Class notes, "Aurora Leigh"

TO THE RIGHT:
Victorian swimwear! (Haha).


- Hopkins sonnet, "To Christ My Lord"

On Elizabeth Barret Browning:

- 1850: Elizabeth Barret Browning considered for position of Poet Laureate.
- She was radical in her politics and very outspoken
- Her father: an enormous personality who didn't want any of his children to marry; he cloistered her, and she developed a dependence on morphine.
- 1845: Met Robert Browing through letter, and they fell in love. A year later they eloped to Italy.

On Aurora Leigh:

- To "live" - it has two uses: to be alive spiritually and physically
- Acculturated - habituated to what society says (ie, when Aurora moves inland, in Britain)
- Aurora is left with a sense of having been adored by her parents while very young, especially by her mother, "the mother's rapture slew her" - she thinks, if her mother had lived longer, Aurora might have had an easier time fitting into society
- She says she looks for the kind of deep, unconditional love that her life lacks after her mother dies
- The words you use to describe the world also describe, to an extent, how you think and feel about that world; words and the possibilities they open for a person are beautiful and infinite
- Passage from Book 1:

"They know a simple, merry, tender knack
Of tying sashes, fitting baby-shoes,
And stringing pretty words that make no sense,
And kissing full sense into empty words;
Which things are corals to cut life upon,..." - cutting - like teething, but on words, etc.