Aurora Leigh

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s epic “Aurora Leigh” which was published in 1856. It is the story of an orphan, Aurora, born in Italy to an English father and Tuscan mother, who is brought up by an aunt in rural Shropshire. She has a successful career as a poet in London and, when living in Florence, is reunited with her cousin, Romney Leigh, whose proposal she turned down a decade before. The poem was celebrated by other poets and was Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s most commercially successful. Over 11,000 lines, she addressed many Victorian social issues, including reform, illegitimacy, the pressure to marry and what women must overcome to be independent, successful writers, in a world dominated by men.

→ Play on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Margaret Reynolds 2 episodes
  Professor of English at Queen Mary, University of London
• Daniel Karlin 3 episodes
  Winterstoke Professor of English Literature at the University of Bristol
• Karen O'Brien 16 episodes
  Professor of English Literature at King's College London

Reading list

• Aurora Leigh
  Elizabeth Barrett Browning (ed. Margaret Reynolds) (W. W. Norton & Company, 1996) Google Books →
• Aurora Leigh and Other Poems
  Elizabeth Barrett Browning (ed. John Bolton and Julia Holloway) (Penguin Classics, 1995) Google Books →
• Aurora Leigh
  Elizabeth Barrett Browning (ed. Kerry McSweeney) (Oxford University Press, 2008) Google Books →
• Elizabeth Barrett Browning - 21st Century Oxford Authors
  Josie Billington and Philip Davis (eds.) (Oxford University Press, 2014)
• Victorian Women Poets
  Alison Chapman (ed.) (D. S. Brewer, 2005)
• Elizabeth Barrett Browning
  Margaret Forster (Doubleday, 1989) Google Books →
• Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett: The Courtship Correspondence, A Selection
  Daniel Karlin (ed.) (Oxford University Press, 1989) Google Books →
• The Courtship of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett
  Daniel Karlin (Oxford University Press, 1999) Google Books →
• Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Key Women Writers Series
  Angela Leighton (Indiana University Press, 1986) Google Books →
• Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart
  Angela Leighton (Prentice-Hall, 1992) Google Books →
• Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Letters to Her Sister Arabella
  Scott Lewis (ed.) (Wedgestone Press, 2002) Google Books →
• Elizabeth Barrett Browning: The Origins of a New Poetry
  Dorothy Mermin (University of Chicago Press, 1989) Google Books →
• Elizabeth Barrett Browning
  Marjorie Stone (Macmillan, 1995) Google Books →
• Flush
  Virginia Woolf (Penguin, 2016) Google Books →
• The Common Reader: Second Series
  Virginia Woolf (ed. Andrew McNeillie) (Mariner Books, 2003) Google Books →

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Programme ID: b0745d37

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0745d37

Auto-category: 821.8 (English poetry–19th century–Victorian era)