Aurora Leigh and Other Poems (Penguin Classics) - Softcover

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140434127 ISBN 13: 9780140434125

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 1996

Synopsis

Aurora Leigh (1856), Elizabeth Barrett Browning's epic novel in blank verse, tells the story of the making of a woman poet, exploring 'the woman question', art and its relation to politics and social oppression. The texts in this selection are based in the main on the earliest printed versions of the poems. What Edgar Allan Poe called 'her wild and magnificent genius' is abundantly in evidence. In addition to Aurora Leigh, this volume contains poetry from the several volumes of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's published poetry from 1826 to 1862, including Casa Guidi Windows (1851), Songs for the Ragged Schools of London (1854) and the British Library manuscript text of the 'Sonnets from the Portuguese' (1846) which records her courtship with Robert Browning.

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About this title

From the Publisher:

Aurora Leigh, a novel in verse, is Elizabeth Barrett Browning¹s tour de force. It describes, with vigor and brilliance, Aurora¹s successful rebellion against her conventional Victorian childhood: to travel to Italy, to find love, and to pursue her career as a writer. This volume, which also includes some of Browning¹s short political poems, ³embodies, like all enduring literature, truths that transcend historical particulars.² (The Guardian) Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) married the poet Robert Browning in 1846; they spent the next 15 years in Italy, where she published Sonnets from the Portuguese, her love poems to Robert Browning, and Aurora Leigh.

From the Back Cover:

Wrote Virginia Woolf of Aurora Leigh in 1931. 'We laugh, we protest, we complain - it is absurd, it is impossible, we cannot tolerate this exaggeration a moment longer - but, nevertheless, we read to the end enthralled. What more can an author ask?' Aurora Leigh (1856), Elizabeth Barrett Browning's epic novel in blank verse, tells the story of the making of a woman poet, exploring 'the woman question', art and its relation to politics and social oppression. In addition to Aurora Leigh, this volume contains poetry from the several volumes of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's published poetry from 1826 to 1862, including The Cry of the Children (1843), Casa Guidi Windows (1851) and the British Library manuscript text of the 'Sonnets from the Portuguese' which records her courtship with Robert Browning.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0140434127
• ISBN 13: 9780140434125
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 544
• Editor: Bolton John Robert Glorney, Holloway Julia Bolton