Afterword

“Afterword: Adulterated Verse, the Modernist Remix,” reflects on the legacy of the Victorian verse-novel by addressing the genre’s substantial influence on modernist fiction. Circling back to the beginning, the Afterword considers Virginia Woolf’s response to Aurora Leigh in her essays and in The Waves (both 1831). It then returns to the topic of Chapter 1 by looking at how adultery enters a series of high modernist novels accompanied both by nods to some of the Victorian poems considered in the previous pages and by the same kinds of formal fracturing that are characteristic of the verse-novel genre. By locating traces of verse-novels in works such as Henry James’s The Golden Bowl and James Joyce’s Ulysses, the Afterword shows how, rather than a literary dead end, the Victorian verse-novel was a brave new beginning for generic experimentation.

E Pluribus Unum

Chapter 5, “E Pluribus Unum: The American Verse-Novel,” travels across the Atlantic to consider how and why verse-novels, imported and indigenous, garnered such remarkable American popularity, especially in the period of the Civil War and during Reconstruction. Beginning with a description of European verse-novels’ transatlantic journeys, fostered by what Meredith McGill has called an American “culture of reprinting,” the chapter then contemplates the native literary scene, which had borne many successful writers of long narrative verse, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Finally, it examines a trio of American verse-novels, all heavily indebted to Aurora Leigh, which exemplify, in variously negotiating that debt, how their poets used the form to navigate the cultural terrain: Josiah Holland’s Kathrina: Her Life and Mine, in a Poem (1867), Lucy Larcom’s An Idyl of Work (1875), and Epes Sargent’s The Woman Who Dared. For these writers, verse-novels promised peculiar purchase on their American publics.

The Longue Durée of Marriage

Chapter 2, “The Longue Durée of Marriage,” offers a formal explanation to the centrality of conjugal experience in the Victorian verse-novel, despite marriage’s representational challenge (as outlined by Kierkegaard in Either/Or). In Coventry Patmore’s The Angel in the House, the extended middle responsible for the poem’s length develops out of this difficulty. By using durational narrative to expand lyric forms of love poetry, Patmore had hoped to portray marriage’s duration without sacrificing the intensity of romantic ardor. But, as comparisons to Byron’s Don Juan suggest, the resultant compound proves unstable. This chapter uncovers the unsettling results of such extension by showing how the need for length introduces ideas of seriality, including the notion of a sequel to love in the afterlife through (potentially adulterous) marriage in heaven. A coda considers William Morris’s The Lovers of Gudrun, the longest and most novelistic tale from his immense Earthly Paradise.

Introduction

“Introduction: A Short History of a Long Form” introduces the verse-novel by describing its major features—including its contemporaneity (in contrast to epic), its storytelling impulse, its frequent use of interpolated lyric verses (“rough-mixing”), and its preference for common language—against the backdrop of Victorian genre theory and recent accounts of the period’s poetic genres. Focusing on Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, an early and influential example of the form, the Introduction suggests how Victorian writers self-consciously used the generic indeterminacy of the verse-novel to contest social as well as literary norms and express a broad range of cultural concerns. It also traces some of the prior hybrid experiments that influenced the rise of the verse-novel at mid-century and offers a preview of the chapters to come.

Amours de Voyage

Chapter 4, “Amours de Voyage: The Verse-Novel and European Travel,” reflects on the expansive generic geography of the form. Like the influential ur-text Don Juan, almost all verse-novels exhibit what Clough calls amours de voyage. The chapter considers overlapping thematic and structural aspects of travel in a group of explicitly cosmopolitan verse-novels (Clough’s Amours de Voyage, Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, Owen Meredith’s Lucile and Glenaveril, and George Eliot’s The Spanish Gypsy): their use of the railway, of guidebooks, of epistolarity, and of plots involving hybrid heredity. The spatial energies of verse-novels often avoid not only the epic teloi of nation founding and empire building but also the novelistic telos of the courtship plot: marriage. These works travel in order to destabilize both their generic terrain and their ideological certainties. A postscript considers William Allingham’s Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland, an exception to this travelling spirit that proves the rule.

Circle-Squarers

Chapter 3, “Circle-Squarers: Tennyson’s and Browning’s Form-Things,” looks at Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and Browning’s The Ring and the Book, two poems that worry about circling the square: creating lyric unity out of rectilinear narrative. Both tell of marriage and adultery, combining fractured narrative form with violent plots. And despite a historical remoteness at odds with the verse-novel’s modernity, they show the pervasive influence of the genre. The chapter considers how Tennyson and Browning embed into their poems two types of gem, diamond and pearl, that can be termed form-things: objects through which to express and explore generic affiliation. Finally, it moves from circular forms back to square books, to Browning’s The Inn Album, a verse-novel that consciously modernizes The Ring and the Book even as it embraces its own marginal generic status in an effort to sidestep the intractable geometry of circled squares.

Adulterated Verse

Chapter 1, “Adulterated Verse,” considers Violet Fane’s Denzil Place: A Story in Verse, one of many poems to build upon the success of Aurora Leigh. Fane’s comparatively late example of a verse-novel synthesizes many of the genre’s most remarkable features. Its hybrid energies appear in the sympathetic narrative of a surprisingly happy fall into adultery. The adultery plot is exemplary for the form; this chapter explores why by showing how adultery’s cultural dynamics offer parallels to the literary dynamics of verse-novels. Fane self-consciously uses intertextuality (especially with Milton’s Paradise Lost) and scenes of reading (as in allusions to Dante’s Paolo and Francesca) to explore the ramifications of generic hybridity, above all as they concern the interplay between lyric and narrative temporalities in love. The chapter also compares the verse-novel’s effects to those of novels, such as James’s The Golden Bowl.