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Article: The "prophet-poet's book".(Aurora Leigh by Elizabeth Barrett Browning)(Critical essay)
- Article from:
- Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900
- Article date:
- September 22, 2008
- Author:
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Elizabeth Barrett Browning's 1856 verse novel Aurora Leigh was her intended magnum opus, the "most mature of [her] works" and "the one into which [her] highest convictions upon Life and Art have entered." (1) Indeed, as she says so well herself: "If lifeblood's fertilising, I wrung mine/On every leaf of this" (5.356-7). Yet Barrett Browning has been taken to task by critics, both in her age and ours, for her seemingly strange--and even awkward--hybrid use of the verse-novel form to create this intended masterwork. Virginia Woolf, in her insightful 1931 commentary on Aurora Leigh, complains that "[b]lank verse has proved itself the most remorseless enemy of living speech" ...