Before, during, and after, framed

I've been reading Aurora Leigh, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Victorian verse novel, for a couple weeks now. I've less than 3000 lines to go, and while I seem to have bulled through the worst of the melodrama -- for this being a Victorian novel, there is melodrama -- Barrett Browning's anti-feminism is starting to bug the hell out of me. What's keeping me going is, of all things, the narrative stance: we started with Aurora recounting her childhood and early career as a poet, mixed with reflections from the present. Then half-way through, we reach the present and switch to narration journal-style, written soon after the action (sometimes on the same day) -- this with a couple years to go. I want to know how Barrett Browning pulls this off -- if she does.

( In between which, Carpe Demon, Undead and Unappreciated, The Royal Pain, Off the Map, and Meh )

Which brings me back to the poetry of Aurora Leigh, and the author's apparent conviction that the way to heighten emotion is to pile on the poetic elaboration, without changing any other quality of the verse. Gets tedious, especially during the melodramatics. Overwritten, much?

That would be a Yes.

---L.