Book Review Monday (Insert Clever, Alliterative Title Here)

There are a lot of issues concerning the rights of women and children being debated both locally and nationally right now. I find myself very strongly on one side of that argument, but that is not what I am here to discuss. At least, not specifically. In order to complete my master's degree in English, I am taking a class in Victorian literature. For the last few weeks in that class, we have been studying Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and my world has been completely changed. In most classes, when you study EBB, you study her Sonnets to the Portuguese, or, as I think of them, "How much I love my husband". They are very romantic and extremely well-written, but reading her other, less universally acknowledged works has been an eye-opening experience for me.

I have just read Aurora Leigh. For those of you who are completely unfamiliar with this work, let me give a brief overview. Aurora Leigh is a young woman recently returned to England after the death of her father. I say returned only because she is the daughter of an English man--she has been raised in Italy. She aspires to be a poet, and make her living through her poetry. She rejects her inheritance and the offer of marriage from her philanthropic, well meaning cousin, Romney. Essentially, she refuses to conform to the accepted paradigm of what a Victorian woman should be. That is, she refuses to be a man's ornament whose only purpose in life is to create pretty things that he can stumble over and curse repeatedly. Though he scorns her plans to be a poet, basically saying that she if foolish to believe she can write like a man, she perseveres, and ultimately, ends up succeeding.

It is amazing to me that more teachers don't teach this book, and that more women haven't read this book, and that people don't constantly talk about Aurora Leigh and her potential for being an ideal feminist role model. In the character of Aurora Leigh, EBB created a character that was her ideal of a competent, independent woman. A woman who wouldn't accept a man in her life (no matter how much she cared for him) until he accepted and respected her abilities and vocation. She is complex, saucy, determined, kindhearted, talented, focused, and mostly just delightful. She isn't perfect--she spends a lot of time in denial of her feelings for Romney, and she ruthlessly judges her audience and her peers in a way that suggests she is in possession of a sizable ego.

But how many women are still trapped in the feeling that they must resign themselves to a life in the home when what they want is more? We are still struggling with the stereotype of the "Angel in the House" , particularly in this part of the country. EBB always wrote/spoke of wanting to find a "literary grandmother"--a woman who provided an example of how to proceed as a woman in a male-dominated world. Instead of finding that for herself, she provided modern women with our own literary grandmother--she provided us with Aurora Leigh.

I have always loved Victorian England. But now I understand so much more about what the writing of that time can hold. Aurora Leigh is a love story--love between a man and woman, a woman and her art, and a man and society. Though EBB could have used an editor--some of the passages get a little long-winded and kind of beat the same point to death--she created some wonderful, moving, inspiring passages about the strength of an independent woman. This is something that women today can take a page from, and I hope that my contemporaries will follow my example in reading Aurora Leigh, and Aurora/EBB's example in striking out on their own.