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Summary
Themes
and Colors
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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