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

the dopamine receptors in her brain. Her full body spasms that centre on a particular point, and difficulties with walking that includes ‘sciatic’ cramping, are a close match. In twenty-first-century Britain, tardive dystonia occurs as a side effect of drugs prescribed for psychosis. But dopamine receptor inhibition is also a side effect of magnolia, a remedy widely prescribed in nineteenth-century England for a range of illnesses, and just as likely as elm to have been the main ingredient in Carden’s bark decoction. (Wouldn’t it be in keeping with Ba’s passionate impatience to overdose in order to try to speed up a cure?)

Each of these competing theories is plausible. The trouble with posthumous speculation is that clinical diagnosis relies on a kind of habeas corpus – actual examination to contemporary clinical standards – and Ba simply isn’t here for even the most distinguished clinician to examine. To understand her ill health, the best we can do is not to conjecture, but to understand it in the way she and those around her did: as the symptoms she experienced. To know what Ba’s life was like, we have to know what it was like for her to suffer as she did, without the ‘voice-over’ of a posteriori knowledge. We have to try to step out of our comfortable positions as onlookers in order to feel as Ba herself does. Framed by apparatus in her Gloucester bedroom, all she knows is that:

The suffering is agony, and the paroxysms continue from a quarter of an hour to an hour and upwards […] The attack seems gradually to approach its acme, and then suddenly ceases—during its progress the mind is for the most part conscious of surrounding objects but towards its close, there is generally some, and occasionally, very considerable confusion produced by it.

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Second Frame

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Is a biography a kind of portrait? This book started by looking at Elizabeth in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s 1858 engraving. Picture it like this – picture a portrait as something actually ‘painted on the wall’ – and you’re almost certainly imagining a face.

But why should faces matter so much? The twentieth-century philosopher Emmanuel Levinas says they are where we encounter each other. Faced with someone else, we realise that we must take them into account in our understanding of the world, that ‘My freedom does not have the last word; I am not alone.’ What flows from this recognition, in other words, is everything that makes us human: love and morality, society and intimacy. The human face is the ‘source from which all meaning appears’.

Levinas was born in Kaunas in what’s now Lithuania in 1906 and, like his compatriot the poet Czesław Miłosz (who was born just 40 miles north and five years later), lived through most of the twentieth century; he died on Christmas Day 1995. Miłosz wrote that, ‘My generation was lost. Cities too. And nations.’ But Levinas was Jewish, and so the century he lived through was darker still, although he survived the Second World War by being interned as a French prisoner of war.

In the 1920s he had studied at the University of Freiburg. His professors there were two great innovators of our understanding that you must include the human having the experience inside your philosophical frame, otherwise you’re noodling in ideal space: father of phenomenology Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger, that dreamer of human Being. Both philosophers may at this point have appeared close to the heart of the culture and traditions Elizabeth Barrett Browning had believed in so deeply. Yet Heidegger’s ideas were soon to fail the test: he became an active Nazi collaborator, and was complicit in the professional destruction of his Jewish mentor, Husserl.

So there’s a profundity to Levinas’s ideas about personhood. ‘To begin with the face as a source from which all meaning appears, the face in its absolute nudity’, he says in 1961 in Totality and Infinity, ‘is to affirm that being is enacted in the relationship between men’ (that’s to say, people). Our human duty is to sustain that other face: to keep alive the other self who is recognised and created in this encounter – and in so doing to become human ourselves.

For without selfhood no set of features has any especial meaning. They could just be shapes ‘painted on the wall’. The phrase comes from Robert Browning’s poem, ‘My Last Duchess’. In that famous fable of coercive control, a jealous Duke has his wife murdered and replaced by her portrait – which, unlike the living woman, is absolutely compliant. The face in the frame, Browning’s poem reminds us, cannot meet our gaze. It is no longer a self.

Book Three: How not to love

What

He doubts is, whether we can do the thing

With decent grace we’ve not yet done at all.

In 1822, turning sixteen brings no particular privileges. British women don’t come of age in any civic sense: it will be nearly a hundred years before any get the vote. For the well-off, girlhood merges into maturity in a procession of pretty, high-waisted dresses, with no stronger demarcation than the putting up of long hair. Meanwhile, the technical age of consent is still, shockingly, twelve.

So Elizabeth’s birthday this March has no special significance. All the same, it’s no fun spending it at the Gloucester Spa Hotel. The usual anniversary poems arrive by post but are no replacement for a proper family party. Henrietta inadvertently rubs salt in the wound: ‘We had famous toasts after dinner […] the first that […] this time next year [you] may be here enjoying both health and happiness [,] the second for your nurses.’ To make the patient feel still more left out, another baby brother, Septimus, has just been born.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, two months later she’s home. But it’s a difficult transition, because she hasn’t yet been cured. The carriage journey across half of Gloucestershire is painful and jolting for a body grown accustomed to nothing but a spinal sling; when she arrives, her family are shocked to see that she can only walk