Aurora Leigh
The Metamorphosing World of Literary Criticism The critical view of any literary work is always subject to the societal vices of the time. Judgement of a piece of writing changes over time because new view points, set to different fields of experience, fixed by completely different historical and social settings creates new conceptions that commonly conflict with ideas from the past. Criticism that is not considered contemporary to the piece in question is prevalently discordant with the opinions and insights of later literary critics, due largely in part to diversified sets of values. Elizabeth Barrett Browning is a poet that has benefited from these changing mindsets as far as criticism goes, especially in regards to her explicit confrontation of political issues, particularly those concerning the social conditions of women at that point in history. Aurora Leigh is a poetic narrative that centers around Barrett's concern with women's issues, particularly the social restrictions placed on the mind and creative aptitude of women writers at the time. It is a piece of literary genius that was accepted with an incredible amount of resistance by many of her contemporaries; most of them denying that women even possessed the
The unifying subject of them both is the female psyche. she has neither simplicity, taste or good sense. Barrett-Browning was lucky in the respect that she was able to see positive changes in critiques of her work in her lifetime, as the mindset about Aurora Leigh and the social issues that encompass the theme of the work itself began to shift very shortly after it was written:"In moral ardour and ethical energy it is unlike any other woman's; and the peculiar passion which it gave to her very finest work, the rush and glow and ardour of aspiring and palpitating life cannot properly be compared with the dominant or distinctive quality of any other poet. "1 It seems very strange to read this type of criticism on a poet that is so highly valued in our modern times. The critical responses to her poem have changed over time, but the strength of her themes has not waned. We now attempt to transfer ourselves into the social setting of the author for a more complete understanding of the work itself and this pattern can be seen from a review printed in 1980:"the first publication of the British Library Manuscript of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's forty four 'Portuguese' sonnets and the first twentieth century edition of her long prose-poem, Aurora Leigh, are crucial works dealing with issues at the heart of Victorian culture. As time marches on many more college students will crack open the pages of an anthology and discover the world of this writer and many more people will apply literary criticism to the themes and historical background of her work. and her fame would be ten times as great and as deserved as it is, if she left us a single lucid and finished performance, instead of a crowd of incoherent and extravagant images. The view has shifted to a more interpretive one, concentrating largely on the environment that she thrived in, and the historical background of that arena as material for critical analysis. The evaluations of this poem are valuable in the respect that they provide a measure of her worth as a poet as well as opening up mindsets and explications that have never before been considered. The modern view of the novel-poem Aurora Leigh has developed to become almost reverent by today's standards; the common conceptions of the poems themes now revolve around the themes of the piece as a crucial facet of the societal evolution of women. "3 Almost 150 years have passed since Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote her complex narrative poem that examines the development and obstacles of a woman poet. "2 History turned and twisted, women's suffrage and equal rights movements raged in the face of Western culture for nearly a century, still not totally quieted today, and the social commitment that Elizabeth Barrett-Browning's poetry emulates still stands as a firm support system for the beginning of all of those revolutionary movements. Our modern view of Aurora Leigh comes from a civilization defined by the changes that Barrett-Browning dreamed of setting into action with the themes of her poetry.
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