Aurora Leigh (Oxford World's Classics)

by ElizabethBarrettBrowning (Author), KerryMcSweeney (Editor)

• Used

  Paperback
  1998

  $4.47

  Aurora Leigh is the foremost example of the mid-nineteenth-century poem of contemporary life. This verse-novel is a richly detailed representation of the early Victorian age. The social panorama extends from the slums of London, through the literary world, to the upper classes and a number of superb satiric portraits: an aunt with rigidly conventional notions of female education; Romney Leigh, the Christian socialist; Lord Howe, the amateur radical; Sir Blaise Delorme, the ostentatious Roman Catholic; and the unscrupulous society beauty Lady Waldemar. However, the dominant presence in the work is the narrator, Aurora Leigh herself. From early years in Italy and adolescence in the West Country to the vocational choices, creative struggles, and emotional entanglements of her first decade of adult life, Aurora Leigh develops her ideas on art, love, God, the Woman Question, and society. This is the first critically edited and fully annotated edition for almost a century.

• Used

  Paperback
  1996

  $5.81

  The text is accompanied by both explanatory annotations and textual notes.
  
  Backgrounds and Contexts includes thirty letters or letter excerpts by Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning that trace Aurora Leigh's inception, evolution, and publication.
  
  Seven contemporary documents-on the woman question, prostitution, socialism, and poetic theory-place the text historically.
  
  Criticism collects twenty-five assessments of Aurora Leigh from the period 1899-1993.
  
  A wide range of opinion is provided by George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Ellen Moers, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Angela Leighton, Deirdre David, Dorothy Mermin, and Margaret Reynolds, among others.
  
  A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.