In Our Time - Aurora Leigh

Episode Date: March 24, 2016

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Elizabeth Barrett Browning's epic "Aurora Leigh" which was published in 1856. It is the story of an orphan, Aurora, born in Italy to an English father and Tuscan mother, who is brought up by an aunt in rural Shropshire. She has a successful career as a poet in London and, when living in Florence, is reunited with her cousin, Romney Leigh, whose proposal she turned down a decade before. The poem was celebrated by other poets and was Elizabeth Barrett Browning's most commercially successful. Over 11,000 lines, she addressed many Victorian social issues, including reform, illegitimacy, the pressure to marry and what women must overcome to be independent, successful writers, in a world dominated by men. With Margaret Reynolds Professor of English at Queen Mary, University of LondonDaniel Karlin Winterstoke Professor of English Literature at the University of BristolAndKaren O'Brien Professor of English Literature at King's College LondonProducer: Simon Tillotson.

Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time. For more details about in our time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's epic poem Aurora Lee was published at the end of 1856. It was immensely popular, selling in vast numbers in Britain and America. Then nothing.

As Robert Browning's reputation increased, his wife's evaporated. In the words of Junior Wolf, fate has not been kind to Mrs. Browning as a writer. Aurora Lee is a novel in the form of a poem. At its heart is a poet, Aurora, discovering how a woman can make an independent career as a writer. It also addresses what was known as the woman question, the role and rights of women in society. One character, Marian Earl, scandalised readers by refusing to be ashamed of her illegitimate child, rejecting a marriage proposal that, according to values of the time, would have made an honest woman again. With me to discuss Elizabeth Barrett Browning's aurorily are Margaret. Margaret

Reynolds, Professor of English at Queen Mary University of London. Danielle Carlin, Winterstoke Professor of English Literature at the University of Bristol. And Karen O'Brien, Professor of English Literature at King's College, London. Margaret or Peggy Reynolds, right, that's it, was born... She was born Elizabeth Barron, Milton Barrett. Sorry, let's start again. She was born Elizabeth Barrett, Milton Barrett, in 1806. How unusual was that?

It's very complicated because her family... Her father's family were very wealthy, and they had often required that the family keep the family name of Barrett. So they keep swapping about between Malton and Barrett. But this wealth was tremendously important in Elizabeth's upbringing. Can you give us some idea of the wealth on what her father did with it? She was the eldest of 12 children. She was the eldest of 12 children. Her father's wealth, as indeed her mother's family's wealth, came from plantations in Jamaica.

Her father's family had 100,000 acres in Jamaica. Sugar. Sugar, yes, and of course, slave owning. And this wealth meant that Mr. Barrett, when Elizabeth was three years old in 1809, she was born in Durham, but they moved to a house, an estate called Hope End, which is near Ledbury in the Malvern Hills.

And originally there was a lovely Queen Anne house here, beautiful walled garden, lakes, everything. Jane Austen? Oh, even better. But Mr Barrett wasn't satisfied with that. He turned the Queen Anne house into stables and offices and built a mansion in front of it

in the Turkish style. With minarets and crescent moons and doors inlaid with Mother of Pall, it was a complete fairy tale. So nothing new about him at all? No, not in the east. There are a few minarets left, but that's all. But Elizabeth was a very precocious child.

And from early years, she read voraciously. Well, so she's in this massive place. She got the run of the place. She's educated at home, but the grounds allow her to be a bit of a tomboy running around the place. Can you just give us some colouring about her childhood?

Yes. About her use. She was. She was something of a tomboy, actually. Headlong was the word that she often used to describe herself in her youth, in her childhood. But combined with that was this studiousness, and she was educated at,

at home, unlike her brother, a slightly younger brother, who eventually went to Charter House. But while he was still at home, they shared a tutor, Daniel McSweeney. So she learned Greek, she learned Latin, she taught herself Hebrew, she read everything that she could lay her hands on, and of course she broke poetry from the age of six. When you say she learned these languages, she translated from one or two of them as well, she did, and she was actually very proficient. There's a funny bit in Aurora Lee where her cousin Romney talks about ladies Greek without the accents, you know, i.e. not quite being up to the mark. In fact, neither Elizabeth Barrett

Browning nor Robert Browning, her husband, used accents when they wrote Greek. Was she encouraged here in this love of literature? She wasn't spontaneous combustion, was it? So who helped her? Everybody. The whole family celebrated her talents. Her father in particular, he called her the poet laureate of Hope End. And every family birthday, every event in the family was celebrated with a poem from Elizabeth. And what about her tutor? He was actually a rather proficient man and kept in touch with the family quite long after he taught them at home.

And he does seem to have done a pretty good job because, as you say, she was able to translate from the Greek and read Latin proficiently. So she's reading massively and she's being well taught. And what is the aim of this until things go, as it were, wrong? Well, good point. Because in the end, under normal circumstances, in the 19th century, she would simply have married and gone on to have a family.

Or would she? Because Mr. Barrett was very possessive, and of course, this is all part of the story later on. The story later on which you'll come. Dan Al Carlin, then two things happen, one to his fortune, the other to her health. Can you just describe those, please? Well, as a result of a series of complicated lawsuits between different branches of the Barrett family, Mr Barrett lost his money and they had to leave Hope End and go into seaside lodgings in Sidmouth and eventually they moved to London. So there was a tremendous financial and also social fall.

And I think Mr. Barrett's possessiveness was double troubled by that process. He felt that the family needed to stick together. together and in its various losses. So his possessiveness was greatly increased. And her mother had died when she was nearly 14 or a bit older than that. So and these these losses were grievous. And then this mysterious still unexplained illness afflicts her. How is it sure so?

It shares itself in extreme physical... She's about 15. Yes. And the father's lost money, so there's a colossal psychological implosion there. They have to move from this fantasy, massive place. We can buy everything, we can own everything, to lodgings. And then from lodgings, they come to Wimple Street. Loggings, again, I presume, or rented something.

Anyway, they're right, in their scale, they've gone from a Premier League to a non-league club. Right. So how does this affect her? Do you think that is the reason she gets ill? It's hard to say what's caused and effect here. What we know is that I believe that the illness and the psychological condition were linked throughout her life. But I also believe that it's rather like the joke on Spike Milligan's tombstone. You know, I always said that I was ill.

She did die eventually at a relatively young age. and I believe the best diagnosis that we have so far is that she had a form of spinal tuberculosis. Which intensified as her life went on. Yes. And certainly did lead her to symptoms of illness and having to rest a lot and being around a lot. So there's not any phony about her.

We just don't know what it was. It is subject to remission, and that's the reason why, after her marriage to Robert Browning and life in Italy and having a child and freedom in independence, she had 15 years really of a much longer life expectancy than she had in 1845. What drew Robert Brand to her? That becomes a great combination.

And how did he get in touch? He wasn't as wealthy at all, even there in a rum rum. How do you get in touch? No, he was living with his parents in suburban leafy New Cross, as it was then. And they knew of each other. They had a mutual friend, John Kenyon. and John Kenyon sent Robert Browning Elizabeth Barrett's 1844 collection and in that collection was a poem, Lady Geraldine's courtship,

with a compliment to Browning. The poet in Lady Geraldine's courtship reads to Lady Geraldine from various modern poets and one of the poets he reads from is Browning and the lines go like this, or from Browning, some pomegranate, which, if cut deep down the middle, shows a heart within blood-tinctured of a veined humanity.

Now the pomegranate, as you know, when you split a pomegranate, you see the red flesh and the seeds. Browning was publishing his poems under a kind of generic label, bells and pomegranates. So this was a punning, witty allusion to his poems. He saw this reference to himself, and that's what triggered his famous first letter to her. Tell us about his famous first letter.

It's quite short. Friday, 10th of January, 1845, I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett, and there's a long kind of intervening bit of syntax. I do, as I say, love these verses, and I love you too. And that began. You're waving your hands. Yes, it's so absolutely perfect.

It's just so wonderful. Yes, fine. Okay. So that's absolutely perfect, but nothing happens for a while, which is also absolutely perfect. I'm sure, Peggy. Indeed. Nothing can happen.

He's absolutely perfect. That's great. Karen and Brian So she obviously has done And then in Dan is mentioned She's published poems So she's working at it She's a working poet

What writers were she drawing form That we know about Well Aurora Lee is an extraordinary compendium Of cultural and textual references So it draws on a huge range Of ancient biblical And modern literature But I think I just draw attention to a very few

A foundational influence Was a novel She read three times When she was young by Germain de Stahl called Corrine or Italy, which is the story of a female genius performer who is half Italian and half English and who the hero, the Scottish aristocrat,

who falls in love with her first season when she's being crowned with a laurel wreath on the capitaline hill in Rome, just as Petra could be. It's a doomed love story, but I think the idea of the public female genius who in some ways is tied up with the process of national transformation

is really important for that poem. Another major influence is the novelist George Sand, whose real name was Amantine Lucille Orode DuPin. So the name Aurora, Oro, meaning Dawn, comes from George Sand, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning absolutely idolised her, visited her with Robert when they were in Paris, and Robert was quite embarrassed by how much EBB idolised her. And she was a daring writer of novels.

She's well known nowadays as the woman who sometimes dressed up in man's clothing and was the lover of Chopin. But her novels from the 18th, 30s, are very much about cross-class romances. So La Petit Fadette, for example, a romance between a peasant girl and these two well-born twins. And they are very subversive narratives

about women finding their way in the world, sexual freedom, and cross-class romances. Can I go on? Yeah, you can. I'm just waiting for the next number three. I think the next crop of influences is really about the tradition of epic. So the Odyssey,

is very much threaded through the poem, the idea of the return home, particularly in relation to the hero Romney, the idea of Paradise, lost Milton's Paradise, lost an exit from Paradise, and a quest for redemption. Wordsworth, Wordsworths, all over it. Wordsworths all over it,

particularly the immortality, but also we think the prelude, which is published in 1850, and again, is a story about the growth of a poet's mind. This is the story of a female poet's mind growing. So those are some background. Milton is behind every epic since Milton in the East Townsend. I think Wordsworth's permeate.

it. Yes, I agree. The others are there to you know far more about neither. So Browning got round. They eventually decided they would marry, despite her father. They married in secret, eloped to the next week, and she settled basically in Florence for the rest of her life with him. Why did they go to Florence and when they got there, what did it offer her so much that she stayed? There were immediate practical reasons.

Italy was good for her health and she'd wanted to go there for some time. Italy was also very cheap and affordable and they didn't have a lot of money. But behind all of that, I think there was a romance of Italy as this transformational space. And I think particularly another key influence for EBB is Byron. And Byron and Child Harold had referred to Italy as the Garden of the World. And I think the society of Italy is a place where you can have a more liberated life. So they go via Pisa and they settle the Karzeguidi in Florence. And from the windows, and there's a famous poem that she writes called Karzeguidi Windows,

see unfolding the beginnings of the Italian Resorgimento. So I think EBB associates her own liberation from her father and her liberation into a fulfilled marriage with this process of Italian liberation. Almost needless to say her father cuts her off. He cuts her off entirely. She longs, particularly when she publishes aurorily, for him to at least say something.

She keeps writing to the one sister that remains in that house in Wimpole Street, nothing until the day he dies. And in fact, not... Can you just tell us about this social life they had in Florence? which was quite intensive, considering. It was a very intensive social life, and it featured expat British communities, but also a lot of American intellectuals.

So, for example, she was visited by Margaret Fuller, who was a prominent transcendentalist, journalist, writer, feminist campaigner, and very much associated herself with the Italian Resorgimento. So it's a lively, liberal nationalist expat community that they're part of. Thank you very much. That was very comprehensive.

Can you be as comprehensive but elliptical about the plot of Aurora Lee, please. Margaret Peggy. Okay. So Aurora, like Corinne, is half Italian, half English. Her mother is Italian. Her mother dies when she is born. Her father dies when she is 13. At this point, she is shipped back to England to live with her father's sister. There she meets her cousin Romney Lee. On her 20th birthday, Romney Lee is a socialist. He proposes to her. She refuses him, partly because she doesn't believe in his brand of socialism, partly because he denigrates her work. She goes to London, She sets herself up as a poet. She makes a living as a poet. One day she's visited by Lady Waldemar. Lady Waldemar is a nasty piece of work. She is in love with Romney Lee, and she's come to Aurora to tell her that Romney Lee is intending to marry a girl of the working class, Marian Earl. Joke, of course, in the name of the Marian Earl. She wants Aurora to stop this marriage. Aurora refuses. She goes to meet Marion, decides that she's a really good egg, but doesn't do anything about it. On the day of the appointment,

marriage, Marion fails to turn up. Aurora settles down, gets on with her work, writes, aurorally, writes a long verse novel in the middle of this poem. She finishes it. She decides that she's going to go to Italy, for all the transformative qualities that Karen has mentioned. And on the way to Italy in Paris, she spots Marianel. She finds that she has a baby. She takes Marianne back to Florence with her. Romney eventually appears there, offers marriage to Marianne. and Aurora and Romney get together in a mystical last scene. That's terrific. Thank you. Thank you very much indeed.

And that's very good. I know it very well. You know it very well. I never have guessed it. Okay. Danny, just what are we to make of Aurora's... Now, it's difficult to disentangle from now on. Listeners must try to get heads around. What we tried... Well, you have all got your hedge round massively. He said Aurora Lee is absolutely.

seemed with autobiography. And yet it is a story of aurorily, who just happens to be again and again and again and again like Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Okay? So, away you go, Danny. What is Aurora's position in society? Well, one of the things I would draw attention to is that Aurora has a literary career

which is not quite like that of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. when she rejects Romney's proposal and goes to London to set up as a writer, she does something that Elizabeth Barrett Browning didn't in fact do. She lives independently. She takes lodgings in Kensington, then an affordable neighbourhood in London. And she becomes a kind of jobbing woman of letters in order to support her poetry. Yes, or she had, and she, Elizabeth Barrett Browning had friends who were professional women writers. is Mary Russell Mitford, Harriet Martineau.

Anna Jamison. And so there were lots of models for this kind of career, but it wasn't the career that Elizabeth Barrett Browning herself had had. But Aurora has it, and it is a kind of wishful fulfillment in a way of what it would be like to have this independent career and an independent social life, so that we see scenes in drawing rooms at fashionable parties. She becomes a kind of literary celebrity. And she makes one daring entrance into the slums in search of her dog. Indeed she does.

When Aurora Lee goes to visit Marian Earl in her slum tenement, EBB based the depiction of that neighbourhood on an expedition that she herself had made in only a week before she and Robert Browning were married, her spaniel, flush, who had been given to her by Mary Rolls, Russell Midford was dog-napped. And this was an absolutely standard sheet. It had already happened twice. There was a gang of dog stealers into London. They stole dogs belonging to fashion ladies and ransomed them. And there was a complicated business. Mr. Barrett was one of those no-negotiations with terrorists kind of guy who refused to allow the ransom negotiations to proceed. EBB got into a handsome cab with her maid Wilson and ventured into St. Giles, I think it would have been those.

slums around Holborn in order to conduct personal negotiations with a leader of the dognapping gang to get her dog back. And it was the observations that she made on that very brief expedition, which turn up in Aurora Lee as her first-hand way of thinking about slums and the depiction of both of you've got your hands up. Peggy first. Can I just interject. This seems to be the first time she's anything to do with the slums of London and maybe the only time. And yet, I think I don't know about that because I think... I mean, compared with... Just a second, because she based herself on Victorian Ops,

compared with the Dickens and so on, it was a very slight experience. It's not a criticism, it's just an observation. And can I ask while I'm going through this? I'm awfully sorry. You keep calling her EBB, so you don't call words with WW or Shakespeare W.S. So why did she get EBB? Like an amateur cup of an England cricket team, a long time ago.

It is, in fact, it's something that she and Robert Browning, it's a name because she had dropped the molten from her name she says this in one of the letters to Browning she says she now thinks of herself as Elizabeth Barrett Barrett Barrett. So when she marries she becomes Elizabeth Barrett Browning but the initials are the same. So it avoids the complication

of having to distinguish between her name before she was married and her name after. Yes. Enough. That's fine. What do you want to say? I think you're absolutely right, Melvin. It's not like Dickens after. I remember Dickens was walking the streets of London night after night and seeing all these things. Absolutely. but anybody going anywhere in London in a carriage

in the mid-19th century would have seen some terrible things I think that was pretty easy to do and I think that the way that Elizabeth EBB translates that moment of going to Whitechapel going to St Giles seeing the things into Aurora's experience of visiting the slums is really interesting and there's this marvellous moment at the wedding of failed wedding of Romney and Marianel

where she says half St Giles in Fries course woolen cloth meets half St James in cloth of gold. And the picture of this meeting of the gentry and the poor is really quite remarkable. Karen and Brian, one of the characters, I think a very interesting character, is Marianne Earl, servant. She's scandalised readers. Why?

She's a very interesting character. Her surname is Earl. It's spelled E-R-L-E, but the clue is in the name. There's a sense of a hidden ability about her, literally, but just in that spirit that she has. Let's not have too many inability. She's a working class girl. She's a working class girl. And that's that. She's actually a labouring class girl. Your

W.W.E.B. says that. Get on with it. So that's fine. All right. She's a labouring class girl who has the audacity to get engaged to Romney Lee, who is a very well-born character. The marriage doesn't take place, as you've just heard. And she is, through the trickery of

Lady Waldemar, ultimately raped and gives birth to a child. Now this is an unusual story because she very defiantly at the end of the story refuses Romney's renewed offer of marriage. That would have made her respectable, but she says, no, I'm a mother and that's enough for me, and I don't want this. And a number of reviewers were very, very struck by this defiance, this assertion of a strong independent voice and this refusal to feel shamed by what has happened to her.

Were they a scandalised? I would like you to tell me this. Were they a scandalised by the fact that she mothered and sentimentalised over this illegitimate child, the child of a just as much as all the Victorian mothers were being told to do the same by more respectable writers. I think that was part of the reason, but EBB herself rather relish the fact that she scandalised her readers. She said that mammas won't allow their daughters to read it.

She actually rather liked that idea. But the daughters read it in secret, she added. Exactly, and they would read it in secret. And EBB also thought that giving that slum city context that she gives for Marion and some of the scenes was also something that scandalised readers. Nevertheless, I think it's fair to say that some of the reviews weren't merely scandalised by the story, but they were rather surprised by the articulate, somewhat bourgeois voice

that aurorally confers on Marion increasingly as the poem goes by. And in some ways they found it a little bit implausible, but in some ways I think it disquieted them. Yes, is this because she couldn't do it? Like Dickens' cat could, she couldn't? I don't think, I think she probably could do it. I think there's fantastic retrial quism in the poem, but I think she wants to give Marion a really clear vocal presence in the poem.

and to associate the giving of a voice to labouring class women with the active writing poetry. To push the envelope a little bit, I know you don't like this, and I'll be accused of anti-women, all the rest of which is absolutely ludicrous, that's what goes on. The fact is that maybe it could be the case, and you've said it in your previous sentence, that Elizabeth Ballot Brown didn't think that a working-class girl talking in a then-working-class accent would be capable of expressing things of high moments,

but I think they would. I think there might be a risk of saying that, but... said, I think that she doesn't hold back from, I know it's the mid-19th century, but she doesn't hold back from the horribleness of what happens to Marion. Because one of the things, that happens to... What happened? She's very bad, she's bang on on that one. What she says, is? She is. And in Marion's early life, her mother has attempted to sell her to a man. And the, you know, the breathing, the hot breath, the staring eyes. That's a horrible scene. And the scene of Marion's description of the rape. And her madness, as she calls it afterwards, is also extremely

difficult to read. And the fact that she says she found her baby where she found her shame in the gutter, she's absolutely uncompromising about the origins of this child. I'd say two things about the voice. First of all, it's no more than Dickens himself had done with Oliver Twist,

who also speaks proper in an implausible way, having been brought up in the workhouse. The second thing is that I think that the scandal was partly to do with a revisionist kind of tendency in the poem to treat the fallen woman unlike the treatment

that she found in contemporary novels like Elizabeth Gaskell's Ruth, for example, where Marianne Earl is raped, has an illegitimate baby and there's a happy ending and it doesn't involve

being exiled as it were to the colonies or dying. Absolutely, most of these characters have to die, Ruth has to die in the end and no matter how much they're understood. Marianne Earl maintains her independence to the end and goes away and she, right now

I know you want to join and everything back but I want to ask, I want to move on a bit, we've got an agenda to deliver. In book five, which many of you have called the heart of orally, she explores the role of the poet in the world. Can you just tell us how she does that? She does. She thinks about

what poetry, modern poetry, contemporary poetry writing now in the 1850s should be doing. And she says why do so many poets, and she's kind of criticising Tennyson here, for instance, writing the... She slams into Tennyson. Okay, all right.

I was putting it politely. I've just been reading it. Then I should... She murders him. What are you talking? Kind of criticising. Get it straight. She says, we shouldn't be talking about the past.

We shouldn't be talking about Camelot. That's okay. That's a hit of Tennyson. We should be talking about now. So she says, never French, but still unscrupulously epic. Let us take on the issues of the age.

She's very, very good in that part, I think. That is really interesting. And it's explicitly a woman's poetry because she says, you know, she talks about the heaving double-breasted age and she says, you know, that will be turned to and look at and suddenly begin to understand. And everything that Karen was saying earlier about all the books that she was putting in, yes, there are all the books from the past,

but there are books from now as well. And this underpins the whole of her argument about how modern poetry should be about modern times. Yes, I mean, maybe she's just, make it straightforward for listeners. She's writing a long novel in the form of a poem. It is. It's sometimes called a novel poem

or a verse novel, yes. Danny Carlin, Aurora speaks of male condescension. She's declared herself to be a writer. I am writing. I write. I write on. A lot of that. This is what I do. How would that have resonated with her audience? How did it resonate?

I think the reception of the poem tells you that reviewers and readers, realized at once that she had done something almost unprecedented and distinctive, that she had established that a woman could write a serious, full-length, epic poem dealing with the issues that it dealt with. And there was a lot of criticism of it. It was attacked in various ways. But it was recognized.

The important thing was immediately acknowledged that something new, and distinctive and ground-breaking had happened. So that's the first achievement. An enormous reception by, for, you know, George Elliott, John Ruskin. Well, you don't need anything else, do you really? Go home, happy. And George Elliott liked it because she said she was communicating with a beautiful mind, a large and beautiful mind.

I'd like to add, by the way, that the design of the poem precedes the plot. This is one of the most important things about it, She writes to Robert Browning in one of the very first letters they exchanged. She says, my chief intention just now is the writing of a sort of novel poem, running into the midst of our conventions and rushing into drawing rooms and the like, where angels fear to tread. She had the idea, and the Byron, we've talked about the influence of Byron, she wrote to Mary Russell Mitford, that I want to write, and this is 1844,

I want to write a poem of a new class in a measure, a Don Jewan without the mockery and impurity. So she has the idea for the kind of poem it is before the story. And that idea that the poem, the poet can challenge the novelist on the novelist's own ground. And that's what she sits out to do, and according to a lot of reviewers, and certainly many readers here and in the States, she did that. Karen O'Brien, we have the character Romney Lee, her cousin. Is he a type? Is he a socialist? He has immensely wealthy like her.

He sets up on his own radical path and comes to diastrates, and where you go? He is a type in some ways. He's this highly generalising, idealistic, abstract thinking socialist who has somewhat rigid ideas and is initially in the first exchange with the roar, a very dismissive of the idea of the woman poet. She is

extremely critical of him, but actually as the poem develops through this intense series of dialogues that they have, what we come to understand is that they are in some ways reciprocally interdependence. So the fact that he doesn't understand the individual that he thinks in general schemes and his particular general scheme collapses disastrously is something that he has to learn

by becoming a genuine and authentic reader of Aurora. So I think we do need to be fair to them. And I think it is not the case that EBB is dismissive of his social idealism. One of the things that he campaigns about is restricting the number of hours that workers can work in factories. And EBB was herself very sympathetic to that cause. But he does have to learn that social reform needs to be grounded in an understanding of the individual and that poetry can give you that genuine empathy with the individual and he becomes in the end Aurora's true reader. So although in some ways he's quite comical and he does write these pamphlets with sort of daft, abstract titles and he's very rigid in the way that he thinks.

Deep down he is someone who is very capable of development. At the end, he's blinded. And so we all think of Rochester and Janeair. Which is, all right, which is... She said she forgot them out. Your EBBB person said she'd never read, but the guy's blinded at the end. The house burns down. It's nothing to do with having read Janeair.

Well, well, well, how can... I mean, I know this is a protection society for... Orally and EBB and ABC and something. But there must have been... No, no. But he's nowhere near as seductive as Rochester. It's as though Sinjin Rivers in Jane and has sort of learned his lessons and became more interesting.

And he was blinded in turn. And his great experiments, which were great and full-hearted and generous in their own way. I mean, he is trying to change society. He is, yes. Opening up his hall, his estate, or to... Yes. To very poor people who then... then burn it down. When do you make of that?

It's a sincere experiment. It's based on French socialist idealism. It's clearly based up to the extent that it has a kind of rigid daily schedule, starting it three in the morning and ending at 10 at night, and that's not very attractive. And ironically, his efforts to be a philanthropist to Marion, which is a big part of his attempt to live the life of philanthropy, that fails.

And paradoxically, it's Aurora who manages to save Marion, but then Marion who saves them both in turn. Yes. It's very well done that, isn't it? And can I just say one last thing about Marion? Aurora is blonde. Marion looks like EBB. The description is spot on EBB.

So there we are. So, Danny, I want to ask you, what aspects of this would have struck, of course she had many readers, thousands of readers, what aspects of this poem would have struck readers as particularly modern, which is what she set out to be?

I'll be modern. Nothing to do with Tennyson's, Romagna, isn't all the Camelot business. I am going to be of now, modern. Well, I think there are a number of things. The first is the attempt, as I've said, for poetry to deal with the issues, the characters, the storylines that had become identified with the novel. And the novel is establishing itself as the preeminent modern literary form. Poetry looks as though it's going to be relegated to the list.

lyric to a kind of the minor key of cultural activity. So what EBB is trying to do is to reclaim that ground for poetry. And there are scenes inorally, scenes of social gatherings, of dialogue, of plot, which would have instantly reminded readers of the terrain of fiction. So that's the first thing. The second is the strong modern autobiographical voice. So the autobiographical fiction is one of the most popular forms of the genre at the time. And here you have aurorally telling the story of her life like David Copperfield

or Pip in great expectations a bit later. And it's that sense of, and doing it, not in a kind of high cultural tone, but in a colloquial tone. So there is high poetry in Orally, but there is also a demotic voice, a voice which speaks what you might call a kind of conversational colloquial English. Partly I think that comes from the mutual influence

between herself and Robert Browning, and she learned part of that from him, just as he learned from her. But it's that colloquial voice in the poem, which is another of its most modern features. I think the other interesting thing that is purely contemporary in Aurora Lee is her engagement with contemporary politics. Obviously, there's a whole question of socialism, there's a whole question of Italian independence. But there's one extraordinary moment where she takes a walk through London in Book 4 with Romney,

and they talk about contemporary events. They talk about alliances between France and Spain. They talk about the potato blight in Ireland. They talk about trade unionism and chartism. so she's engaging directly with contemporary politics as a woman poet. Karen O'Brien, the word feminist has to come to mind. Of course, it's in a different context. We're talking about the mid-19th century.

Would you like to talk about the feminism of EBB and the feminism of Aurora Lee? Happy to, and they're not absolutely the same thing. In the period when she's writing Aurora Lee, EBB is involved in some feminist causes. So, for example, Barbara Lee Smith, one of her sort of remote acquaintances was campaigning to reform married women's property law with the House of Commons. And EBB is a signature to a petition saying that that reform should take place and indeed it did. So she's aware of and involved in a variety of feminist initiatives in the 1850s.

But the feminism of aurora lee is really about developing up an effective, powerful voice for the woman poet. And that's not for her something like the early 19th century poetess. that is a strong social voice, which is distinctively female, not submerged in a male voice, but nevertheless transformational, and not self-conscious. So one of the discussions that she has with Romney towards the end of the poem is about how there's a kind of self-consciousness about the woman writer. A woman must prove what she can do before she does it,

Aurora says at one point. And what Aurora is seeking to become is, as it were, an unself-conscious, fully self-confident, independent feminist voice. And I think the poem is also very much about sisterhood. So she refers to Marianne as her woman. Woodland's sister, the power of what the two of them can do together is so much greater than what they can do separately. They set up a woman's household, they set up a woman's household. So it's a feminism that's also partly about the personal, it's about alliances and allegiances

between women and the strength that they can derive from that. Is there any sense in which she demands of Browning, her husband, that he respect her rights here and then so on? Is there any sense of what we would say early 21st century feminism? Or is it embryonic? Is it hidden in other ways, what's going on? There are aspects of Robert in Romney. I'm sure Danny could say more about that than I could, but at the same time, it's very clear that Robert was a tremendous advocate for her poetry. He was delighted by the good reviews that she got and indignant at the bad ones, and he was entirely supportive of her career as a writer. So Browning is what Romney has to become. In fact, at one point, Robert Browning writes a letter where he says that in those days,

I could only get a publisher to take something of mine if I promised him something of my wife's. And yet when Elizabeth died, Edward Fitzgerald, the translator of the ruby out of Oma Kayam, wrote, No more aurorily, thank God. Was he a lone voice? Yes. Now, come on, the truth. Was he a lone voice? Well.

No, he wasn't. And you tell me why. Well, because, I suppose, you know, there's a great deal of movement going on at this point with not only married women's property, but suffrage and demanding more rights for women in terms of employment, etc. So Aurora became kind of falsely, from our point of view, the representative of this kind of strident voice, perhaps. And perhaps from that point of view, people felt that. Look, it's very interesting for us all who don't make a life study of this, to know.

She's sold again and again again. She got Ruskin on her side. She got George Elliott's on her side. It's a fair question to ask who didn't like it and that gives us a bit of context Now could you tell us that instead of all the perhapses I mean was he the only one is all I want to know Was Edward Fitzgerald, a Custode-O-Man?

Of course there were others but And was it a significant feeling that this was not working That the novel poem was... Danny's got the answer. Right, you got the answer. If you look at the contemporary reviews, they are divided in their response to the poem. They're struck by its power

and its energy, intellectual energy, but they're disconcerted by the fact that it doesn't conform to ideals of womanhood either in the way the characters behave or in what the author herself has done. And those responses, there is a current of that feeling that the poem is transgressive in that way.

Is there any kind of feeling that it isn't a very good poem? I don't think that comes in until, until later. Although there are contemporary reviews that point out some of the weaknesses in the poem as they're seen to be.

But the sort of full-scale attack on it or denigration of it doesn't come until the end of the century. Can I ask you, Karen, now, or her reputation soon fell away, as we said at the beginning of the program, Virginia Woolf say what's happened to her. And Robert Brown

earnings increase went up while hers went down and she was neglected for a very long time until reasonably recently. Why can you give this an account for that? She was almost let's say just to be roughly about a century out of favour now then. I think it was partly to do with the undervaluation of Robert Browning and a kind of a readjustment which led to a denigration of EBB. I think that's unfortunate but nevertheless just to Robert Browning. I think that Virginia will who very much admired the poem made to me the cardinal mistake of saying that it was stylistically very weak and not very good

blank verse. So I think there was a real questioning of the poetic quality of aurorily in the early 20th century, which I think is entirely unwarranted, because I think it's a stunning... So you disagree with Virginia Woolf? I disagree with Virginia Woolf, but that happens sometimes. But I think there was just a chipping away

at her reputation, not only as a woman, as a feminist, but as a writer that happened in the early 20th century that was very much reversed. starting I think with Cora Kaplan in the 1970s with the feminist movement, where not only the power but also the quality of the writing was properly recognised. I think it's also to do with the introduction of modernism. Sorry?

The introduction of modernism. So that Aurora, Aurora Lee was just too big, too long, too sloppy. Two wordsworthy in. In comparison with the minutiae of T.S. Eliot. Although she uses a lot of his phrases. And still, and she still keeps going exactly the way he uses it. Absolutely. You know all that.

There is a general reaction against the Victorians at the end of the century and into the first years of the 20th century, and nobody escapes from that, not even Tennyson. Tennyson is mocked into the lighthouse, for example. So she is at the extreme end, if you like, of the reaction against the period, its pieties, its solemnity, its earnestness, all those things she suffers from, I think. It's a general as well as a particular case.

If it's possible, after this immense poem, in almost haiku form, to tell her what her claim to greatness is, Could you do it, Karen? For me, it's all about style. It's about the underpinning Shakespeare and blank verse in a poem that somehow manages to be philosophical, highly colloquial, highly detailed, highly concrete, experimental, and brilliantly vivid.

Well, that's the end of our program about EBB. Thanks to MR, K-O-B and D-K. Next week we were talking about Agrippina, related to five emperors, she became an empress, Agrippina the Younger we were talking about, sex, excess, incest, incest, incest first century AD thanks for listening and the In Our Time podcast

gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests Well thank you I thought that was fun I hope I didn't push you too much I just there's so much to say you always have to push But you're all terrific Thank you. You were no, it was great thank you

I think we've never heard of her orally Well now I think oh that's interesting It's a great poem It's fantastic I have to say this I'm Oh you're on air now by the way This is this twiddly this is I'm I'm a supporter of the Virginia Woolf take on this programme

because I think it's the best single bit of criticism on it. And I don't think the blank verse is all that good in places. Why didn't you say that on the programme? Because he didn't give me a chance. Yes, I did. I was about to jump in after Karen. Were there any critics of it? And you went fiddly, folly, folly, folly.

And you didn't say the Virginia Woolsey. Well, because what I wanted to end with is her, she says, My haiku would be Elizabeth Barrett was inspired by a flash of true genius when she rushed into the drawing room and said that here where we live and work

is the true place for the poet but she goes on at any rate her courage was justified in our own case her bad taste her tortured ingenuity her floundering scrambling and confused impetuosity

have space to spend themselves here without inflicting a deadly wound while her ardour and abundance her brilliant descriptive powers her shrewd and caustic humour infect us with her own enthusiasm we laugh we protest we

complain. It's absurd. It's impossible. We cannot tolerate this exaggeration a moment longer, but nevertheless, we read to the end and throled. What more can an author ask? I think the problem is also that actually it's almost unique. You're absolutely right about the connections to Wordsworth, but

there is nothing else like a rural relief. It's a... It's a... It's a suit. Wordsworth is connected to Milton. It all get that the connections of what matter. It's just that you've missed out words. I mean, because you were bringing this

women writers, which was absolutely right. Yes, I know. But she's she's sort of, to say a thing is too crude, but not only intimations on immortality, but the bits of the prelude about the shades of the prison, the boy, they're growing up,

and the love of nature that she has. And that Marion has, Marion is a very wordsworthy in character. She has this spiritual longing, you know, that kind of gets her through her astonishingly awful child. Doesn't she have a bit of few legal? I think you're right that the prelude was

the starting gun, if you like, for Aurora Lee, that she'd had the idea of that she knew the kind of poems she wanted to write. But then in the early 1850s, they read the prelude, and then I think that's when that crystallises the idea that she too can write this kind of poem oppositional, as it were, not the growth of the woman poet's mind

and the bits of wonderful descriptions in the first book, which I do think is a masterpiece. Book one. I think that's terrific. Just an amazing, amazing. Amazing. For me anyway, the description, in some passage, the kind of shift from talking about Italian nature to the discovery of the English landscape and English nature. Just so extraordinary.

But also the sort of the English way of life, I didn't get round to it, but just the detail of the writing, when she talks about her aunt is her somewhat narrow forehead braided tight as if for taming accidental thoughts. That was really good. And the education. I actually, I'm not really hard. They're fantastic. This English tightness. It's terribly good, wasn't it?

Braided tight as it? No, it's very good. It's concretised. George Elliott said of her style, because Virginia Woolf is wrong. No petty striving after special effects, no heaping up of images for their own sake. I think that's completely contrary to Virginia Woolf, yeah.

I don't know if, yeah, I think Virginia Woolf is wrong. And the idea that Virginia Woolf was saying that you'd read this for the plot, it's not a plot that keeps you reading. Or it's something to keep you reading. Read to the end, controlled. Yes, maybe that's a different association. And I think that's right. And she says, what more can it north for us?

There's some wonderful lines and passages. I mean, you know, I'm completely, I'm grateful to us for suggesting it and to you for putting me in the right way of reading and your notes and everything. I had a great time. Good, good. This is an obvious thing to say, but the second time, I got tons more out of it. It's great to teach. I know this is something that I teach rather than I research, and it's,

so teachable. I bet it is. There's lots to talk about. Here comes a producer with his famous one-liner. It's tea or coffee. You didn't mention peas on a night I was waiting for that.

Oh, I love that. I love that so much. You know, that Elizabeth Browning lives in the servants' quarters in the mansion of literature where she bangs the crockery about and eats vast handfuls of peas

on the point of her knife. Who said that? Virginia Woolf? It's at the beginning of her essay. Yes, yes, yes. She's saying fate has not been crying, I remember. And I met that. It made me laugh when I was an undergraduate, and I tell you it makes me laugh now. There are many more Radio 4 arts and discussion programs to download for free.

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