Abstract
‘A dropped star / Makes bitter waters, says a Book I’ve read’ (5: 917–18), Aurora Leigh comments midway through the text in which she writes her identity as both woman and poet. The ‘Book’ Aurora alludes to in this pivotal passage is Revelation, the Biblical book most frequently invoked in Aurora Leigh as in Emily Dickinson’s poetry and H.D.’s Trilogy. The ‘dropped star’ is the ‘great star from heaven’ called Wormwood that flames down ‘burning as it were a lamp’ to embitter a third part of the earth’s waters in the final Judgment (Revelation 8). In Aurora’s book, however, this ominous star primarily signifies not God’s wrath, but the destructive power of the woman artist who abandons her vocation for the material security of marriage.
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Notes
George P. Landow, Elegant Jeremiahs: The Sage from Carlyle to Mailer (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1986); and
John Holloway, The Victorian Sage: Studies in Argument (1953; rpt and New York, Norton, 1965).
Nichol, ‘Aurora Leigh’, Westminister Review, 68 (1857) p. 412;
Eliot, ‘Belles Lettres’, Westminster Review, 67 (1857) pp. 306–7.
Gates, Studies and Appreciations (New York, Macmillan, 1900) p. 39;
Texte, Etudes de Littérature Européenne (Paris, Armand Colin, 1898) p. 240 (my translation).
Barabara Leigh Smith and the Langham Place Group ed. Candida Ann Lacey, Women’s Source Library (New York & London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987).
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© 1995 Marjorie Stone
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Stone, M. (1995). Juno’s Cream: Aurora Leigh and Victorian Sage Discourse. In: Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Women Writers. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23803-3_4
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