Episode
Talking About 'A Rowling Reading of Aurora Leigh'
- Published
- Dec 3, 2025
- Duration seconds
- 4665
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Summary
John Granger in September 2022, weeks after the publication of Ink Black Heart , tackled the tangle of 108 poetic epigraphs in Strike 6 from twenty-two Anglo-American Victorian women poets in search of a common theme, of a prevalent meaning, or, the Holy Grail, a work among the many works that acted to Heart as Rosmersholm did to Lethal White and Faerie Queene did to Troubled Blood . This effort involved listing the poets, the epigraphs (citing poems by each woman) , and, without reading each poem, noting simply what each brief excerpt included. You can read the results of those surveys at ‘ Ink Black Heart: Intro to Epigraphs 101 .’ The anticipated result of those tabulations was that the poetic epigraphs in Heart , in tandem with the cardiac Part headings from Grey’s Anatomy, were consistently about the heart as spiritual faculty rather than bodily pump. The surprise finding was that 13% of the epigraphs were from Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh . John speculated in conclusion that it was the heart of Rowling’s sixth Strike-Ellacott novel: Again, this is not the place to write at any length about the relevance of ‘Aurora Leigh’ as a mirroring text within Ink Black Heart . Like you, I look forward to Beatrice Groves’ exegesis to complement her Cuckoo’s Calling work with Rossetti’s ‘Dirge’ and Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses .’ The two important things to note here are only that ‘Aurora Leigh’ is the poem most deployed in Strike6 epigraphs and that it is a melange of “ Biblical and classical history and mythology, as well as modern novels .” That it would work as something of a template or touchstone for Ink Black Heart, a novel with mythological and hermetic backdrops and archetypal symbols used to reinvent the depth and range of the most modern of genres, the murder my…