47 pages • 1 hour read
Aurora Leigh
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Book 8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Book 8 Summary
As Book 8 opens, several years have passed; Aurora still lives with Marian and the child in Florence. Attempting to read Boccaccio, Aurora can only sigh when she hears Marian laugh. Night seems to Aurora like a sea that drowns her. Suddenly, Romney Leigh appears, and the two discuss the news from home contained in Vincent Carrington’s letter. It transpires that a subsequent letter from a different mutual friend has gone astray. Romney tells Aurora that her latest book has “won his soul” (Line 296) and talks about the day on which she first refused his proposal of marriage. He also expounds on the details of his failure in the world. Aurora replies that she too is a failure, for she has become both sad and lovelorn. Romney proposes again, and Aurora responds by emphasizing the centrality of God in man’s life. Romney claims that Aurora’s latest book contained the essence of something sublime beyond Aurora herself; he also complains that society has lost access to God through its fixation on material matters. In response, Aurora idealizes the concept of work and praises Romney’s philanthropy.
Romney describes the civil unrest that has courted him throughout his social work. He has been shot at, and Leigh Hall has been burned by an angry mob that mistakenly believed the hall to be a prison rather than a refuge for the poor. The paintings of the Leigh lineage have all been destroyed. In view of these misfortunes, Romney believes that he has achieved very little in life. He asks Aurora to come to Leigh Hall, but because she believes him to be married to Lady Waldemar, Aurora questions the propriety of this arrangement. Romney promises to protect Marian and her son, and his manner is so strange that Aurora wonders whether he is experiencing poor mental health. Aurora dismisses him curtly but mourns his suffering. When Aurora mentions Lady Waldemar, Romney laughs and tells Aurora that he loves Aurora herself; he is not married to Lady Waldemar. Finally, he presents Aurora with a letter from Lady Waldemar.
Book 8 Analysis
In Book 8, as ever when they are together, the cousins hold forth on the state of the world during their age, indulging in extensive tracts of philosophical musings designed to serve as counterpoints to each other. Yet the overall tone of this meeting between the two is far more forgiving than their previous conversations, and in contemplating the many regrets and failures that they have each experienced, they find far more common ground than they have in the past. Despite a few initial misunderstandings (given that Aurora still assumes Romney to be married to Lady Waldemar), Barrett Browning uses this book to introduce hints of a reconciliation, which provides a bit of foreshadowing into the couple’s eventual agreement to marry at the end of Book 9. As the conversation progresses, both Romney’s exclamations of affection and Aurora’s fond inward contemplations of her cousin reveal that each is softening toward the other.
Amidst these growing promises of full-fledged romance, Barrett Browning also uses Aurora’s voice to further explore aspects of the state of Female Identity and Value in the Victorian Era, for in the midst of her reminiscences of their earlier meetings, she acknowledges the follies of their youthful ambitions: her obsession with art over life, and Romney’s single-minded dedication to social work. Both of them, she opines, have failed to achieve their ambitions, and in a significantly more pious shift than in previous passages, the poet causes her protagonists to turn to a deeper contemplation of religion. The discussion therefore considers that with society’s overemphasis upon materialism comes the loss of God’s guidance. As the text states, “Materialist / The age’s name is” (Lines 635-36). Both cousins therefore lament the proliferation of technology that undermines simple spirituality, and Aurora also mourns women’s entrapment through perfectionism and self-doubt.
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By Elizabeth Barrett Browning
