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Aurora Leigh

In Chapter 33 of Anne of Green Gables, Anne and Diana dress for the concert at White Sands hotel, where Anne is to recite:

Marilla stalked downstairs, thinking proudly how sweet Anne looked, with that

One moonbeam from the forehead to the crown

and regretting that she could not go to the concert herself to hear her girl recite.

The quotation comes from Elizabeth Barett Browning’s poem, “Aurora Leigh.”

In Emily’s Quest, Emily had been unable to write since she burned her book, A Seller of Dreams, had become engaged to Dean and had broken her engagement.

Suddenly–the flash came–again–after these long months of absence–my old, inexpressible glimpse of eternity. And all at once I knew I could write. I rushed to my desk and seized my pen. All the hours of early morning I wrote; and when I heard Cousin Jimmy going downstairs I flung down my pen and bowed my head over my desk in utter thankfulness that I could work again.

Get leave to work–
In this world ’tis the best you get at all,
For God in cursing gives us better gifts
Than men in benediction.

“So wrote Elizabeth Barrett Browning–and truly. It is hard to understand why work should be called a curse–until one remembers what bitterness forced or uncongenial labour is. But the work for which we are fitted–which we feel we are sent into the world to do–what a blessing it is and what fulness of joy it holds. I felt this to-day as the old fever burned in my finger-tips and my pen once more seemed a friend.

-Emily’s Quest ch.12

The quotation comes from Browning’s epic poem, Aurora Leigh, where the protagonist Aurora, like Browning herself, is a female poet. The significance of Aurora Leigh is noted in Epperly’s The Fragrance of Sweet Grass.

Aurora Leigh
By Elizabeth Barett Browning

(excerpt‘ from the Third Book)

When Romney Leigh and I had parted thus,
I took a chamber up three flights of stairs
Not far from being as steep as some larks climb,
And, in a certain house in Kensington,
Three years I lived and worked. Get leave to work
In this world,–’tis the best you get at all;
For God, in cursing, gives us better gifts
Than men in benediction. God says, ‘Sweat
For foreheads;’ men say ‘crowns;’ and so we are crowned,
Ay, gashed by some tormenting circle of steel
Which snaps with a secret spring. Get work; get work;
Be sure ’tis better than what you work to get.

(excerpt from BOOK FOUR)

Poor Marian!wanton Marian!was it so,
Or so? For days, her touching, foolish lines
We mused on with conjectural fantasy,
As if some riddle of a summer-cloud
On which some one tries unlike similitudes
Of now a spotted Hydra-skin cast off,
And now a screen of carven ivory
That shuts the heaven’s conventual secrets up
From mortals over-bold. We sought the sense:
She loved him so perhaps, (such words mean love,)
That, worked on by some shrewd perfidious tongue,
(And then I thought of Lady Waldemar)
She left him, not to hurt him; or perhaps
She loved one in her class,or did not love,
But mused upon her wild bad tramping life,
Until the free blood fluttered at her heart,
And black bread eaten by the road-side hedge
Seemed sweeter than being put to Romney’s school
Of philanthropical self-sacrifice,
Irrevocably.Girls are girls, beside,
Thought I, and like a wedding by one rule.
You seldom catch these birds, except with chaff:
They feel it almost an immoral thing
To go out and be married in broad day,
Unless some winning special flattery should
Excuse them to themselves for’t, . . ‘No one parts
Her hair with such a silver line as you,
One moonbeam from the forehead to the crown!’
Or else . . ‘You bite your lip in such a way,
It spoils me for the smiling of the rest’
And so on. Then a worthless gaud or two,
To keep for love,a ribbon for the neck,
Or some glass pin,they have their weight with girls.