Aurora Leigh
“Narrator Lucy Scott is quite good as Aurora Leigh, who tells her own story in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s novel in verse. Scott hints at the various voices and deftly expresses the Victorian (often exaggerated) passions of the characters…There’s not much she can do, however, to speed up the story. To a contemporary listener, the extended images and descriptions of landscapes and emotions are not gripping but, rather, intrusions that have to be borne until the next bit of action. The novel was quite popular in its day, and John Ruskin considered it the greatest long poem of the nineteenth century.”
AudioFile
Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “novel in verse” is an epic poem that voices with enchanting beauty and literary courage the perspective of Victorian women.
Aurora Leigh forges her own path to become a poet, successfully proving her worth, defying the ideals of her era, and rescuing her spirit from the suppression of a routine domestic life. Infusing the work with her own experience and passion, Browning produced a true masterpiece.
With young readers today regularly extolling this “piece of heaven,” it is clear that the passing of time has proved beyond doubt her “wild and magnificent genius” (Edgar Allan Poe).
In this intelligent reading by Lucy Scott, Aurora Leigh ’s qualities are illuminated for all to hear.
Praise