Aurora Leigh

Before Book 9 can deliver upon the poem’s promises of romantic love, it must first deal with the characters’ many flaws and missteps, and thus, it is appropriate that the book opens not with Aurora and Romney’s reconciliation, but with the venomous contents of Lady Waldemar’s letter. Within the letter’s self-indulgent pages, Lady Valdemar only deigns to extend a partial apology for the harm her misplaced jealousy caused Marian. Indeed, she blatantly rejects any responsibility for the actions of her lady’s maid, who caused Marian to be commercially sexually exploited, attacked, and raped. The harsh reality of the consequences of Lady Waldemar’s actions makes her angry letter all the more poisonous in its criminal disregard for her own culpability, and Aurora is rightly flabbergasted by the letter’s contents. However, despite Lady Waldemar’s unrepentant attitude, the letter does serve as an ideal narrative springboard that allows Aurora and Romney to lay past issues to rest and move the conversation on to other topics. Once Marian has absolved Romney of all responsibility on her behalf and has graciously removed herself from the picture, the cousins are finally free to pursue a full reconciliation and profess their love to one another.

Contrasted with Jane Eyre (1846), which concludes with the miraculous restoration of Rochester’s vision, Romney’s blindness in Aurora Leigh paradoxically confers spiritual or mystic vision, and in this way, Romney himself comes to embody the oft-used trope the “blind seer,” or wise man, for he apprehends the reality of events far more clearly now that he has lost the physical ability to see his surroundings. Appropriately, the poetry of Book 9 intensifies until it reaches the long-awaited climax of Aurora and Romney’s sincere and mutual declarations of love. The conclusion of the poem not only achieves an equilibrium or “perfect noon” between Romney’s blindness, or night, and Aurora’s day, but it also inaugurates a new era, and even a Second Coming of sorts:

The old word waits the hour to be renewed:

Toward which, new hearts in individual growth

Must quicken, and increase to multitude

In new dynasties the race of men

Developed whence, shall grow spontaneously

New churches, new economies, new laws

Admitting freedom, New societies

Excluding falsehood. HE shall make all new (Lines 942-49).

The final word of Aurora Leigh is “amethyst,” the 12th and final foundation stone of the New Jerusalem, or New Earth, as described in the Book of Revelation. By concluding with overt Biblical symbolism, the poem enshrines God at the center of the couple’s union, and the promised “New Age,” as Romney and Aurora have just discussed. Through the reference to Revelation 21, the poem transcends the mortality with which it began, implying, just as Revelation does, that “[t]here will be no more death” (Revelation 21:4). A spiritual union finally prevails over the earthly suffering that the Leighs have previously experienced, and the poem’s triumphant pinnacle is offered reverentially to the Almighty. Revelation can be heard latently but potently behind the final stanza of Aurora Leigh: “It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End.”