“I who have written much in prose and verse

For others’ uses, will write now for mine,–

Will write my story for my better self,

As when you paint your portrait for a friend,

Who keeps it in a drawer and looks at it

Long after he has ceased to love you, just

To hold together what he was and is.”

Aurora Leigh opens by framing the poem as a portrait of a lover who has been forgotten but whose likeness is kept in a drawer. This note of nostalgia, lament, and longing is common to many Romantic poems, but most prominently recalls Christina Rosetti’s famous poem “Remember,” which prevails upon the reader to remember its speaker, when they have “gone far away into the silent land” (“Remember.” Poetry Foundation, Line 2). Though “Remember” was first published in 1862, the two women poets were friends and dedicated poems to one another throughout their literary careers. Both Barrett Browning and Aurora travel “far away,” and the poem opens with the deaths of Aurora’s parents. However, the “foreign land” also contains the “outer infinite” and evokes the sublime, an awareness of which concludes the poem.

“You never can be satisfied with praise

Which men give women when they judge a book

Not as mere work, but as mere woman’s work.”

In Book 2, Romney Leigh articulates one of the central problems with which the poem engages: the fact that contemporary society did not view female artists on the same level as male artists. In invoking a new age of female artists at the close of Aurora Leigh, Barrett Browning discredits Romney’s argument here.

“Women of a softer mood,

Surprised by men when scarcely awake to life,

Will sometimes only hear the first word, love,

And catch up with it any kind of work,

Indifferent, so that dear love go with it:

I do not blame such women, though, for love,

They pick much oakum.”

These lines reiterate arguments made by Mary Wollstonecraft in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, where she advocates for greater economic as well as social equality for women, who are traded like property through marriage. Aurora’s rejection of Romney here is clearly in solidarity with Wollstonecraft’s words.

“[L]ife develops from within.”

Although the poem engages valiantly with many social issues of Barrett Browning’s day, Aurora’s mounted opposition to Romney’s arguments in favor of social work present poetry as an alternative and higher pathway through life. The poem may therefore be read as a statement of personal faith. Ultimately, through the union of the earthly with the poetic and the spiritual, the poem’s triumphant ending is achieved.

“The works of women are symbolical.

We sew, sew, prick our fingers, dull our sight,

Producing what? A pair of slippers, sir,

To put on when you’re weary–or a stool

To tumble over and vex you.”

By rejecting traditional “woman’s work,” Aurora erects a philosophical foundation stone for her poem and for herself as a female artist. In this moment, the separation between Barrett Browning and her literary alter ego as at its thinnest, for she uses Aurora as a mouthpiece through which to articulate her own proto-feminist views to a largely unreceptive and conservative public.

“How arrogant men are!–Even philanthropists,

Who try to take a wife up in the way

They put down a subscription-cheque,–if once

She turns and says, ‘I will not tax you so,

Most charitable sir,’–feel ill at ease,

As though she had wronged them somehow. I suppose

We women should remember what we are,

And not throw back an obolus inscribed

With Cæsar’s image, lightly. I resumed.”

A bitter pun belies this similitude between Caesar’s image on a coin and the notion of the counterfeit woman as Eve the deceiver. The poem mourns women’s longstanding entrapment within a system of exchange, just as Aurora rejects Romney’s mercantile approach to love. The lines are further complicated by Barrett Browning’s own biography, for her marriage to fellow poet and writer Robert Browning resulted in her disinheritance from the family fortune.

“I’ll have no traffic with the personal thought

In art’s pure temple.”

Exiling herself from the system of social exchange that typically controls women of her era, Aurora once again speaks directly for Barrett Browning. Rejecting the limitations and aspersions cast upon female artists, Aurora’s words reflect Barrett Browning’s own struggle with her art.

“Even so my pastoral failed: it was a book

Of surface-pictures–pretty, cold, and false.”

Aurora’s failed pastoral publication presages the glorious denouement of the poem-novel. While she retains her poetic authority, her failure follows the trajectory of every hero to gain spiritual insight. It is significant that what she fails at writing is a pastoral, for she writes a few lines later that the superficial poem fails to engage with the problems of its time, an attribute that is contained in the very definition of a pastoral.

“If there’s room for poets in the world

A little overgrown, (I think there is)

Their sole work is to represent the age,

Their age, not Charlemagne’s,–this live, throbbing age,

That brawls, cheats, maddens, calculates, aspires, 

And spends more passion, more heroic heat, 

Betwixt the mirrors of its drawing-rooms, 

Than Roland with his knights, at Roncesvalles. 

To flinch from modern varnish, coat or flounce, 

Cry out for togas and the picturesque,

Is fatal,–foolish too.”

Book 5 opens with Aurora’s inward speculations about art, and once again, the protagonist’s opinions mirror Barrett Browning’s own. In this passage, Aurora proclaims the true vocation of poets of any age to speak the truth of the world that surrounds them, staring steadfastly at all manner of pleasant and unpleasant realities. Throughout each book the poem remains insistent that art reflect the true nature of life with integrity.

“[…] So, I mused

Up and down, up and down, the terraced streets,

The glittering Boulevards, the white colonnades

Of fair fantastic Paris.”

The idle, contemplative attitude that Aurora adopts in this passage is reminiscent of the parallelism between walking, thinking, and writing that characterizes Wordsworth’s landscape poetry. Having left England, Aurora’s travels augur a phase of spiritual wandering and soul-searching that lasts until the poem’s final book. The shifting geography in Aurora Leigh (Italy to England to France and back to Italy) echoes Barrett Browning’s own biography, for she moved to Italy with Robert Browning in 1846 upon being disowned by her family. Italy itself therefore stands as a source of freedom and unfettered poetic imagination, representing a contrast with England’s “mind-forg’d manacles.”

“I walked on, musing with myself

On life and art, and whether, after all,

A larger metaphysics might not help

Our physics, a completer poetry

Adjust our daily life and vulgar wants,

More fully than the special outside plans,

Phalansteries, material institutes

The civil conscriptions and lay monasteries

Preferred by modern thinkers.”

Aurora’s musings indict her contemporaries’ jaded outlook on class inequality, which had remained an irresolvable and disquieting problem for the best part of a century. If the poem can be interpreted as a love story, it is equally a debate between Aurora, the poet, and Romney, the practical philanthropist.

“Now, a fantasy,

A simple shade or image of the brain,

Is merely passive, does not retro-act,

Is seen, but sees not.

‘Twas a real face,

Perhaps a real Marian.”

Marion’s somewhat ephemeral and elusive reappearance in Book 6 recalls the many ghostly happenings that haunt Romantic literature. Whether it be disembodied voices in Robert Browning or the phantasms of Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” ghosts were a familiar motif, and Barrett Browning also makes it a point to capitalize on the dominant imagery of the time.

“She leaned above him (drinking him as wine)

In that extremity of love.”

In this passage championing women’s liberty, Barrett Browning does not omit a mention of women’s traditional, maternal role. Marian is portrayed in Book 7 as an ideal mother, one who ultimately devotes herself entirely to her child. In these lines, Barrett Browning ironically transmutes Marian’s youthful transgressions into maternal purity, just as Marian herself has transformed her rape into tender love and innocence upon the birth of her child.

“Poor mixed rags

Forsooth we’re made of, like those other dolls

That lean with pretty faces into fairs.

It seems as if I had a man in me,

Despising such a woman. […] 

We’re all so,–made so–’tis our woman’s trade

To suffer torment for another’s ease.

The world’s male chivalry has perished out,

But women are knights-errant to the last;

And, if Cervantes had been greater still,

He had made his Don a Donna.”

At first lamenting women’s internalized misogyny, Aurora shifts the image of womanhood from the doll to the heroic knight of legend. In doing so, she co-opts the contemporary nostalgia for the chivalric age, which is a prominent motif of Romantic literature. She also appropriates the role of hero for herself and all other women, using this sly twist of words to bestow a much-needed sense of agency on women in general.

“‘Unmarried and a mother, and she laughs!

‘These unchaste girls are always impudent.

‘Get out, intriguer! leave my house, and trot:

‘I wonder you should look me in the face,

‘With such a filthy secret.”

In one of the most intense moments in the novel, the plight of unjustly outcast women such as Marian is unequivocally related. As Marian relates the details of her misfortune following her disappearance on her wedding day, she takes a fierce pride in building a new life for herself based on motherhood, even as she stands in the ruins of who she used to be.

“[…] Lord Howe

Writes letters good for all things but to lose;

And many a flower of London gossipry 

Has dropt wherever such a stem broke off,–

Of course I know that, lonely among my vines,

Where nothing’s talked of, save the blight again,

And no more Chianti!”

During Aurora’s wilderness years in Florence, London’s social scene is likened to cut flowers, where Aurora is lost in a spiritual and artistic forest. Tangled in vines (in which “lines” of poetry can be heard), Aurora feels lost in a fallen Eden, an Italy full of bittersweet childhood memories. Her wandering (as is often the case in pastoral and travel literature of the time) stands in for spiritual and artistic questing.

“This special book,

I did not make it, to make light of it:

It stands above my knowledge, draws me up;

‘Tis high to me. It may be that the book

Is not so high, but I so low, instead;

Still high to me.”

Just as Romney Leigh places his faith in Aurora when he reads her book, which he says “lived in [him],” so the poem pledges faith in the word of the Christian God, conveyed via the Bible. Writing is sacred in the world of the poem, and the act of writing not only liberates Aurora from a life of dependence on men, but it also grants her spiritual ascension over her earthly troubles.

“I stood myself there worthier of contempt,

Self-rated, in disastrous arrogance,

As competent to sorrow for mankind

And even their odds. A man may well despair, 

Who counts himself so needful to success.

I failed. I throw the remedy back on God,

And sit down here beside you, in good hope.”

In his grand ambition and subsequent despair, Romney Leigh’s fall from grace is comparable with that of both Lucifer and Adam. Their falls are charted in another deeply political poem, Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), which advocated for Republicanism. The snakelike coils of flame that consume Leigh Hall may therefore be equated to the hell into which Satan is cast in Milton’s poem. Only through humility is Romney redeemed. Thus, his blindness signifies a spiritual darkness that can only be lifted when he acknowledges his past faults and failings and reconciles with the woman he loves.

“‘She who did this thing, was born

To do it,–claims her license in her work.’

–And so with more works. Whoso cures the plague,

Though twice a woman, shall be called a leech:

Who rights a land’s finances, is excused

For touching coppers, though her hands be white,–

But we, we talk!”

Aurora calls for women to claim equality through their work, rallying them to act rather than talk. Even as she bemoans the harms caused by socially ingrained misogyny, she interrupts herself, concluding the call to action with an abeyance of words.

“[…] Government,

If veritable and lawful, is not given

By imposition of the foreign hand,–

Nor chosen from a pretty pattern-book

Of some domestic idealogue, who sits

And coldly chooses empire, where as well

He might republic.”

Barrett Browning vocally advocated the abolition of slavery, despite her own family profiting from the labor of enslaved people in Jamaica. Like Aurora, she was disinherited and subsequently escaped to Italy, where she supported herself with writing. Despite the Slavery Abolition Act being passed in the early 19th century in England, Britain still profited handsomely from its empire.

“‘Tis somewhat easier, though, to burn a house

Than build a system:–yet that’s easy, too,

In a dream. Books, pictures,–ay, the pictures what,

You think your dear Vandykes would give them pause?”

The ongoing social challenges posed by the Industrial Revolution and the Empire caused widespread civil unrest. The poem here acknowledges the difficulties posed by these inequalities but advocates a degree of conservatism in the realm of social justice. The poem also acknowledges its limitations in redressing these social difficulties.

“I knew that Marian Erle was beautiful.

She stood there, still and pallid as a saint,

Dilated, like a saint in ecstasy,

As if the floating moonshine interposed 

Betwixt her foot and the earth, and raised her up 

To float upon it.”

Inaugurating the poem’s spiritual denouement is the symbolic death and resurrection of Marian Erle. Her fatherless child aligns her with the Virgin Mary, while the birth of her son prefigures the Second Coming, or New Age which is to follow in Book 9. The moon is continually mentioned throughout the final two books, a forerunner for the light of the Sun that will follow in the subsequent golden age. Marian’s ghostliness is also reminiscent of the Holy Ghost, which in Book 9 transfigures the earthly losses experienced by the characters into a spiritual awakening.

“But oh, the night! oh, bitter-sweet! oh, sweet!

O dark, O moon and stars, O ecstasy

Of darkness! O great mystery of love,–

In which absorbed, loss, anguish, treason’s self

Enlarges rapture,–as a pebble dropt

In some full wine-cup, over-brims the wine!”

This section of the poem typifies the Romantic Sublime. Dissolving first into sorrow and then into the mystery of otherworldliness, Aurora’s subjective journey in the final two books is essentially spiritual. The dissolution of the earthly (symbolized by the ruination of Leigh Hall) facilitates a spiritual awakening, through which both poem and poet paradoxically triumph.

“[…] fructuous rose,

Whose calyx holds the multitude of leaves.–

Loves filial, loves fraternal, neighbour-loves,

And civic […] all fair petals, all good scents,

All reddened, sweetened from one central Heart!”

In this passage, love is portrayed in expansive terms. At the heart of the rose (love’s symbol) is the mystery of life. The poem advocates for the centrality of divine love and divine order in relationships, civic life and worldly affairs. The love affair that has shaped the poem’s plot is thus representative of this wider sense of love.