform human sorrow, itsstore of personal domestic love and joy; and these are given out in a delightful alternation ofpathos, reflection, satire playful or pungent, and picturesque description, which carries us withswifter pulses than usual through four hundred pages, and makes us sorry to find ourselves at theend. Our extracts will necessarily be very limited; and we must urge the reader to bear in mindthat “Aurora Leigh” is a poem which even large extracts cannot fairly represent. It has the calm,even flow of a broad river, not the spray and rainbows of a mountain torrent.

Coventry Patmore, Review of Aurora Leigh, from North British Review (February1857)

The poetical reputation of Mrs. Browning, late Miss Barrett, has been growing slowly, until ithas achieved a height which has never before been attained by any modern poetess, thoughseveral others have had wider circles of readers. An intellect of a very unusual order has beenripened by an education scarcely less unusual for a woman; and Mrs. Browning now honorablyenjoys the title of poetess in her own right, and not merely by courtesy.

The poems before us are divisible into three tolerably distinct classes; first, the imaginativecompositions, which form the bulk of Miss Barrett’s poems, and several of which Mrs.Browning tells us she “would willingly have withdrawn, if it were not almost impossible toextricate what has once been caught and involved in the machinery of the press.” Secondly, the

poems which have immediately arisen from personal feeling and personal observation. Of thesethe chief are the so-called “Sonnets from the Portuguese,” and “Casa Guidi Windows.” Thirdly,the novel-in-verse, or present-day epic, called “Aurora Leigh.” Besides the poems belonging tothese three classes, there are several “occasional pieces” of more or less significance.

Pieces which the authoress confesses that she “would willingly have withdrawn,” are, by thatconfession, almost withdrawn from criticism. We imagine that the two dramas, “a Drama ofExile,” and “the Seraphim,” are among the number of those which Mrs. Browning, in her lastedition, introduces with “a request to the generous reader that he may use their weakness, whichno subsequent revision has succeeded in strengthening, less as a reproach to the writer, than as ameans of marking some progress in her other attempts.” We will only say concerning these andsome other youthful essays, that we think the authoress mistaken in supposing that the“machinery of the press” will give them the deprecated perpetuity, unless she herself continuesto reprint them; and that their value “as a means of marking some progress in her otherattempts,” is of a kind which her personal friends will appreciate much better than the world, forwhom, we presume, she writes and publishes.

“Aurora Leigh” is the latest, and Mrs. Browning tells us, in the dedication, “the most mature” ofher works; the one into which her “highest convictions upon Life and Art have entered.” It wasnot well judged to prejudice the reader, at the very outset, with the inevitable doubt, “Is a poemthe right place for ‘highest convictions upon Life and Art?’” This poem is two thousand lineslonger than “Paradise Lost.” We do not know how to describe it better than by saying that it is anovel in verse,—a novel of the modern didactic species, written chiefly for the advocacy ofdistinct “convictions upon Life and Art.” If poetry ought to consist only of “thoughts thatvoluntary move harmonious numbers,” a very large portion of this work ought unquestionably tohave been in prose. But the question seems open to discussion, and we give Mrs. Browning thebenefit of the doubt. Perhaps the chief misfortune for the poem is, that there may always be twoopinions on all “convictions upon Life and Art.” For example, we ourselves dissent altogetherfrom certain of the views advocated. We think that “conventions,” which are society’s unwrittenlaws, are condemned in too sweeping and unexamining a style; that the importance of anordinary education in the formation of character is too emphatically denied by the example ofMarian Erle, whom we regard as an impossible person, under her circumstances; that Art is notthe highest power in the world; and so forth. “Aurora Leigh” would assuredly have been a morepoetical work if it had made the question, “Do you agree with it?” an absurd one, and had onlyallowed of the question, “Do you or do you not understand it?” The safest way of speaking ofthis poem, which, expressly or by implication, has so considerable a polemic element in it, is toplace a simple analysis of it before our readers.

The command of imagery shown by Mrs. Browning, in this poem, is really surprising, even inthis day when every poetaster seems to be endowed with a more or less startling amount of thatpower; but Mrs. Browning seldom goes out of her way for an image, as nearly all our otherversifiers are in the habit of doing continually. There is a vital continuity, through the whole ofthis immensely long work, which is thus remarkably, and most favorably distinguished from thesand-weaving of so many of her contemporaries. The earnestness of the authoress is, also,plainly without affectation, and her enthusiasm for truth and beauty, as she apprehends them,

unbounded. A work upon such a scale, and with such a scope, had it been faultless, would havebeen the greatest work of the age; but unhappily there are faults, and very serious ones, over andabove those which we have already hinted. The poem has evidently been written in a very smallproportion of the time which a work so very ambitiously conceived ought to have taken. Thelanguage which in passionate scenes is simple and real, in other parts becomes very turgid andunpoetical; for example:—

“What if even GodWere chiefly God by working out himselfTo an individualism of the Infinite,Eterne, intense, profuse,—-still throwing upThe golden spray of multitudinous worldsIn measure to the proclive weight and rushOf his inner nature,—the spontaneous loveStill proof and outflow of spontaneous life?”

Or, in a different style, the style, unfortunately, of hundreds of lines:—

“In those days, though, I never analyzedMyself even: all analysis comes late.”

Or again:—

“Those faces! ’twas as if you had stirred up hellTo heave its lowest dreg-fiends uppermostIn fiery swirls of slime,—such strangled fronts,Such obdurate jaws were thrown up constantly.”

These, and other artistic defects, detract somewhat from the general effect of the poem; but noone who reads it, with true poetic sympathy, can withhold his tribute of admiration from a workpossessing so many of the highest excellencies.

from W. E. Aytoun, Review of Aurora Leigh, in Blackwood’s EdinburghMagazine (January 1857)

Mrs. Browning takes the field like ... Joan of Arc, and declares that she will not accept courtesyor forbearance from the critics on account of her sex. She challenges a truthful opinion, and thatopinion she shall have.

Aurora Leigh is a story of the present time in nine books. When we say a story, it must not beunderstood in the sense of a continuous narrative or rather poem of action, for a great portion ofthe work is reflective. Still, there is a story which we shall trace for the information of thereader....

Such is the story, which no admirer of Mrs. Browning’s genius ought in prudence to defend. Inour opinion it is fantastic, unnatural, exaggerated; and all the worse, because it professes to be atale of our own times. No one who understands of how much value probability is to a tale, canread ... the poem without a painful feeling that Mrs. Browning has been perpetrating, inessentials, an extravaganza or caricature.... Aurora Leigh is not an attractive character.... she isincongruous and contradictory both in her sentiments and in her actions. She is not a genuinewoman; one half of her heart seems bounding with the beat of humanity, while the other half isossified. What we miss in her is instinctiveness, which is the greatest charm of women. No doubtshe displays it now and then, and sometimes very conspicuously, but it is not made the generalattribute of her nature.......With all deference to Mrs. Browning, and with ideas of our ownperhaps more chivalric than are commonly promulgated, we must maintain that woman wascreated to be dependant on the man, and not in the primary sense his lady and his mistress. Theextreme independence of Aurora detracts from the feminine charm, and mars the interest whichwe might otherwise have felt in so intellectual a heroine. In fact, she is made to resemble tooclosely some of the female portraits of George Sand, which never were to our liking. In Romneywe fail to take any kind of interest. Though honorable and generous, he is such a very decidednoodle that we grudge him his prominence in the poem, do not feel much sympathy for hismisfortunes, and cannot help wondering that Aurora should have entertained some spark ofaffection for so deplorable a milksop....* * *In poetry, passages such as that which we have quoted are intolerable, because, by juxtapositionwith others, exquisite in themselves, they impair our capacity for enjoyment. Anything veryhideous or revolting taints the air around it, and produces a sensation of loathing, from which wedo not immediately recover. Hence poets, even when their situations are of the most tragicnature—even when they are dealing with subjects of questionable morality—do, for the mostpart, sedulously avoid anything like coarseness of expression, and frame their language so as toconvey the general idea without presenting special images which are calculated to disgust.Indeed, whilst reading this poem, which abounds in references to art, we have been impressedwith a doubt whether, with all her genius, accomplishment, and experience, Mrs. Browning hasever thought seriously of the principles upon which art is founded....

Still, with all its faults, this is a remarkable poem, strong in energy, rich in thought, abundant inbeauty, and it more than sustains that high reputation which, by her previous efforts, Mrs.Browning has so honorably won.

Letter from William Makepeace Thackeray to Elizabeth Barrett Browning (2 April1861)

[This letter was a belated response to the submission by Browning of her poem “Lord Walter’sWife,” to be considered for publication in the Cornhill Magazine, of which Thackeray was theneditor. In the poem (reproduced in Appendix 3 below), a woman responds to the advances of amarried man with a bold challenge to the hypocritical sexual conventions of a patriarchal society.In Browning’s response to Thackeray’s letter she affirmed that she had no fondness herself for“coarse subjects,” but was “deeply convinced that the corruption of our society requires, not shutdoors and windows, but light and air.” For the full correspondence see Gordon Ray, ed., The

Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP,1989), volume 4, 226ff. For an extended discussion of the correspondence see Linda Shires,“Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Cross Dwelling and the Re-Working of Female PoliticalAuthority,” Victorian Literature and Culture (2002), 327-343.]

36 Onslow Sqr. April 2. 1861.

My dear kind Mrs. Browning

Has Browning ever had an aching tooth wh. must come out (I don't say Mrs. Browning, forwomen are much more courageous)—a tooth wh. must come out and which he has kept formonths and months from the dentist? I have had such a tooth a long time, and have sate down inthis chair, and never had the courage to undergo the pull.

This tooth is an allegory (I mean this one). Its your poem that you sent me months ago—and whoam I to refuse the poems of Elizabeth Browning, and set myself up as a judge over her? I can’ttell you how often I have been going to write, and have failed.

You see that our Magazine is written not only for men and women, but for boys, girls, infants,sucklings almost, and one of the best wives, mothers, women in the world, writes some verses,wh. I feel certain would be objected to by many of our readers—Not that the writer is not pure,and the moral most pure chaste and right—but there are things my squeamish public will nothear on Mondays though on Sundays they listen to them without scruple. In your poem youknow there is an account of unlawful passion felt by a man for a woman—and though you writepure doctrine and real modesty and pure ethics, I am sure our readers would make an outcry, andso I have not published this poem.

To have to say no to my betters is one of the hardest duties I have—but I'm sure we must notpublish your verses—and I go down on my knees before cutting my victims head off, and say‘Madam you know how I respect and regard you, Brownings wife and Peniny’s mother: and forwhat I am going to do I most humbly ask your pardon.’

My girls send their very best regards and remembrances: and I am, dear Mrs. BrowningAlways yoursW M Thackeray

Virginia Woolf, “Aurora Leigh,” from The Common Reader, Second Series (1932)

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By one of those ironies of fashion that might have amused the Brownings themselves, it seemslikely that they are now far better known in the flesh than they have ever been in the spirit.Passionate lovers, in curls and side-whiskers, oppressed, defiant, eloping—in this guisethousands of people must know and love the Brownings who have never read a line of theirpoetry. They have become two of the most conspicuous figures in that bright and animatedcompany of authors who, thanks to our modern habit of writing memoirs and printing letters andsitting to be photographed, live in the flesh, not merely as of old in the word; are known by theirhats, not merely by their poems. What damage the art of photography has inflicted upon the artof literature has yet to be reckoned. How far we are going to read a poet when we can read abouta poet is a problem to lay before biographers. Meanwhile, nobody can deny the power of theBrownings to excite our sympathy and rouse our interest. “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship” isglanced at perhaps by two professors in American universities once a year; but we all know howMiss Barrett lay on her sofa; how she escaped from the dark house in Wimpole Street oneSeptember morning; how she met health and happiness, freedom, and Robert Browning in thechurch round the corner.

But fate has not been kind to Mrs. Browning as a writer. Nobody reads her, nobody discussesher, nobody troubles to put her in her place. One has only to compare her reputation withChristina Rossetti’s to trace her decline. Christina Rossetti mounts irresistibly to the first placeamong English women poets. Elizabeth, so much more loudly applauded during her lifetime,falls farther and farther behind. The primers dismiss her with contumely. Her importance, theysay, “has now become merely historical. Neither education nor association with her husband eversucceeded in teaching her the value of words and a sense of form.” In short, the only place in themansion of literature that is assigned her is downstairs in the servants’ quarters, where, incompany with Mrs. Hemans, Eliza Cook, Jean Ingelow, Alexander Smith, Edwin Arnold, andRobert Montgomery, she bangs the crockery about and eats vast handfuls of peas on the point ofher knife.

If, therefore, we take Aurora Leigh from the shelf it is not so much in order to read it as to musewith kindly condescension over this token of bygone fashion, as we toy with the fringes of ourgrandmothers’ mantles and muse over the alabaster models of the Taj Mahal which once adornedtheir drawing-room tables. But to the Victorians, undoubtedly, the book was very dear. Thirteeneditions of Aurora Leigh had been demanded by the year 1873. And, to judge from thededication, Mrs. Browning herself was not afraid to say that she set great store by it—“the mostmature of my works”, she calls it, “and the one into which my highest convictions upon Life andArt have entered”. Her letters show that she had had the book in mind for many years. She wasbrooding over it when she first met Browning, and her intention with regard to it forms almostthe first of those confidences about their work which the lovers delighted to share.

. . . my chief INTENTION [she wrote] just now is the writing of a sort of novel-poem . . .running into the midst of our conventions, and rushing into drawing-rooms and the like,“where angels fear to tread”; and so, meeting face to face and without mask the Humanityof the age, and speaking the truth of it out plainly. That is my intention.

But for reasons which later become clear, she hoarded her intention throughout the tenastonishing years of escape and happiness; and when at last the book appeared in 1856 she mightwell feel that she had poured into it the best that she had to give. Perhaps the hoarding and thesaturation which resulted have something to do with the surprise that awaits us. At any rate wecannot read the first twenty pages of Aurora Leigh without becoming aware that the AncientMariner who lingers, for unknown reasons, at the porch of one book and not of another has us bythe hand, and makes us listen like a three years’ child while Mrs. Browning pours out in ninevolumes of blank verse the story of Aurora Leigh. Speed and energy, forthrightness andcomplete self-confidence—these are the qualities that hold us enthralled. Floated off our feet bythem, we learn how Aurora was the child of an Italian mother “whose rare blue eyes were shutfrom seeing her when she was scarcely four years old”. Her father was “an austere Englishman,Who, after a dry lifetime spent at home in college-learning, law and parish talk, Was floodedwith a passion unaware”, but died too, and the child was sent back to England to be brought upby an aunt. The aunt, of the well-known family of the Leighs, stood upon the hall step of hercountry house dressed in black to welcome her. Her somewhat narrow forehead was braidedtight with brown hair pricked with gray; she had a close, mild mouth; eyes of no colour; andcheeks like roses pressed in books, “Kept more for ruth than pleasure,—if past bloom, Pastfading also”. The lady had lived a quiet life, exercising her Christian gifts upon knittingstockings and stitching petticoats “because we are of one flesh, after all, and need one flannel”.At her hand Aurora suffered the education that was thought proper for women. She learnt a littleFrench, a little algebra; the internal laws of the Burmese empire; what navigable river joins itselfto Lara; what census of the year five was taken at Klagenfurt; also how to draw nereids neatlydraped, to spin glass, to stuff birds, and model flowers in wax. For the aunt liked a woman to bewomanly. Of an evening she did cross-stitch and, owing to some mistake in her choice of silk,once embroidered a shepherdess with pink eyes. Under this torture of women’s education, thepassionate Aurora exclaimed, certain women have died; others pine; a few who have, as Aurorahad, “relations with the unseen”, survive and walk demurely, and are civil to their cousins andlisten to the vicar and pour out tea. Aurora herself was blessed with a little room. It was green-papered, had a green carpet and there were green curtains to the bed, as if to match the insipidgreenery of the English countryside. There she retired; there she read. “I had found the secret ofa garret room Piled high with cases in my father’s name, Piled high, packed large, where,creeping in and out . . . like some small nimble mouse between the ribs of a mastodon” she readand read. The mouse indeed (it is the way with Mrs. Browning’s mice) took wings and soared,for “It is rather when We gloriously forget ourselves and plunge Soul-forward, headlong, into abook’s profound, Impassioned for its beauty and salt of truth—’Tis then we get the right goodfrom a book”. And so she read and read, until her cousin Romney called to walk with her, or thepainter Vincent Carrington, “whom men judge hardly as bee-bonneted Because he holds thatpaint a body well you paint a soul by implication”, tapped on the window.

This hasty abstract of the first volume of Aurora Leigh does it of course no sort of justice; buthaving gulped down the original much as Aurora herself advises, soul-forward, headlong, wefind ourselves in a state where some attempt at the ordering of our multitudinous impressionsbecomes imperative. The first of these impressions and the most pervasive is the sense of thewriter’s presence. Through the voice of Aurora the character, the circumstances, theidiosyncrasies of Elizabeth Barrett Browning ring in our ears. Mrs. Browning could no more

conceal herself than she could control herself, a sign no doubt of imperfection in an artist, but asign also that life has impinged upon art more than life should. Again and again in the pages wehave read, Aurora the fictitious seems to be throwing light upon Elizabeth the actual. The idea ofthe poem, we must remember, came to her in the early forties when the connexion between awoman’s art and a woman’s life was unnaturally close, so that it is impossible for the mostaustere of critics not sometimes to touch the flesh when his eyes should be fixed upon the page.And as everybody knows, the life of Elizabeth Barrett was of a nature to affect the mostauthentic and individual of gifts. Her mother had died when she was a child; she had readprofusely and privately; her favourite brother was drowned; her health broke down; she had beenimmured by the tyranny of her father in almost conventual seclusion in a bedroom in WimpoleStreet. But instead of rehearsing the well-known facts, it is better to read in her own words herown account of the effect they had upon her.

I have lived only inwardly [she wrote] or with SORROW, for a strong emotion. Beforethis seclusion of my illness, I was secluded still, and there are few of the youngest womenin the world who have not seen more, heard more, known more, of society, than I, whoam scarcely to be called young now. I grew up in the country—I had no socialopportunities, had my heart in books and poetry, and my experience in reveries. And sotime passed and passed—and afterwards, when my illness came . . . and no prospect (asappeared at one time) of ever passing the threshold of one room again; why then, I turnedto thinking with some bitterness . . . that I had stood blind in this temple I was about toleave—that I had seen no Human nature, that my brothers and sisters of the earth wereNAMES to me, that I had beheld no great mountain or river, nothing in fact. . . . And doyou also know what a disadvantage this ignorance is to my art? Why, if I live on and yetdo not escape from this seclusion, do you not perceive that I labour under signaldisadvantages—that I am, in a manner as a BLIND POET? Certainly, there iscompensation to a degree. I have had much of the inner life, and from the habit of self-consciousness and self-analysis, I make great guesses at Human nature in the main. Buthow willingly I would as a poet exchange some of this lumbering, ponderous, helplessknowledge of books, for some experience of life and man, for some . . .

She breaks off, with three little dots, and we may take advantage of her pause to turn once moreto Aurora Leigh.

What damage had her life done her as a poet? A great one, we cannot deny. For it is clear, as weturn the pages of Aurora Leigh or of the Letters—one often echoes the other—that the mindwhich found its natural expression in this swift and chaotic poem about real men and women wasnot the mind to profit by solitude. A lyrical, a scholarly, a fastidious mind might have usedseclusion and solitude to perfect its powers. Tennyson asked no better than to live with books inthe heart of the country. But the mind of Elizabeth Barrett was lively and secular and satirical.She was no scholar. Books were to her not an end in themselves but a substitute for living. Sheraced through folios because she was forbidden to scamper on the grass. She wrestled withAeschylus and Plato because it was out of the question that she should argue about politics withlive men and women. Her favourite reading as an invalid was Balzac and George Sand and other“immortal improprieties” because “they kept the colour in my life to some degree”. Nothing is

more striking when at last she broke the prison bars than the fervour with which she flung herselfinto the life of the moment. She loved to sit in a café and watch people passing; she loved thearguments, the politics, and the strife of the modern world. The past and its ruins, even the pastof Italy and Italian ruins, interested her much less than the theories of Mr. Hume the medium, orthe politics of Napoleon, Emperor of the French. Italian pictures, Greek poetry, roused in her aclumsy and conventional enthusiasm in strange contrast with the original independence of hermind when it applied itself to actual facts.

Such being her natural bent, it is not surprising that even in the depths of her sick-room her mindturned to modern life as a subject for poetry. She waited, wisely, until her escape had given hersome measure of knowledge and proportion. But it cannot be doubted that the long years ofseclusion had done her irreparable damage as an artist. She had lived shut off, guessing at whatwas outside, and inevitably magnifying what was within. The loss of Flush, the spaniel, affectedher as the loss of a child might have affected another woman. The tap of ivy on the pane becamethe thrash of trees in a gale. Every sound was enlarged, every incident exaggerated, for thesilence of the sick-room was profound and the monotony of Wimpole Street was intense. Whenat last she was able to “rush into drawing-rooms and the like and meet face to face without maskthe Humanity of the age and speak the truth of it out plainly”, she was too weak to stand theshock. Ordinary daylight, current gossip, the usual traffic of human beings left her exhausted,ecstatic, and dazzled into a state where she saw so much and felt so much that she did notaltogether know what she felt or what she saw.

Aurora Leigh, the novel-poem, is not, therefore, the masterpiece that it might have been. Ratherit is a masterpiece in embryo; a work whose genius floats diffused and fluctuating in some pre-natal stage waiting the final stroke of creative power to bring it into being. Stimulating andboring, ungainly and eloquent, monstrous and exquisite, all by turns, it overwhelms andbewilders; but, nevertheless, it still commands our interest and inspires our respect. For itbecomes clear as we read that, whatever Mrs. Browning’s faults, she was one of those rarewriters who risk themselves adventurously and disinterestedly in an imaginative life which isindependent of their private lives and demands to be considered apart from personalities. Her“intention” survives; the interest of her theory redeems much that is faulty in her practice.Abridged and simplified from Aurora’s argument in the fifth book, that theory runs somethinglike this. The true work of poets, she said, is to present their own age, not Charlemagne’s. Morepassion takes place in drawing-rooms than at Roncesvalles with Roland and his knights. “Toflinch from modern varnish, coat or flounce, Cry out for togas and the picturesque, Isfatal—foolish too.” For living art presents and records real life, and the only life we can trulyknow is our own. But what form, she asks, can a poem on modern life take? The drama isimpossible, for only servile and docile plays have any chance of success. Moreover, what we (in1846) have to say about life is not fit for “boards, actors, prompters, gaslight, and costume; ourstage is now the soul itself”. What then can she do? The problem is difficult, performance isbound to fall short of endeavour; but she has at least wrung her life-blood on to every page of herbook, and, for the rest “Let me think of forms less, and the external. Trust the spirit . . . Keep upthe fire and leave the generous flames to shape themselves.” And so the fire blazed and theflames leapt high.

The desire to deal with modern life in poetry was not confined to Miss Barrett. Robert Browningsaid that he had had the same ambition all his life. Coventry Patmore’s “Angel in the House” andClough’s “Bothie” were both attempts of the same kind and preceded Aurora Leigh by someyears. It was natural enough. The novelists were dealing triumphantly with modern life in prose.Jane Eyre, Vanity Fair, David Copperfield, Richard Feverel all trod fast on each other’s heelsbetween the years 1847 and 1860. The poets may well have felt, with Aurora Leigh, that modernlife had an intensity and a meaning of its own. Why should these spoils fall solely into the laps ofthe prose writers? Why should the poet be forced back to the remoteness of Charlemagne andRoland, to the toga and the picturesque, when the humours and tragedies of village life, drawing-room life, club life, and street life all cried aloud for celebration? It was true that the old form inwhich poetry had dealt with life—the drama—was obsolete; but was there none other that couldtake its place? Mrs. Browning, convinced of the divinity of poetry, pondered, seized as much asshe could of actual experience, and then at last threw down her challenge to the Brontës and theThackerays in nine books of blank verse. It was in blank verse that she sang of Shoreditch andKensington; of my aunt and the vicar; of Romney Leigh and Vincent Carrington; of Marian Erleand Lord Howe; of fashionable weddings and drab suburban streets, and bonnets and whiskersand four-wheeled cabs, and railway trains. The poets can treat of these things, she exclaimed, aswell as of knights and dames, moats and drawbridges and castle courts. But can they? Let us seewhat happens to a poet when he poaches upon a novelist’s preserves and gives us not an epic or alyric but the story of many lives that move and change and are inspired by the interests andpassions that are ours in the middle of the reign of Queen Victoria.

In the first place there is the story; a tale has to be told; the poet must somehow convey to us thenecessary information that his hero has been asked out to dinner. This is a statement that anovelist would convey as quietly and prosaically as possible; for example, “While I was kissingher glove, sadly enough, a note was brought saying that her father sent his regards and asked meto dine with them next day”. That is harmless. But the poet has to write:

While thus I grieved, and kissed her glove, My man brought in her note to say, Papa hadbid her send his love, And would I dine with them next day!

Which is absurd. The simple words have been made to strut and posture and take on an emphasiswhich makes them ridiculous. Then again, what will the poet do with dialogue? In modern life,as Mrs. Browning indicated when she said that our stage is now the soul, the tongue hassuperseded the sword. It is in talk that the high moments of life, the shock of character uponcharacter, are defined. But poetry when it tries to follow the words on people’s lips is terriblyimpeded. Listen to Romney in a moment of high emotion talking to his old love Marian aboutthe baby she has borne to another man:

May God so father me, as I do him, And so forsake me, as I let him feel He’s orphanedhaply. Here I take the child To share my cup, to slumber on my knee, To play his loudestgambol at my foot, To hold my finger in the public ways . . .

and so on. Romney, in short, rants and reels like any of those Elizabethan heroes whom Mrs.Browning had warned so imperiously out of her modern living-room. Blank verse has proveditself the most remorseless enemy of living speech. Talk tossed up on the surge and swing of theverse becomes high, rhetorical, impassioned; and as talk, since action is ruled out, must go onand on, the reader’s mind stiffens and glazes under the monotony of the rhythm. Following thelilt of her rhythm rather than the emotions of her characters, Mrs. Browning is swept on intogeneralization and declamation. Forced by the nature of her medium, she ignores the slighter, thesubtler, the more hidden shades of emotion by which a novelist builds up touch by touch acharacter in prose. Change and development, the effect of one character upon another—all this isabandoned. The poem becomes one long soliloquy, and the only character that is known to usand the only story that is told us are the character and story of Aurora Leigh herself.

Thus, if Mrs. Browning meant by a novel-poem a book in which character is closely and subtlyrevealed, the relations of many hearts laid bare, and a story unfalteringly unfolded, she failedcompletely. But if she meant rather to give us a sense of life in general, of people who areunmistakably Victorian, wrestling with the problems of their own time, all brightened,intensified, and compacted by the fire of poetry, she succeeded. Aurora Leigh, with herpassionate interest in social questions, her conflict as artist and woman, her longing forknowledge and freedom, is the true daughter of her age. Romney, too, is no less certainly a mid-Victorian gentleman of high ideals who has thought deeply about the social question, and hasfounded, unfortunately, a phalanstery in Shropshire. The aunt, the antimacassars, and the countryhouse from which Aurora escapes are real enough to fetch high prices in the Tottenham CourtRoad at this moment. The broader aspects of what it felt like to be a Victorian are seized assurely and stamped as vividly upon us as in any novel by Trollope or Mrs. Gaskell.

And indeed if we compare the prose novel and the novel-poem the triumphs are by no means allto the credit of prose. As we rush through page after page of narrative in which a dozen scenesthat the novelist would smooth out separately are pressed into one, in which pages of deliberatedescription are fused into a single line, we cannot help feeling that the poet has outpaced theprose writer. Her page is packed twice as full as his. Characters, too, if they are not shown inconflict but snipped off and summed up with something of the exaggeration of a caricaturist,have a heightened and symbolical significance which prose with its gradual approach cannotrival. The general aspect of things—market, sunset, church—have a brilliance and a continuity,owing to the compressions and elisions of poetry, which mock the prose writer and his slowaccumulations of careful detail. For these reasons Aurora Leigh remains, with all itsimperfections, a book that still lives and breathes and has its being. And when we think how stilland cold the plays of Beddoes or of Sir Henry Taylor lie, in spite of all their beauty, and howseldom in our own day we disturb the repose of the classical dramas of Robert Bridges, we maysuspect that Elizabeth Barrett was inspired by a flash of true genius when she rushed into thedrawing-room and said that here, where we live and work, is the true place for the poet. At anyrate, her courage was justified in her own case. Her bad taste, her tortured ingenuity, herfloundering, scrambling, and confused impetuosity have space to spend themselves here withoutinflicting a deadly wound, while her ardour and abundance, her brilliant descriptive powers, hershrewd and caustic humour, infect us with her own enthusiasm. We laugh, we protest, wecomplain—it is absurd, it is impossible, we cannot tolerate this exaggeration a moment

longer—but, nevertheless, we read to the end enthralled. What more can an author ask? But thebest compliment that we can pay Aurora Leigh is that it makes us wonder why it has left nosuccessors. Surely the street, the drawing-room, are promising subjects; modern life is worthy ofthe muse. But the rapid sketch that Elizabeth Barrett Browning threw off when she leapt fromher couch and dashed into the drawing-room remains unfinished. The conservatism or thetimidity of poets still leaves the chief spoils of modern life to the novelist. We have no novel-poem of the age of George the Fifth.

Appendices

Appendix 1: Initial Correspondence of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett

Letter from Robert Browning to Elizabeth Barrett, 10 January 1845

New Cross, Hatcham, Surrey.[Post-mark, January10, 1845.]

I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett,—and this is no off-hand complimentaryletter that I shall write,—whatever else, no prompt matter-of-course recognition of your genius,and there a graceful and natural end of the thing: since the day last week when I first read yourpoems, I quite laugh to remember how I have been turning and turning again in my mind what Ishould be able to tell you of their effect upon me—for in the first flush of delight I thought Iwould this once get out of my habit of purely passive enjoyment, when I do really enjoy, andthoroughly justify my admiration—perhaps even, as a loyal fellow-craftsman should, try and findfault and do you some little good to be proud of hereafter!—but nothing comes of it all—so intome has it gone, and part of me has it become, this great living poetry of yours, not a flower ofwhich but took root and grew—Oh, how different that is from lying to be dried and pressed flat,and prized highly, and put in a book with a proper account at top and bottom, and shut up and putaway ... and the book called a ‘Flora,’ besides! After all, I need not give up the thought of doingthat, too, in time; because even now, talking with whoever is worthy, I can give a reason for myfaith in one and another excellence, the fresh strange music, the affluent language, the exquisitepathos and true new brave thought; but in this addressing myself to you—your own self, and forthe first time, my feeling rises altogether. I do, as I say, love these books with all my heart—andI love you too. Do you know I was once not very far from seeing—really seeing you? Mr.Kenyon said to me one morning ‘Would you like to see Miss Barrett?’ then he went to announceme,—then he returned ... you were too unwell, and now it is years ago, and I feel as at someuntoward passage in my travels, as if I had been close, so close, to some world’s-wonder inchapel or crypt, only a screen to push and I might have entered, but there was some slight, so itnow seems, slight and just sufficient bar to admission, and the half-opened door shut, and I wenthome my thousands of miles, and the sight was never to be?

Well, these Poems were to be, and this true thankful joy and pride with which I feel myself,

Yours ever faithfully,Robert Browning

Letter from Elizabeth Barrett to Robert Browning, 11 January 1845

50 Wimpole Street, Jan. 11, 1845

I thank you, dear Mr. Browning, from the bottom of my heart. You meant to give me pleasure byyour letter—and even if the object had not been answered, I ought still to thank you. But it isthoroughly answered. Such a letter from such a hand! Sympathy is dear—very dear to me: butthe sympathy of a poet, and of such a poet, is the quintessence of sympathy to me! Will you takeback my gratitude for it?—agreeing, too, that of all the commerce done in the world, from Tyreto Carthage, the exchange of sympathy for gratitude is the most princely thing!

For the rest you draw me on with your kindness. It is difficult to get rid of people when you oncehave given them too much pleasure—that is a fact, and we will not stop for the moral of it. WhatI was going to say—after a little natural hesitation—is, that if ever you emerge withoutinconvenient effort from your ‘passive state,’ and will tell me of such faults as rise to the surfaceand strike you as important in my poems, (for of course, I do not think of troubling you withcriticism in detail) you will confer a lasting obligation on me, and one which I shall value somuch, that I covet it at a distance. I do not pretend to any extraordinary meekness under criticismand it is possible enough that I might not be altogether obedient to yours. But with my highrespect for your power in your Art and for your experience as an artist, it would be quiteimpossible for me to hear a general observation of yours on what appear to you my master-faults,without being the better for it hereafter in some way. I ask for only a sentence or two of generalobservation—and I do not ask even for that, so as to tease you—but in the humble, low voice,which is so excellent a thing in women—particularly when they go a-begging! The most frequentgeneral criticism I receive, is, I think, upon the style,—‘if I would but change my style’! But thatis an objection (isn't it?) to the writer bodily? Buffon says, and every sincere writer must feel,that ‘Le style c'est l'homme’; a fact, however, scarcely calculated to lessen the objection withcertain critics.

Is it indeed true that I was so near to the pleasure and honour of making your acquaintance? andcan it be true that you look back upon the lost opportunity with any regret? But—you know—ifyou had entered the ‘crypt,’ you might have caught cold, or been tired to death, and wishedyourself ‘a thousand miles off;’ which would have been worse than travelling them. It is not myinterest, however, to put such thoughts in your head about its being ‘all for the best’; and I wouldrather hope (as I do) that what I lost by one chance I may recover by some future one. Wintersshut me up as they do dormouse's eyes; in the spring, we shall see: and I am so much better that Iseem turning round to the outward world again. And in the meantime I have learnt to know yourvoice, not merely from the poetry but from the kindness in it. Mr. Kenyon often speaks ofyou—dear Mr. Kenyon!—who most unspeakably, or only speakably with tears in my eyes,—hasbeen my friend and helper, and my book's friend and helper! critic and sympathiser, true friendof all hours! You know him well enough, I think, to understand that I must be grateful to him.

I am writing too much,—and notwithstanding that I am writing too much, I will write of onething more. I will say that I am your debtor, not only for this cordial letter and for all the pleasure

which came with it, but in other ways, and those the highest: and I will say that while I live tofollow this divine art of poetry, in proportion to my love for it and my devotion to it, I must be adevout admirer and student of your works. This is in my heart to say to you—and I say it.

And, for the rest, I am proud to remainYour obliged and faithfulElizabeth B. Barrett

Appendix 2: Summary of the story line of the nine books of Aurora Leigh (fromWikipedia, 9 April 2007)

First Book: Aurora describes her childhood in Florence, growing up as the daughter of aFlorentine mother and an English father. Her mother died when she was three or four, leavingher father to raise her. He was a scholar, and imparted to her knowledge of Greek and Latin anda love of learning. Her father died when she was thirteen, and she was sent to England to livewith his sister, her aunt, in Leigh Hall, her family’s ancestral home. Her aunt tried to educate herin what she considered a ladylike manner, but Aurora discovered her father’s old library and readscholarly books on her own.

Second Book: This book starts on Aurora’s twentieth birthday. Her cousin, Romney Leigh,proposes marriage to her. He is disparaging about her poetic ability, telling her that women donot have the passion, intellectual capacity, or redemptive qualities to be true artists. Because ofthis, and because she feels that he is too wrapped up in his social work and ideals to be a goodhusband, she angrily rejects him. Aurora’s aunt chastises her for refusing him, telling her thatbecause he is the male heir, he will inherit all of the estate and Aurora will be left with nothing.Shortly afterwards, her aunt dies. Romney attempts to give Aurora money, but she refuses it,deciding to go to London to make her living as a poet.

Third Book: This book opens in Aurora’s London apartment. She has been writing small popularpoems for magazines, which have earned her an enthusiastic following among romantic youngmen and women, but she is dissatisfied. The great works of art of which she felt she was capablehave arrived stillborn—she has the inspiration, but somehow cannot get it onto the page. Whileshe works, frustrated, a visitor arrives for her, a Lady Waldemar. She is beautiful but sharp andsarcastic, and Aurora does not like her. Lady Waldemar explains to Aurora that she is in lovewith Romney, so much so that she lowers herself to do charity work with him, but Romney hasdecided to marry instead one of his lower-class ‘projects,’ Marian Erle. She wants Aurora to gospeak to Marian and then to Romney and convince them of their foolishness. Aurora, partly outof curiosity and partly concern for Romney, goes to visit Marian and hears her life story:Marian’s drunken mother tried to sell her into prostitution, and to escape it she ran away andbecame ill, eventually being taken into a poor hospital. There Romney found her and assisted herin getting work as a seamstress.

Fourth Book: Marian continues her story, relating how Romney continued to aid her andultimately proposed marriage to her. Aurora asks her if she is sure he truly loves her, to whichMarian replies that Romney loves everything. She assures Aurora that despite her lower-class

status, she will be a loving and devoted wife to him. Before Aurora can answer, Romney entersMarian’s room. He and Aurora awkwardly trade words, and she tells him she approves ofMarian. He walks her home, and during their conversation she becomes confused about her ownfeelings for him. A month passes, and it is time for Romney and Marian’s wedding—but Mariansends a letter in her place to the ceremony, telling Romney that she is not good enough for him.The crowd at the wedding assume that Romney must have treated her cruelly and attack him.Romney is devastated, and searches for Marian for days, but cannot find her. He and Aurorahave a conversation about their respective disappointments with their missions; Romney canneither make a dent in the poverty he sees all around him nor gain the respect of the people hetries to help, while Aurora still has not succeeded in writing a real work of Art.

Fifth Book: Aurora discusses her further attempts to write. She tells how she is determined not tobe constricted by her woman’s role but is doubtful that the modern age presents opportunities forepic poetry. As the book continues, she grows more and more desperate, crying out to her musesand gods for inspiration. She confides that she has not seen Romney Leigh for almost two years,but she has heard that he has turned Leigh Hall into a refuge for the poor. At a stifling, insipidevening party at one of her well-born friend’s houses, she learns that Romney is engaged tomarry Lady Waldemar, and bitterly reflects that “He loved not Marian, more than once heloved/Aurora.” She decides that to find inspiration, she must travel to Italy, her mother’s land,and in order to get the money sells some of her father’s old books, as well as her own unfinishedmanuscript.

Sixth Book: This book begins with Aurora in France, presumably on a stop-over on the way toItaly. She wanders Paris with her head in the clouds, enjoying the atmosphere of history and thebeauty that surrounds her. Suddenly, she catches a glimpse of a familiar face—it is Marian Erle.Frantically, Aurora follows her, losing her in the crowd eventually, but not before seeing thatMarian is carrying a child. She is shocked, but resolves not to judge her harshly and tries for aweek to find her, finally running into her by chance at a flower market. Marian takes her to herpoor room, where she shows Aurora her baby boy. Aurora reproaches Marian for beingpromiscuous, but Marian angrily replies that far from it, she was attacked and raped and leftpregnant. She explains to Aurora that Lady Waldemar convinced her that Romney did not trulylove her, and sent her to France with her lady’s maid. The lady’s maid left her in a brothel, whereshe was raped and almost driven insane, but she managed to escape.

Seventh Book: Marian continues to tell Aurora her story: she was taken in by a kind lady as amaid, but was summarily fired when her pregnancy became apparent. Despite this, she could notbring herself to be unhappy: she was overjoyed that out of her dreadful experience, she couldhave the wonderful experience of motherhood. Aurora, after hearing Marian’s dreadful story,apologizes profusely to her for misjudging her and offers her a ‘marriage’ of sorts—she willprotect Marian and her son and take them to Italy with her. Marian gratefully accepts. Auroradecides not to inform Romney that she has found Marian, but writes an angry letter to LadyWaldemar, telling her she knows of her disgraceful conduct towards Marian. Marian’s presence,however, constantly brings Romney to Aurora’s thoughts. She is surprised when a friend writesto her to congratulate her on her book—the manuscript she sold to get to Italy. She decides that

perhaps it was better than she thought. She finds no particular inspiration in Italy, however,finding instead constant bittersweet memories of her childhood.

Eighth Book: Several years have passed. Aurora, Marian, and the boy are living in a villa inFlorence. Suddenly, Romney Leigh arrives, having discovered their whereabouts through afriend of Aurora’s. Aurora, believing him to be married to Lady Waldemar, is cold with him. Hetells her that he has read her book and believes it to be good and true Art, and tells her that he hasreconsidered the judgmental strictures he passed on her previously. He relates to her the sorryfailure of his attempts at social reform: after he converted Leigh Hall into a refuge, stories wentaround the village that it was a prison and a mob burned the whole thing to the ground. Auroraexpresses her sympathy, but tells him she still cannot think well of his wife. Romney issurprised, and tells her that he is not married to Lady Waldemar, although he has a message fromher to Aurora. Aurora tears it open, and reads it.

Ninth Book: Aurora reads Lady Waldemar’s letter, which claims that she did not intend to hurtMarian, only to remove her. Her scheme did not work; even after Marian was gone, Romney didnot love her. She tells Aurora, in a vitriolic tone, that she, by her letter forcing Lady Waldemar totell Romney that Marian lived, has doomed him to a loveless life with her, when he is truly inlove with Aurora. Aurora, somewhat shocked both by the letter’s contents and the angry rhetoric,dazedly asks Romney what he will do now, and he answers that he will marry Marian and raiseher child as his own. Marian refuses him, however, stating that she prefers to remain as herchild’s only guardian and devote her life to him, rather than a husband, and that she has realizedthat what she thought was love for Romney was rather hero-worship. She leaves, urging Romneyto talk to Aurora. They converse, and forgive each other for any wrongs they have done to eachother over the years. Romney admits to Aurora that he is going blind, and will soon be unable tosee anything. Aurora, in tears, confesses to Romney that she loves him, and has finally realizedit; and also realizes that, in loving him, she will be able to complete herself and find her poeticmuse once more. The poem ends with Aurora and Romney in a loving embrace, as she describesthe landscape for his unseeing eyes in Biblical metaphors.

Appendix 3: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “Lord Walter’s Wife” (1861)

[This poem, which is not included in the Broadview Anthology, is presented here (withoutannotation) for reference, in connection with the letter from Thackeray included above in“Critical Viewpoints.”]

I

‘But where do you go?’ said the lady, while both sat under the yew,And her eyes were alive in their depth, as the kraken beneath the sea-blue.

II

‘Because I fear you,’ he answered;—‘because you are far too fair,And able to strangle my soul in a mesh of your gold-coloured hair.’

III‘Oh that,’ she said, ‘is no reason! Such knots are quickly undone,And too much beauty, I reckon, is nothing but too much sun.’

IV

‘Yet farewell so,’ he answered;—‘the sunstroke’s fatal at times.I value your husband, Lord Walter, whose gallop rings still from the limes.’

V

‘Oh that,’ she said, ‘is no reason. You smell a rose through a fence:If two should smell it what matter? who grumbles, and where’s the pretense?’

VI

‘But I,’ he replied, ‘have promised another, when love was free,To love her alone, alone, who alone from afar loves me.’

VII

‘Why, that,’ she said, ‘is no reason. Love's always free I am told.Will you vow to be safe from the headache on Tuesday, and think it will hold?’

VIII

‘But you,’ he replied, ‘have a daughter, a young child, who was laidIn your lap to be pure; so I leave you: the angels would make me afraid.’

IX

‘Oh that,’ she said, ‘is no reason. The angels keep out of the way;And Dora, the child, observes nothing, although you should please me and stay.’

X

At which he rose up in his anger,—‘Why now, you no longer are fair!Why, now, you no longer are fatal, but ugly and hateful, I swear.’

XI

At which she laughed out in her scorn: ‘These men! Oh these men overnice,Who are shocked if a colour not virtuous is frankly put on by a vice.’

XII

Her eyes blazed upon him—‘And you! You bring us your vices so near That we smell them!You think in our presence a thought ’twould defame us to hear!

XIII

‘What reason had you, and what right,—I appeal to your soul from my life,—To find me so fairas a woman? Why, sir, I am pure, and a wife.

XIV

‘Is the day-star too fair up above you? It burns you not. Dare you implyI brushed you more close than the star does, when Walter had set me as high?

XV

‘If a man finds a woman too fair, he means simply adapted too muchTo use unlawful and fatal. The praise!—shall I thank you for such?

XVI

‘Too fair?—not unless you misuse us! and surely if, once in a while,You attain to it, straightaway you call us no longer too fair, but too vile.

XVII

‘A moment,—I pray your attention!—I have a poor word in my headI must utter, though womanly custom would set it down better unsaid.

XVIII

‘You grew, sir, pale to impertinence, once when I showed you a ring.You kissed my fan when I dropped it. No matter! I've broken the thing.

XIX

‘You did me the honour, perhaps, to be moved at my side now and thenIn the senses—a vice, I have heard, which is common to beasts and some men.

XX

‘Love's a virtue for heroes!—as white as the snow on high hills,And immortal as every great soul is that struggles, endures, and fulfils.

XXI

‘I love my Walter profoundly,—you, Maude, though you faltered a week,For the sake of . . . what is it—an eyebrow? or, less still, a mole on the cheek?

XXII

‘And since, when all’s said, you're too noble to stoop to the frivolous cantAbout crimes irresistable, virtues that swindle, betray and supplant.

XXIII

‘I determined to prove to yourself that, whate’er you might dream or avowBy illusion, you wanted precisely no more of me than you have now.

XXIV

‘There! Look me full in the face!—in the face. Understand, if you can,That the eyes of such women as I am are clean as the palm of a man.

XXV

‘Drop his hand, you insult him. Avoid us for fear we should cost you a scar—You take us for harlots, I tell you, and not for the women we are.

XXVI

‘You wronged me: but then I considered . . . there’s Walter! And so at the endI vowed that he should not be mulcted, by me, in the hand of a friend.

XXVII

‘Have I hurt you indeed? We are quits then. Nay, friend of my Walter, be mine!Come, Dora, my darling, my angel, and help me to ask him to dine.’

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Don LePan of Broadview Press for thepreparation of the draft material.