Aurora Leigh Critics

Question 1

Form definition?

Answer 1

Form is how the text is structured eg: novel, poem etc

Question 2

Genre definition?

Answer 2

A stylistic category in literary with particular conventions
Jauss - genre is a horizon of expectations

Question 3

When was it published?

Answer 3

1856

Question 4

What did she criticise Austen for?

Answer 4

Not talking about God, nature or the soul

Question 5

What was the dominant form?

Answer 5

Novel was the dominant form by the 1850s. Novels were seen as the present and poems were seen as the past

Question 6

What was George Eliot’s review?

Answer 6

Westminster Review January 1857
‘the first woman who has produced a work which exhibits all the peculiar powers without the negations of her sex’

Question 7

Virginia Woolf’s criticism?

Answer 7

1932
When a poet uses a novelist’s preserves - ‘words have been made to strut and posture and take on an emphasis which makes them ridiculous’

Question 8

The incongruence between the two forms?

Answer 8

John Nichol - Westminster Review October 1857
‘there is a certain incongruity between the natural variety and expansion of the one, and the concentration required in the other’

Question 9

Is it autobiographical?

Answer 9

EBB letter to John Kenyon in March 1855
‘an autobiography of a poetess - not me’

Question 10

How many similes are present in the narrative?

Answer 10

Over 250

Question 11

What she wanted to write?

Answer 11

EBB letter to Mary Russell Mitford in December 1844
‘I want to write a poem of a new class’

Question 12

The importance of form?

Answer 12

Author Hugh Clough in ‘Dryden and His Times’
‘a man’s way of saying things will very often tell you more about him than all the things he says to you’

Question 13

What EBB’s intention was?

Answer 13

EBB letter to Robert Browning in February 1845
‘my chief intention now is the writing of a sort of novel-poem

Question 14

Her use of classical allusions?

Answer 14

‘Homer’s heroes’ were cut down to size emphasises that power lies with the poet rather than the classical hero

Question 15

Forms that the epic poem was associated with?

Answer 15

Associated with the hexameter in Latin and Greek and the blank verse in English, such as in Paradise Lost by John Milton

Question 16

What allows Aurora Leigh to become ‘woman and artist’ inside the masculine tradition of the epic?

Answer 16

Susan Stanford Friedman sees elements of the lyric and novel, which were genres more accessible to women

Question 17

Who is Lady Waldemar?

Answer 17

Gelpi - ‘the voice of Aurora’s own self-distrust’

Question 18

The view that male pets were better ?

Answer 18

The contemporary poetic theory was that women had a sentimental style of poetry which was less important than the authoritative style of men

Question 19

Criticism of the form of Aurora Leigh?

Answer 19

Sydney Dobell, who was an author of epic poems himself
He comments that the verse-novel ‘contains some of the finest poetry written in the century […] But it is no poem. No woman can write a poem.’

Question 20

What makes the poem epic?

Answer 20

The structure and duration of the poem, spanning nine books, and her life from birth to marriage. Also the use of epic similes and catalogues

Question 21

What results in narrative confusion?

Answer 21

According to Alison Case in her book Plotting Women, the coexistence of two incompatible plots - the retrospective female Kunstlerroman present in books 1-4 and the feminine love story from book 5 onwards, both of which have Aurora as the narrator, result in narrative confusion

Question 22

What is Aurora’s obsession with words an example of?

Answer 22

‘the artistic narrative mastery that validates the Kunstlerroman’
Case

Question 23

What is a Kunstlerroman?

Answer 23

A narrative about an artist’s growth to maturity

Question 24

What is Case’s criticism of Aurora Leigh?

Answer 24

It’s juggling of narrative modes’ results in an ‘uneasy coexistence’

Question 25

Challenge of the ‘uneasy coexistence’?

Answer 25

Women can have desires for both artistic fame and romantic love
Case also suggests that Aurora cannot admit her love for Romney until she has fully developed as an artist, as marriage in their youth would only hold them both back

Question 26

EBB addresses how personal the story is?

Answer 26

‘I have put much of myself in it - I mean to say my soul, my thoughts, emotions, opinions; in other respects, there is not a personal line, of course’

Question 27

How the poem relates to other texts?

Answer 27

Cora Kaplan - the poem is ‘an overlapping sequence of dialogues’ with other texts

Question 28

A summation of the forms and genres of Aurora Leigh?

Answer 28

‘at once a veiled autobiography, a reluctant novel and an aspiring epic’
Herbert Tucker

Question 29

Her use of combining genres?

Answer 29

Stone - she ‘does not merely mingle genres; she fuses them together to form a new whole’

Question 30

EBB’s thoughts on the desires of the reader?

Answer 30

‘I am inclined to think we want new forms … as well as thoughts’
Letter to Robert Browning in March 1845

Question 31

How does this relate to Barrett Browning’s other works?

Answer 31

Her 1844 poem ‘Lady Geraldine’s Courtship’
This feminist work resists Victorian expectation of female passivity by engaging in a courtship with a man from a different class. Genre in AL pushes Victorian expectations