A Victorian Viewpoint: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s "Aurora Leigh"

In Laura’s British Literature Before 1800 class, we’ve just transitioned from the Romantic to the Victorian Era. One of the first pieces she is having us read is the Norton’s selection of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s verse poem “Aurora Leigh”. As a whole, “Aurora Leigh” is read as an emblem of Victorianism, which is most likely why Laura is having us read it to start off the unit.

The verse poem is a bildungsroman, illustrating the development of the young poetess Aurora Leigh. In Book 5 of the verse poem, Aurora digresses on the topic of “Poets and the Present Age”, wherein Aurora claims poets should concern themselves with subjects of the Present Age. She also makes the following claim about the poet’s vision:

But poets should

Exert a double vision; should have eyes

To see near things as comprehensively

As if afar they took their point of sight,

And distant things as intimately deep

As if they touched them.

(Norton Anthology of English Literature 1151)

Perhaps I’m mistaken, but Aurora Leigh’s conception of the poet seems fairly Romantic. It seems not too far removed from Coleridge’s “transparent eyeball”, or Emerson’s “imaginative seer as liberating us from ordinary life” (Theory and Criticism 615). What then do we do with those claims that “Aurora Leigh” is emblematic of the Victorian Age?