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Summary
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Aurora Leigh, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Marriage, Equality, and Social Class
Feminism and Women’s Roles
Art and Truth
Justice, Art, and Love
Summary
Analysis
The narrator, Aurora Leigh, has done a lot of writing about other people but decides that now it’s time to tell her own story. She is still young, although both her parents are gone. She tells the story of her past, starting at the beginning. Her mother, who is from Florence, dies when Aurora is only four—her mother was always sickly and frail but had beautiful blue eyes. Aurora grows up longing for the presence of a mother in her life, which her father struggles to fill.
The beginning of the poem introduces Aurora, the main character and narrator of the story. Although Aurora describes herself as still young, the opening book of the poem involves her looking back on her past self from the present, where she is a published writer with a more mature perspective. This gives the beginning a nostalgic tone. Much of the novel revolves around Aurora learning what it means to be a woman, and the early death of her mother leaves her without a woman in her life to teach her, meaning Aurora must learn many things on her own—often through books.
Themes
Aurora’s father is an Englishman who is normally reserved but who felt a sudden burst of passion during a trip to Florence when he met Aurora’s mother. When he suddenly becomes a widower, he feels adrift and leaves Florence to take Aurora into the mountains by Pelago. He learns to bond with Aurora through books, which help her learn about the world. People tell Aurora she’s like her father, with similarly pale and delicate features. Aurora and her father stay in the mountains for nine years after her mother’s death.
Aurora’s mother and father represent the two different sides of her, with her father being more reserved and analytical while her mother is more open and passionate. As a poet, Aurora tries to embody the qualities of both her parents, combining control and spontaneity. In a novel where marriages and courtship often go wrong, Aurora’s family represents a positive example of how two people from different parts of the world can come together and form a union based on personal love that combines each of their best qualities.
Themes
One day when she’s 13, Aurora’s father suddenly dies. His last words to her are “Love, my child.” Although Aurora is still growing, this is an end to her childhood. Eventually, she is forced to leave her home in the mountains and sail back to England to live with her aunt on her father’s side. The landscape of England looks foggy and cold when Aurora first sees it from the boat. Aurora’s aunt has a country home called Leigh Hall in the middle of the dull landscape. She lives a quiet life, which she calls “virtuous,” but Aurora feels that her aunt’s boring lifestyle makes her like a caged bird. Aurora herself feels more like a wild bird forced into the cage too.
The cold, foggy landscape of England contrasts with the more beautiful and sunny landscape of Italy’s mountains. Aurora’s aunt is a more extreme version of her English father, who, unlike her aunt, knew how to overcome his reserved manner and heed his passions. Aurora describes her aunt’s closed-off personality by comparing her to a caged bird, which suggests limited experiences and a lack of freedom. Leigh Hall is an impressive building, but to Aurora it is little more than a cage, providing an early example in the novel of how wealth doesn’t lead to happiness and in some cases may even make people less happy.
Themes
Aurora’s aunt rarely shows any sort of affection toward her. She comes to learn that while his aunt used to love Aurora’s father in her way, she disliked Aurora’s Florentine mother and saw her as leading her father astray. Being very Christian, Aurora’s aunt feels she has a duty to take care of Aurora, but she remains cold and distant, perhaps because of the parts of Aurora that resemble her mother. Aurora tries to be a good and obedient child. She completes her studies well, learning French, German, algebra, geography, music, and the history of royal lineages around the world. Aside from this, the only books Aurora’s aunt likes her to read are ones about proper behavior of women.
Aurora’s aunt’s inability to show affection is important, because one of the main things that Aurora learns over the course of the story is the importance of being able to love people on a personal level. In this context, Aurora’s aunt is a warning sign of what Aurora herself might one day turn into if she doesn’t open herself up to love. Aurora initially tries to please her aunt, and even many years after she leaves Leigh Hall, she will continue to struggle with learning how to love people. Although this poem celebrates the power of books, Aurora’s aunt only likes books that give strict instructions for life, reflecting her personality and her narrow interests.
Themes
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In addition to following her aunt’s rules, Aurora also tries to please her aunt by being nice to her aunt’s cousin, Romney Leigh, a young man a couple years older than Aurora who sometimes comes from his school to visit. One day, Aurora overhears her aunt and Romney gossiping about how Aurora is getting paler and will soon die. Like Aurora’s aunt, Romney can be cold and reserved, but Aurora tries to befriend him because she has so few other options.
Romney’s reserved personality and favored status with his aunt hint at how, like his aunt, he too struggles to feel passion and personal love. Aurora’s pallor suggests that her homesickness and lack of affection are so severe that the deprivation has physical effects on her body. The fact that Romney is one of the few other people that Aurora meets while living in Leigh Hall is yet another sign of how wealth can have downsides, with big country manors encouraging isolation.
Themes
Aurora continues to miss the Italian landscape, which had tall mountains and green woods, while England only has “tamed” natural landscapes like parks. She tries to make the best of it, getting up early to see the sunrise. Her own room in Leigh Hall is full of green things, which she likes because it reminds her of nature. She begins to spend time alone reading books that don’t necessarily benefit her, at least according to her aunt. She reads Greek and Latin, which her father taught her, and reading becomes a source of hope that helps her fill the gap in her life she’s felt since her father died.
The green things in Aurora’s room suggest that she is so far away from the grassy mountains of Italy that even an artificial reminder inside Leigh Hall is better than nothing. The strictly “tamed” landscape of England connects with Aurora’s aunt’s buttoned-up personality. The fact that even England’s landscape is dreary suggests that English life in general is repressed. Perhaps for this reason, the books that most appeal to Aurora are set in Greece and Rome as well as in ancient times—all things that make these books an escape from modern English society.
Themes
Aurora reads books of various quality, believing that good intentions don’t always lead to good books. She believes that “the world of books is still the world” and that God is in both. One day in a garret, Aurora finds cases with her father’s name on them that turn out to be full of his old books. She starts with the first one she sees and begins to particularly cherish these books from her father’s collection.
Particularly for someone like Aurora, who lives such a sheltered life, what happens in books can be as important as what happens in her life. Because Aurora lives such a repressed outer life with her aunt, she instead develops a vibrant inner life, which books help her to do. This perhaps relates to Aurora’s strong religious beliefs, including the Christian belief that a person’s soul is eternal while their outer body will pass away.
Themes
Aurora is particularly enthralled when she finds her father’s poetry books. She feels that poets come as close to telling the truth of God as any human can. Aurora is so interested in poetry that she begins to write it herself, and her early efforts come freely without much self-analysis about what she writes. Later, when she looks back on this poetry, she will see it as a “lifeless” imitation of the work of better poets.
Poetry is a type of writing that often focuses on emotions—the opposite of the strict etiquette books that Aurora’s aunt likes. Aurora’s analysis of her own work reflects yet again how she is a slightly older and more mature narrator reflecting on a younger, more naïve self. Aurora doesn’t understand poetry enough to see the flaws in her work when she begins, and yet in spite of Aurora’s criticisms of her old poetry, this passage still has a nostalgic tone to it that suggests Aurora learned something valuable through her early efforts, even if they weren’t great art.
Themes
Aurora becomes fascinated by the lives of poets like John Keats, Lord Byron, and Alexander Pope. Although Aurora’s own poetry is still amateurish, people around her notice that something is changing inside her. Her aunt doesn’t fully understand what’s happening inside Aurora but clearly disapproves. She tries to get Aurora back on track to do her household chores. A divide forms between Aurora’s outer life, where she’s devoted to her aunt, and her inner life, where she is increasingly thinking about poetry.
John Keats, Lord Byron, and Alexander Pope were all poets whose public personas make up an important part of their legacy, especially since their poems sometimes included autobiographical elements. For Aurora, her goal is not only to become great at poetry but also to learn how to incorporate poetry into her life and live an interesting life like her poetic idols. The growing divide between Aurora’s inner and outer life suggests that a person doesn’t need to be a literary celebrity for poetry to shape their life.
Themes
Aurora learns to love England, realizing that as humble as the landscape is compared to Italy, it was still good enough for Shakespeare. She enjoys going out walking in the country with Romney and sometimes also his friend Vincent Carrington, a rising painter, but usually just the two of them alone. Aurora clarifies that she doesn’t love Romney or even think of him as a particularly good friend, but they still find things to discuss. On these walks Aurora will point to beautiful things they see, like herds of cattle and full orchards, believing them to be evidence that God is watching over humanity.
Aurora’s changing opinion about the English landscape shows how poetry has already begun to influence her ability to see the world, helping her to find value in England where she didn’t before. Aurora’s acceptance of England also seems to signify her coming to terms with her grief over her parents’ death. For a while, Aurora tried to avoid this grief by being the type of niece her aunt wanted. But Aurora only truly found a way to get over her grief through poetry, which opens her up to her own feelings and helps her see hope in the future.
Themes
