Aurora Leigh, Elizabeth Barrett Browning | Herbert F. Tucker (essay date 1993)
Herbert F. Tucker (essay date 1993)
SOURCE: Tucker, Herbert F. “Aurora Leigh: Epic Solutions to Novel Ends.” In Famous Last Words: Changes in Gender and Narrative Closure, edited by Alison Booth, pp. 62-85. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993.
[In the following essay, Tucker examines the “epicizing conventions” in Aurora Leigh, discussing principles of structure, narrative technique, and the dichotomy between the human and the divine.]
Like it or not—and readers have long done both—Aurora Leigh is a work of overwhelming fluency. It is the fitting masterpiece of a prolific poet and tireless correspondent who stands out as having lived, even more than other first-generation Victorians, with pen in hand. Elizabeth Barrett Browning's magnum opus floods the reader with a tide of writing that feels by turns irresistible and interminable, and that will settle for no level but its own. At once a...
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