Criticism On Aurora Leigh: An Overview Marjorie Stone
Criticism on Aurora Leigh: An OverviewMarjorie StoneAurora Leigh, published in 1856 by Chapman and Hall, just two weeks after ElizabethBarrett Browning published the most comprehensive collection of her earlier poetry up to thattime – Poems (1856) -- unquestionably expanded her reputation and her reading public in aperiod when the novel was establishing the dominance it still enjoys among literary genres, inpart because, besides being a poem, it was ‘quite a novel’ in her husband and fellow poet’s words(LTA 2:211). Margaret Reynolds points out that the first edition ‘sold out in a fortnight, and it wasreprinted five times’ before its author’s death in 1861:By the end of the nineteenth century it had been reprinted more than twenty times in Britainand nearly as often in the United States. It became one of the books everyone knew and read.Oscar Wilde loved it, the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne wrote a gushing preface for it,the novelist Rudyard Kipling borrowed the plot for The Light That Failed (1890), and, inAmerica, the feminist activist Susan B. Anthony presented her treasured copy to the Libraryof Congress in 1902 and wrote on the flyleaf: ‘This book was carried in my satchel for yearsand read & re-read. . With the hope that Women may more & more be like ‘Aurora Leigh’.1(AL Norton, p. x)John Ruskin, whose views on women diametrically opposed Anthony’s, responded similarly(another paradox), describing it as ‘the greatest poem the century has produced in any language’(Works 15:227). Elizabeth Gaskell took her epigraph for The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857)from Aurora Leigh, much as she had taken several chapter epigraphs in North and South fromEBB’s 1844 and 1850 collections of Poems. And George Eliot read it three times because noother book gave her ‘a deeper sense of communion with a large as well as a beautiful mind’(Letters 2:342), describing its author as ‘the first woman who has produced a work which exhibits1Anthony’s comments in her copy of Aurora Leigh appear in full in Reconstruction, M23.
2all the peculiar powers without the negations of her sex’ (Westminster, 306). Along with suchadmirers, though, it also had animated detractors, the conflict between them feeding into thecontinuing debates that generated edition after edition up to 1900. As the poet commented inFebruary 1857, she had heard ‘(indirectly from various quarters) that “never did a book so divideopinions in London”. Some persons cant bear it,—& others . . Monkton Milnes, for instance, &Fox of Oldham, besides Ruskin & the Pre-Raffaelites, crying it up as what I am too modest towrite’ (LTA 2:287).Despite such differences in opinion in the nineteenth century, few readers in the twentyfirst century would dispute the status of Aurora Leigh as Elizabeth Barrett Browning’spreeminent achievement, or her own description of it in the Dedication as the ‘most mature’ ofher works, expressing her ‘highest convictions upon Life and Art’. Between 1900 and 1978,however, when the first modern reprint of Aurora Leigh appeared, the profile of her achievementwas dramatically different. In this period, the work that appeared in edition after edition and inmany different languages was Sonnets from the Portuguese, not Aurora Leigh. In 1977, JuliaMarkus sought to draw attention to ‘another major though lesser known poem’ by BarrettBrowning in producing ‘the first modern critical edition of any of the poet’s work’ (xi). But thework she recovered was Casa Guidi Windows. Aurora Leigh is not even mentioned in herexplanatory preface. Innovative though it was, Markus’s work in editing Casa Guidi Windowswas quickly overshadowed by the appearance of Cora Kaplan’s Women’s Press edition of AuroraLeigh one year later. In this case, the ground was already prepared by Ellen Moers’s attention tothe poem in Literary Women (1976), and the work Kaplan recovered – the first extended portraitof a woman writer in English literature – was much more in tune with the second wave feminismof the times than EBB’s lyrical epic about the Italian Risorgimento in Casa Guidi Windows.Critical Fallacies, and Reviews, Debates and ReverberationsBetween 1900 and 1978, the received critical opinion was that Aurora Leigh was almostuniversally condemned by Victorian reviewers. For example, in his 1957 biography, Taplin stated
3that ‘the notices in the more influential periodicals were unanimous in their opinion that thedefects in the poem far outweighed its merits’ (p. 338).2 In her 1962 extended study of EBB’spoetry – the most comprehensive to appear before Dorothy Mermin’s in 1989 – Alethea Haytersimilarly observed that all Victorian reviewers ‘thought poorly of the characterization of theadults’ in Aurora Leigh (p. 169), in essential agreement with the opinions expressed in theBlackwood’s review of the poem. This view persisted in some quarters into the 1980s, as inDeirdre David’s claim that Aurora Leigh provoked an ‘avalanche of negative criticism’ in theserious reviews (Intellectual Women, p. 114). Even Reynolds speaks of ‘grudgingacknowledgement’ of the work by ‘contemporary reviewers’ (AL, p. 2). As Mermin’s balancedoverview suggests (1989, pp. 222-4), however, critical responses to EBB’s most ambitious andpolitically engaged work were as diverse as the conflicting ideological perspectives and agendasthat reviewers (and their respective periodicals) brought to the poem. Sandra Donaldson’s 1993annotated bibliography of reviews and criticism confirms this diversity of views, and the strikingvariations in response that her annotations chart is a feature as well in the twenty-three newAmerican entries Cheryl Stiles has added to those catalogued by Donaldson.3While there were some largely negative reviews of Aurora Leigh in more conservativejournals such as Blackwood’s, the Saturday Review and the Dublin University Magazine, therewere also very positive ones in the British Quarterly Review, The Literary Gazette, the MonthlyReview and the Edinburgh Weekly Review. On the one hand, in one of the most uniformly2The Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 338. Taplin goes on to say of Victorian reviewers’ response to thepoem, ‘They asserted it was too hastily and carelessly written, that it was far too long, that it was lacking indramatic appeal, that the characters were poorly conceived, that the incidents in the story were hackneyed,implausible, and many of them unnecessarily coarse and revolting to good taste’, etc. Many of thesegeneralizations relate most closely to the review in the ultra-conservative Saturday Review, with whichTaplin begins his survey. For an analysis of the biases informing Taplin’s biography, see Stone, ElizabethBarrett Browning (1995), pp. 218-20.3Using a chronologically limited search with ‘a new electronic database, the American Periodicals Series(APS), available from ProQuest’ (239), Stiles uncovers and summarizes ‘23 new entries’ to supplement the‘68 articles and reviews published in American periodicals during 1856-62’ (243) cited in Donaldson’sEBB bibliography. Stiles notes that the APS contains ‘more than 1500 records’ for EBB (in comparison to800 for Christina Rossetti, 1,100 for Tennyson, 1,800 for RB, and 17,000 for Dickens, the hands-downwinner). Extrapolating from her search, she speculates that one third of those for EBB ‘could prove to benew’ (243).
4negative reviews, G. S. Venables in the Saturday Review (27 December 1856) attacked the lengthof Aurora Leigh, its ‘few and unreal’ characters, its ‘scanty . almost inconceivable’ incidentsand its ‘unbroken series of far-fetched metaphors’ as an example of ‘feminine misadventures inart’; Venables also employs the metaphor of ‘Pythonesses’ that would recur in late nineteenthcentury allusions to EBB’s ‘Pythian shriek’ (pp. 776-7).4 On the other hand, Robert AlfredVaughan in the British Quarterly Review (January 1857) observed, ‘Our generation scarcelynumbers more than one or two among its master minds from whom we could have looked for aproduction at all to rival this in comprehensiveness – a poem with so much genuine depth and sofree from obscurity. The results of abstract thinking are here, and yet there is no heavyphilosophising of set purpose. A warm human life meets us everywhere’ (p. 265). A centurylater, in 1957, Taplin would take Venables’s review as ‘typical’ (p. 338) and overlook reviewssuch as Vaughan’s altogether. Yet Vaughan was far from alone in his opinion of Aurora Leigh.The Literary Gazette reviewer observed, ‘All the powers which were indicated in her formerworks seem to us to be displayed in the present poem in perfection. She wields the lightning ofher genius with Jove-like freedom. Everywhere there is power, everywhere variety’. Thereviewer goes on to compare specific passages to the ‘richness of colouring’ in Tennyson and the‘fulness of life’ in Titian, while the description of the railway journey from Paris to Marseilles iscompared to Turner in its ‘power’ of turning to ‘beauty the funnel and smoke’ of apparentlyunpoetical, modern subjects (22 November 1856, pp. 917-8). In the Westminster Review GeorgeEliot similarly paid anonymous tribute in January 1857 to the ‘profound impression’ left byAurora Leigh as a ‘poetical body everywhere informed by a soul, namely, by genuine thoughtand feeling’, even though she objected to what she saw as the imitation of Jane Eyre in Romney’s4Objecting to ‘far-fetched metaphors’ in the dialogue between Aurora and Romney in Book II, Venablescomments, ‘Minds in a state of imaginative exaltation will never run in couples. Two Pythonesses singingtheir responses in parts, and keeping time in their contortions, would have destroyed the popular faith inDelphic inspiration’ (776). He did acknowledge that if one eliminated ‘the story, the eccentricities of theactors, and a great part of the dialogue’ in Aurora Leigh, there remained ‘an abundant store of poeticalthought, of musical language, and of deep and true reflection’ (777). On late nineteenth-century referencesto EBB’s ‘Pythian shriek’, see the treatment of Edmund Gosse, below.
5being struck by blindness (p. 307) – an imitation that EBB disputed in her letters when AnnaJameson also noted the parallel.5 Eliot’s generally laudatory review was followed in the sameperiodical by John Nichol’s more critical assessment of Aurora Leigh in October 1857 as a workbreaking the ‘laws’ of art ‘fixed by Nature herself’ (p. 400) and exaggerating the effects of Art on‘elevating the condition of the masses’ (p. 412). Nichol was explicitly taking issue with Ruskin’sdescription of Aurora Leigh as the greatest poem of the century (see paragraph two, above), aswell as implicitly with Eliot’s review. Eliot and Nichol epitomize the divergent views of EBB’snovel-poem on its appearance – but her review, like Vaughan’s and the review in the LiteraryGazette, was forgotten by early and mid-twentieth-century literary critics, while his wasfrequently cited.The perception that the reviews were uniformly negative or at best ‘grudging’ alsooverlooks the notices of Aurora Leigh in the daily and weekly press, which help to explain themedia buzz the novel-poem provoked and the wide audience of readers it attracted, going into a‘second edition, a fortnight after publication’ (LTA 2:273). Some of these notices were harshlycondemnatory: the Press (20 November 1856) dismissed the work’s critique of ‘conventionalismof all kinds’ and its ‘rank unmitigated rant’ (pp. 1120-2); the Guardian (31 December 1856)objected to its ‘coarse and disagreeable, and by no means original’ story (pp. 999-1000). TheCatholic Dublin Tablet denounced it as reading ‘like a translation into blank verse of a Frenchnovel by Frederic Soulié’ and introducing ‘characters and transactions such as have long ceasedto figure in our literature’ – noting the ‘brazenfaced’ Byronic character of Lady Waldemar inparticular – although the reviewer also acknowledged that the author’s ‘powers’ were ‘evinced by the very pages’ condemned (29 November 1856, p. 762). Yet the majority of weekly paperstook an opposing and highly favourable view of Aurora Leigh. For instance, the London DailyNews (26 November 1856) termed it one of ‘the master works of the highest order of genius’ (p.5EBB emphasized that in Jane Eyre as she recalled the novel Rochester was ‘monstrously disfigured’ and‘hideously scarred’, whereas ‘the only injury received by Romney in the fire was from a blow’, while hisactual blindness was caused by a fever he experienced afterwards (LEBB 2:246).
62); the Examiner (29 November 1856) set out its ‘philosophical love story’ and said readerswould want to enjoy the ‘great truth living and expanding in the verse’ (p. 736); and the NewYork Daily Times (9 December 1856) praised its ‘highly felicitous’ female characters and itsWordsworthian portrayal of a humble character (n.p.). The Leader and the Globe publishedsimilarly enthusiastic tributes (see below). Such responses indicate that EBB was not deluded inher comments on the response to Aurora Leigh. She had braced herself for harsh reviews becauseof its bold sexual content and candour regarding economic and sexual politics, expecting ‘furiousabuse’. But she found that ‘the daily and weekly press’ was ‘for the most part, furious the otherway’, though she did note exceptions like the Tablet (LEBB 2:249).Although EBB’s plan of writing a philosophical poem dealing with ‘the practical & theideal’ that was also ‘against the socialists’ (AL Norton, p. 331) was central to her conception ofAurora Leigh in 1853 (see the “Critical Introduction” to the poem in the Pickering and Chattoedition), neither the poem’s treatment of the ‘social question’ nor its philosophy formed a primaryfocus in the reviews and press notices. By 1856, when her novel-poem appeared, the socialquestion remained urgent in England, but most of the socialist enterprises underway in England,France and America had collapsed. W.H. Smith in the British Quarterly Review (October, 1861)did note in retrospect that she had ‘struck a blow, and struck it ably, on one of the most flagranterrors of Socialism’ (p. 367). But most criticism on the social question tended to focus on theportrayal of Romney, with numerous reviewers finding it unrealistic or unfair. Nichol’sWestminster Review article most cogently advances the argument that Romney and the cause herepresents are treated ‘unfairly’(p. 414) – even offensively, through his ‘mutilation’ (p. 411) – asNichols critiques Ruskin, along with EBB, for exaggerating the effects of art on socialimprovement. Other reviewers, however, were more sympathetic to the depiction of Romney. Forexample, the Globe critic commented that while ‘[n]o one would contend that RomneyLeigh’s intended marriage in St. James’s Church with a tramper’s daughter is like what takesplace in real life’, the poet was ‘justified, in such a daring symbolic lesson’. This critic also
7suggests how resonant a figure Romney may have been for EBB’s contemporaries, in noting that‘Maurice and Kingsley, Lord Shaftesbury, Mr. Sidney Herbert, and the Duke of Bedford,combine to form Romney Leigh – Fourrier [sic], Comte, and Owen also help to fill out hispersonality’ (20 November 1856, n.p.). As for the philosophical dimensions of EBB’s treatmentof Romney the social reformer and Aurora the artist, these were noted in some reviews but notgenerally approached as a central dimension. Noting that ‘the poem touches upon the chieffigures in modern society’, as well as the ‘varied social problems’ of the age, the NationalMagazine reviewer commented that, ‘The aspiring and scornful idealist finds the noblest use ofher gifts in their practical application. The material worker learns that man’s social progress isblindly aimed at unless pursued in light of his immortality’ (March 1857, p. 314. However,others, like Henry Chorley in the Athenæum (see below), ignored what EBB described as ‘thedouble action of the metaphysical intention’ (AL Norton, p. 340).If many socialist initiatives had fizzled out by 1856, the Victorian women’s movementhad gathered steam through the decade, a circumstance which may help to explain why the‘woman question’, which EBB had thought of as ‘collateral’ to her purposes in Aurora Leigh,emerged front and center in the reviews. Mermin notes that the work transgressed ‘twoboundaries of genre and of gender’: the boundaries between ‘poetry and fiction’ and between‘masculine and feminine’ (p. 223). This transgressiveness, moreover, was also an element ofstylistic features such as EBB’s employment of graphic, startling, gynocentric metaphors like the‘double-breasted age’. In many of the reviews, these various dimensions run together as criticshostile to the work’s gender politics filter their responses through objections to its generic andstylistic hybridity. Thus Chorley’s unexpectedly negative review in the Athenaeum (22 November1856) begins by noting that Aurora Leigh is a ‘contribution to the chorus of protest and mutualexhortation, which Woman is now raising, in hope of gaining the due place and sympathy which,it is held, have been denied to her’. He then proceeds to attack the work for being not ‘a poem,but a novel, belonging to the period which has produced “Ruth,” and “Villette,” and “The
8Blithedale Romance”’. Along with this mixing of genres, Chorley is especially critical of theassociated stylistic ‘mingling of what is precious with what is mean the grandeur of passionand the pettiness of modes and manners . Milton’s organ is put by Mrs. Browning to playpolkas in May-Fair drawing-rooms’ (p. 1425). Venables begins his even harsher attack on AuroraLeigh in the Saturday Review (27 December 1856) with the words, ‘The negative experience ofcenturies seems to prove that a woman cannot be a great poet’. He then uses his denunciation ofthe ‘fable, manners, and diction’ in Aurora Leigh (and its ‘philosophy’, the ‘least valuable part’)to drive home his thesis. So objectionable does he find Aurora that he observes the poem is at itsbest ‘[w]hen Aurora forgets that she is a poetess – or, still better, when she is herself forgotten’(pp. 776-8).There is a similar correlation in W. E. Aytoun’s Blackwood’s review (January 1857)between his resistance to the gender (and also the class politics) of Aurora Leigh and hisobjections to its experimental form and style, as EBB recognized in describing his review as‘generous’ -- considering that it was ‘coming from the camp of the enemy (artistically andsocially)’ (LEBB 2:255). Aytoun, who asserts ‘we must maintain that woman was created to bedependent on the man’, finds that the ‘extreme independence of Aurora detracts from thefeminine charm’ (p. 33); and just as he insists upon a hierarchical separation of the sexes, so heinsists upon ‘the distinction between a novel and a poem’ (pp. 34-5), as well as the use of asuitably dignified form of diction and blank verse to separate the higher from the lower socialclasses. He thus deplores the fact that ‘Mrs. Browning follows the march of modernimprovement. She makes no distinction between her first and her third class passengers, butrattles them along at the same speed upon her rhythmical railway’ (p. 37). The link betweenAytoun’s class prejudices and his aesthetic principles is made clear when he confesses that he has‘not much faith in new theories of art’, because he classes ‘them in the same category withschemes for the regeneration of society’ (p. 39). Patmore, by comparison, was more mixed in hisresponse to EBB’s ‘present-day epic’ (p. 237) in the North British Review (February 1857),
9despite EBB’s apprehensions. Instead of directly dogmatizing on the woman question, heacknowledged the ‘command of imagery’ and ‘vital continuity’ of the work (p. 246), although healso criticized its stylistic mixture of poetry with passages that ‘ought unquestionably to havebeen in prose’ or ‘in a review’ rather than in ‘an epic’ (pp. 240, 242). As for the ‘elaborately
Criticism on Aurora Leigh: An Overview Marjorie Stone Aurora Leigh, published in 1856 by Chapman and Hall, just two weeks after Elizabeth Barrett Browning published the most comprehensive collection of her earlier poetry up to that time – Poems (1856) -- unquestionably expanded her reputation and her reading public in a period when the novel was establishing the dominance it still enjoys .
Leigh Canal Boat Records List produced by Professor Timothy Peters on behalf of the Waterways Archives and Wigan Archives & Local Studies. The volumes give details of those boats inspected by the Leigh Municipal Borough Health Inspector and registered with the Leigh authorities as operating on canals in the Leigh area between 1901 and 1954.
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Introduction to Literary Criticism. Definition and Use “Literary criticism” is the name given to works written by experts who critique—analyze—an author’s work. It does NOT mean “to criticize” as in complain or disapprove. Literary criticism is often referred to as a “secondary source”. Literary Criticism and Theory Any piece of text can be read with a number of different .
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Aurora University and George Williams College: A New Era Today, Aurora University is a private, independent, comprehensive institution with an enrollment of approximately 5,000 students. Aurora University is comprised of two campuses: a campus of 37 acres in Aurora, Illinois; and the 137.5-acre George Williams
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