Two-Way Mirror by Fiona Sampson (jenna bush book club txt) 📗

(‘But now you have a horrid cold, / And in a ugly night cap you are rolled’), and a sonnet celebrating the ‘recovery of little Arabella, from a dangerous illness’:

When Death’s pale hand o’er Baby spread,

The pillow raised her little head,

Her face was white, her pulse beat low,

From every eye sad tears did flow.

If this seems a little morbid, that’s perhaps not surprising. Papa’s accolade came just five weeks after little Mary’s death, and these first family poems are written through the ensuing period of mourning at Hope End and during the family’s trip north.

However seriously Ba takes her own poems, occasional verse is in fact another of the family’s ‘things’. Her grandmother Graham-Clarke writes accomplished poetry, and over the years Ba’s siblings and Mamma will try their hand at it too. Like the family nicknames, these rhymes play with language as something shared, a kind of insider speak, and the domestic magic of using words to build a shared understanding is something Ba will never quite shake off. Years from now, a distinctively Victorian alignment with the people at home will remain close to the heart of her adult work.

Meanwhile, when she gets to fourteen Ba looks back at how this eight-year-old self:

first found real delight in poetry […] too young to feel the loveliness of simple beauty, I required something dazzling to strike my mind—The brilliant imagery the fine metaphors and the flowing numbers […]

At nine I felt much pleasure from effusions of my imagination in the adorned drapery of versification […] At this age works of imagination only afforded me gratification […]

At ten my poetry was entirely formed by the style of written authors and I read that I might write.

These memories come from ‘Glimpses into My Own Life and Literary Character’, one of three notebook self-portraits Ba composes in a burst of adolescent self-consciousness between the ages of twelve and fifteen. Perhaps naïvely, she cites John Locke’s foundational 1689 work of philosophical empiricism, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, to argue that she’s not being vain: self-examination can ‘bring us great advantage in directing our thoughts in the search of other things’. Precocious or not, her self-scrutiny is typical for a teenaged girl in veering towards the excessively self-critical. ‘My Character and Bro’s Compared’ is peppered with judgements like ‘ardent’, ‘enthusiastic’, ‘impatient’ and ‘not content till I excel’, which a disinterested observer might recognise as signs of an unusual intelligence struggling with being forced to go at trotting pace.

Still, this fourteen-year-old is guided more by emotional intuition than rational proposition – ‘I feel uncontroulable contempt for any littleness of mind, or meanness of soul […] & prejudice I detest’ – professes a ‘patriotism enthusiastic & sincere’, and claims to ‘understand little of Theology’, although at twelve she passed through a phase of ‘enthusiastic visions’, since regretted. She’s also capable of touchingly straightforward adolescent angst: ‘In society I am pretty much the same as other people only much more awkward much more wild & much more mad!!’

But behind all this there’s a nagging sense of talent being wasted: of a mind consuming itself. Idyllic though life at Hope End is, far from being stretched Ba is being held back a year by sharing lessons with Bro, her younger brother who, ‘tho by no means difficient has no chance in competition with her’, as William Artaud puts it. Youthful intelligence must find its own way, and it does so chiefly through reading. ‘At eleven I wished to be considered an authoress. Novels were thrown aside. Poetry and Essays were my studies & I felt the most ardent desire to understand the learned languages.’

Ba starts Latin, her first ‘learned language’, in 1816, having begun French a few months earlier. The following summer she takes up Greek – with the Classics tutor who was officially brought in for Bro – finding, ‘I like this language a lot, because […] I will be able to read Plato, and all the great authors of Greece.’ And not just read: within a couple of years she’ll be composing her first Greek ode. For now, though, it’s with still childish tactlessness that she admonishes her Uncle Sam, ‘I’m astonished that you don’t want to travel to Greece, where can one take more instruction, or more pleasure, than from the broken monuments which are the tombs of the greatest people in the universe?’ But after all, she is only eleven. And what’s more, she’s writing in French – under the tutelage of a Madame Gordin, who comes in twice a day and sets correspondence as homework.

It would be difficult to make such an arrangement in rural Herefordshire, but the family are spending summer 1817 at newly fashionable Ramsgate. Much to Ba’s irritation this Kent seaside resort has also produced a dancing master: ‘I don’t like dancing at all.’ Her mind is on Higher Things. She’s already composing French and Latin verse,

sitting in ‘my house under the sideboard,’ in the dining room, concocting one of the soliloquies beginning:

‘Qui suis je? autrefois un general Romain:

Maintenant esclave de Carthage je souffre en vain’

as she’ll recall decades from now in a vignette of her ten-year-old self, still playing house under the furniture of the adult world at the same time as she plunges determinedly out of her depth.

This is touching, funny – and priggish. Talent is Ba’s privilege and her Achilles heel. At fourteen, when Bro goes away to school, she becomes doubly anguished by the loss of her closest companion and her own exclusion from education. Perhaps triply so, as sexless tomboy freedom is exchanged for the young woman’s body that will handicap so many of her pleasures:

Through the whole course of my childhood, I had a steady indignation against Nature who made me a woman, & a determinate resolution to dress up in men’s clothes as soon as ever I was free of the nursery, & go into the world ‘to seek my fortune’.

‘Poor Beth,’ she’ll write later, slipping discreetly into third person:

had one great misfortune. She was