Status Updates From Aurora Leigh

Seriously. Why are you proposing to her immediately after insulting the intelligence of women in general.

‘Love, my child, love, love!- (then he had done with grief)
‘Love, my child.’ Ere I answered he was gone, And none was left to live in all the world.

Because unmotjhered babes, he thought, had need Of Mother Nature more than others use.’

A verse novel is a hard sell but oh my word I LOVED this. A Charlotte Bronte plot with Elizabeth Gaskell interests told as a prolonged, interior, confessional reflection reminiscent of Augustine, wrestling with modernity, social reform, vocation, men and women's work, and love and ending - with a nod to Dante - at daybreak in Italy before a vision of the New Jerusalem. Love my girl EBB.

somehow this poem manages to be intensely interior and very wide-ranging at the same time!

try not to say betwixt every 4 pages challenge

Why hello St. John Rivers - I mean Romney Leigh! Remarkably strong Jane Eyre parallels here in Book II. Now I'm trying to think of other Victorian heroines who make a conscious choice AGAINST the zealous social reformer and commit to less tangible service - love or poetry. Gaskell's North and South presents an interesting variation on this pattern.