47 pages • 1 hour read
Elizabeth Barrett BrowningAurora Leigh
Fiction | Novel/Book in Verse | Adult | Published in 1856A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Laurel Wreath
Aurora Leigh charts the narrator’s struggle with the oppressive social roles of her time and ascension to the rank of respected poet. Barrett Browning hails the poem as the “most mature” of her works, and there is a reciprocity between Barrett Browning’s success as a poet and the success of her protagonist, Aurora. Crowning herself precociously with a wreath in Book 2, Barrett Browning herself ironically only just misses the title of Poet Laureate, which instead was given to Tennyson. Nonetheless, the celebrated literary critic John Ruskin pronounced Aurora Leigh to be “the greatest poem in the English language […] not surpassed by Shakespeare’s sonnets” and the “Poem of the Age,” with politician Robert Lytton concurring: “a true Aurora […] that will leave an everlasting light with us.”
It is noteworthy that Book 1 elides the notion of an escape into nature with the escape into literature. Travel writing had been a fashionable genre since Cowper’s 1785 poem, “The Task,” and just like Wordsworth’s more prominent works, Aurora Leigh is as much a part of this tradition as the Romantic one, for lines like the following go so far as to posit that literature itself as a form of travel:
It is rather when
We gloriously forget ourselves and plunge
Soul-forward, headlong, into a book’s profound,
Impassioned for its beauty and salt of truth—
‘Tis then we get the right good from a book,
I read much (Book 1, Lines 705-10).
With the mention of “beauty and salt” in a single line, Barrett Browning marries images of the earthly and natural with their very opposite: the spiritual. In this way, both the earthly and the spiritual are linked through literature, for as Aurora states, “the world of books is still the world, I write, / And both worlds have God’s providence” (Book 1, Line 793). Given these and other poetical flourishes, Barrett Browning deserves to crown herself with the much-coveted laurel wreath even if contemporary society does not quite deign to give her the recognition she deserves, and in this, the character of Aurora Leigh stands as her avatar in the world of poetic success.
Death and Reincarnation
Barrett Browning’s fervent spirituality runs through all her works, which themselves enact a kind of Christlike reincarnation of the many mortalities she experienced during her life. In Sonnets from the Portuguese, for example, Barrett Browning famously refers to her “lost saints,” presumably her sister, her mother and the children lost in her four miscarried pregnancies. Her mother died young and was buried in 1828 next to her sister, who died at age three. Within the context of Aurora Leigh, Aurora’s poetic ambitions also arise from the death of her father, and thus, as with many poets, Barrett Browning’s works are informed by the deepest tragedies of her own life. It is worth noting that as she matured, Barrett Browning experienced many different kinds of death. Upon marrying Robert Browning, for example, she was disinherited by her father and lived in exile from England for the rest of her life, never reconciling with her family. The yearning for communication with Romney Leigh that Aurora experiences therefore echoes Barrett Browning’s own loss of connection with her father and her beloved brother as a consequence of her marriage.
In her poetry and other writings, Barrett Browning associated poetic inspiration with religious rapture, for as she wrote in a letter to her friend, Mary Russell Mitford, on January 20, 1842, “Christ’s religion is essentially poetry–poetry glorified.” This urge for redemption is palpable in Aurora Leigh, in which the parallels with Barrett Browning’s biography are intentionally overt, especially given her assertion in the dedication that the poem contains her “highest convictions upon Life and Art” (Foreword). As with so much of Barrett Browning’s poetry, poetic ecstasy is balanced by the ghost of loss.
Portraits and the Picturesque
Aurora’s literal and spiritual journey must be contextualized within the 19th-century conventions of travel writing. William Gilpin’s defines the picturesque, in Observations on the River Wye (1782), as “the kind of beauty which is agreeable in a picture.” In Book 1, Elizabeth describes Aurora Leigh as a “portrait” of herself (Line 5), composed for a friend to “keep [...] in a drawer” (Line 6). Since photography was not widespread until the latter half of the century, the painted likeness was still the dominant form of imaging. The ancestral portraits of Leigh Hall that are featured in Aurora Leigh are therefore treated as devotional objects, on par with sacred manuscripts, and their loss in the fire is meant to be a truly tragic occurrence rather than the relatively simple loss of property. The subject of portraiture is also featured in the poem’s discussion of Aurora’s late mother, which Aurora would stare at for hours as a child, “half in terror, half in adoration” (Book 1, Line 138).
Not only is the entire poem a portrait of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, but within the poem, portraiture as a reflection of the visible world is a way of approaching the Divine. Ironically, when Romney develops blindness and can no longer behold earthly beauty directly, he gains new spiritual insight in his union with Aurora, and their final decision to marry therefore inaugurates the dawn of a new age.
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By Elizabeth Barrett Browning
