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AURORA LEIGH – Elizabeth Barrett Browning
The author and the poem her childhood and adolescence had been passed on her family's estate in Herefordshire, and from her sixteenth year, illness has caused her to live as a semi-invalid. Even before she met her future husband, she had begun to think about writing a long poem comprehending the aspect and manners of modern life.
Aurora Leigh recounts, the first-person narrator, recounts her development as a person and a poet from birth to the age of 30. Her early life is spent in Italy. She loses her Italian mother at the age of 4 and is 13 when her English father dies, and she is sent back to England to live in the country with her aunt (her father's sister). On her 20th birthday, she is proposed to by her cousin Romney, who wants her to give up her poetic ambitions and join him in fighting the evils of the age. She refuses his offer, claiming for herself as a woman an equal right to vocational fulfilment. After her aunt's
death, Aurora moves to London to make her way in the literary world. Some years later she’s visited by Lady Waldemar, who asks her help in preventing Romney from marrying a woman called Marian. On their wedding day Marian leaves Romney at the altar and disappears. Aurora, now a successful poet, decides to return to Italy.
This poem mixes genres (novel, autobiography, social satire), subjects (from the slums of London to the New Jerusalem), and themes (sexual, vocational, aesthetic, social, religious).
Book 1
At the beginning of Book 1, Aurora says that she wants to write for herself, so she underlines that she’s writing an autobiography. She writes about her mother and her father. Her mother was Italian, she was born in Florence, but Aurora lost her when she was only 4. After her mother’s death, Aurora and her father (who is English) moved to Pelago, a village among the mountains near Florence. Aurora tries to explain this decision through the use of an image, in which animals
Protagonists: Pan's white goats feed milk-less lips of orphans like Aurora. Another image comes to Aurora's mind: the picture of her mother on the wall, drawn by a painter after her death. She remembers that she sat and starred at the picture, half in terror, half in adoration. As she grew, she always mixed and confused her life with that picture.
When she was 13, her father died and with the death of her father, "her childhood ends forever". After his death, she cannot remember the days clearly, but one day a stranger separated her from Assunta, her servant. This "stranger" takes her to her aunt's home, in England, where her father was born. But she doesn't like that place that is stranger to her. She then describes her aunt, a woman who is too restrained and cannot go beyond her duties: she does not give Aurora the love that a 13-year-old girl needs. Her aunt has lived a "harmless" and quiet life, a sort of cage-bird life.
Aunt doesn't like Aurora because she is very similar to Aurora's mother, and her aunt hated her ("My father's sister was to me my mother's 'hather'").
Another interesting image (this time about her aunt): her aunt dries out from Aurora's body the last sea-salt left in her body. Aurora made braids, because her aunt likes ordered hair; she stopped saying Tuscan words, because her aunt wants her to speak English; she learnt how to pray; she learnt German, mathematics, music. She then writes about her cousin Romney, a "sort of friend" for her.
Thanks to her father's library, where she secretly reads Shakespeare, she returns to be the person that was in Italy, and she suddenly wakes up, something 'moved her'. She starts appreciating England ("she learnt to love England") and the place where she lives, the nature, even if she
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