Far more than romance
Before this last year, I had never really understood the context and history of Elizabeth Barrett Browning beyond her relationship with Robert Browning—the twinning of their two names in poetry, and the well-loved Sonnets from the Portugese. But as I read more on Emily Dickinson, I learned how much she admired and loved E.B.B—she kept a portrait of Barrett Browning in her spare room. And as I read EBB’s work Aurora Leigh, it became clear to me the connection Dickinson must have felt, and the traces of Browning in Dickinson’s own work—of Browning’s work as a woman poet, as a woman who had a domineering father, a woman who took control of her own life and fled England for Italy, as a successful published woman poet, who wrote for social justice and abolition and was known for those works long before her legacy was merely “How do I love thee; let me count the ways.”
Reading Barret Browning’s Aurora Leigh is a revelation. A novel-poem—nine books written all in free verse, with pithy comments on philosophy, women’s lack of equality, and social justice, as well as romance and tragedy. I can’t think of another work I’ve enjoyed reading more of late, and the resonance it holds with the world we are living in now, despite the centuries between.
Aurora Leigh is a young woman aspiring to be a poet. Early in the story, we learn of her friendship with her cousin Romney, who wants to work with the impoverished, and whose idealism is well-intended but naive in ways of action. Aurora refuses Romney’s proposal of marriage, as well as her inheritance, determined to make her own way in the world as a poet. As they argue Aurora states:
“Does every man who names love in our lives / Become a power for that? is love’s true thing / So much best to us, that what personates love is next best? A potential love, forsooth! / We are not so vile. No, no—he cleaves, I think, / this man, this image,…chiefly for the wrong / And shock he gave my life, in finding me / Precisely where the devil of my youth / Had set me, on those mountain-peaks of hope / All glittering with the dawn-dew, all erect / And famished for the morning,—saying, while / I looked for empire and much tribute, ‘Come, / I have some worthy work for thee below. / Come, sweep my barns and keep my hospitals,— / And I will pay thee with a current coin / Which men give women.”
As Aurora’s aunt disapproves of her refusal of Romney and the inheritance, but finally halts voicing her opinion at all times, Aurora comments:
“…Being observed, / When observation is not sympathy, / Is just being tortured…”
After forging success on her own, Aurora learns of her cousin Romney’s engagement to a young woman from a lower class, that has somewhat scandalized their social world, but he’s determined to help the young woman, Marian, out of poverty. Marian leaves the night of the wedding with no warning and is not heard of until Aurora later finds her in France. From there, there are trips to the continent, and a story of women’s friendship and love, as Aurora takes care of Marian, who tragically was assaulted and is now a single mother with no relations and no work. The tragedy of it is frank. But it’s the strength of their friendship that becomes one of the primary highlights of the novel—shoring one another up as women, caring for Marian’s child, trying to make a life without a husband or father.
The style of the work is what really captures the imagination—the language and ideas and poetry converge to create a shimmering style of narration. It floats along at times so easily you can miss that we have shifted scenes and speakers, and yet that almost seems incidental to the flow of Aurora’s narration and thoughts—almost foreshadowing the stream-of-consciousness writing of modernist writers like Woolf that would come more than fifty years later.
A few more quotes are listed below.
On writing:
“My critic…flatters prettily, / and wants another volume like the last. / My [other] critic. …wants another book / Entirely different, which will sell, (and live?) / A striking book, yet not a startling book, / The public blames originalities, / (You must not pump spring-water unawares / Upon a gracious public, full of nerves—)…”
On work:
“Three years I lived and worked. Get leave to work / In this world—’tis the best you get at all; / For God, in cursing, gives us better gifts / Than men in benediction. God says, ‘Sweat / For foreheads,’ men say ‘crowns,’ and so we are / crowned,— / Ay, gashed by some tormenting circle of steel / Which snaps with a secret spring. Get work, get work; / Be sure ‘tis better than what you work to get.”
“I worked with patience, which means almost power…”
On poetry—echoing Dickinson’s famous inquiry to the editor of The Atlantic, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, asking whether her own verse “is alive?”:
“I ripped my verses up, / And found no blood upon the rapier’s point; / The heart in them was just an embryo’s heart / Which never yet had beat, that it should die; / Just gasps of make-believe galvanic life; / Mere tones, inorganized to any tune. / / And yet I felt it in me where it burnt, / Like those hot fire-seeds of creation held / in Jove’s clenched palm before the worlds were sown,—”
On the difference between work for living and work for art:
“I had to live, that therefore I might work, / And, being but poor, I was constrained, for life / To work with one hand for the booksellers, / While working with the other for myself / and art. You swim with feet as well as hands, / Or make small way. I apprehended this,— / In England, no one lives by verse that lives; / And apprehending, I resolved by prose / To make a space to sphere my living verse. / I wrote for cyclopedias, magazines, / And weekly papers, holding up my name / To keep it from the mud. I learnt the use / Of the editorial ‘we’ in a review,…”
On feeling constrained in body and soul:
“…—Then we went. // And I breathe large at home. I drop my cloak, / Unclasp my girdle, loose the band that ties / My hair…now could I but unloose my soul! / We are sepulchred alive in this close world, / And want more room.”
On how the sexes view the other, as Aurora puzzles over her cousin Romney’s choice of different possible wives:
“…—The man’s need of the woman here, / Is greater than the woman’s of the man, / And easier served; for where the man discerns / A sex (ah, ah, the man can generalise, / Said he) we see but one, ideally / And really: where we yearn to lose ourselves / And melt like white pearls in another’s wine, / He seeks to double himself by what he loves, / And make his drink more costly by our pearls. / At board, at bed, at work, and holiday, / It is not good for man to be alone,— / And that’s his way of thinking first and last; / And thus my cousin Romney wants a wife.”
And on what women absorb in life:
“…’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.”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning is a revelation, a victorian woman who carved her own way in the world, through chronic illness, social isolation, to become one of the most successful poets of her age, beloved in Italy as well as England, for the verse she wrote in the cause for freedom from political tyrrany. Her words echo through the centuries and still have something important and strong to say.