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

a few steps. Immediately, as she’s helped to the room that will be her world in the coming months, she replaces little Arabella as the invalid sibling.

Yet there are compensations to this removal from the quotidian hurly-burly. Elizabeth takes after Papa in flourishing with seclusion. She loves ‘silence & quietness & a sight of the green trees & fields out of the window’. She also shares her father’s single-pointed determination; and now, in her own sanctum, she’s free to read and write to her heart’s content. The apprentice writer finds herself, at sixteen, released from boring ‘accomplishments’ and domestic, daughterly duties. Even formal study is no longer compulsory. Instead, shawled and wearing an invalid’s lacy mob cap, she reclines among cushions like royalty at a levée. The role of invalid is semi-public, part of the world if set apart, and Elizabeth’s room is a public as well as a private space, one designed equally for night and day, sleeping and waking.

When Henrietta sketches Hope End, we see how snugly the house fits among wide lawns, where the brothers play cricket between the trees as shadows lengthen first one way, then the other. Elizabeth is confined to an upper floor, but the mansion sits down low in its valley, and from her window she can see the elaborate, Picturesque-style lake and shrubbery below her, and, further away, the estate orchards, hop yards and woods. She even glimpses the bare tops of the Malvern Hills. But what dominate her view are trees:

First, the lime,

[…] past the lime, the lawn,

Which, after sweeping broadly round the house,

Went trickling through the shrubberies in a stream

Of tender turf, and wore and lost itself

Among the acacias, over which you saw

The irregular line of elms by the deep lane

Which […] dammed the overflow

Of arbutus and laurel. […] Behind the elms,

And through their tops, you saw the folded hills

[…] the woodlands.

This is a Hope End of the mind, transformed by memory three decades from now into the childhood home of Aurora Leigh’s eponymous heroine. In 1822, the halls and stairwells of the actual house below Elizabeth echo with the continuing chaos of childhood. The schoolroom where she and Bro ‘conversed, read, studied—together […] fagged at the grammar, wept over the torn dictionary—triumphed over classical difficulties’, has been handed on to younger siblings. Alfred and Septimus are still infants in the nursery, but Henrietta, Arabella, Charles, George and Henry are all now aged between four and thirteen, ‘my gardeners and scufflers’, as their mother calls them:

George & Stormy are cleaning the walks, A. scuffling up Henttas walk to the Cottage & Henry helping Emma to spread out the Nursery tea on the grass—a busy but very quiet school day we have had—[Arabella] gave us a gay cottage breakfast on her birth day, under Minnys directing taste […] Seppy is sneezing with a little cold—[…] & is as sentimentally melancholy […] as the strawberries will permit.

However, Elizabeth’s invalid status has shifted a double burden of daughterly responsibility onto thirteen-year-old Henrietta, effectively forcing her, since Bro and Sam are away at school, into the role of eldest child at home. Entering adolescence just as her big sister returns from Gloucester, Henrietta is in many ways what Elizabeth might have been: an artistic child growing up into a conventional young woman. She writes verse and, like her mother, also sketches; the family appreciate her poems and pictures. But they don’t view her as gifted, and for her – as for Arabella – there’s to be no dispensation from daughterly duties.

Perhaps this is partly an accident of birth order. Firstborn children fascinate their parents, initiating what later siblings more or less repeat; as a third child and second daughter, ‘Addles’ is unenviably ‘also-ran’. On the other hand, talent undeniably exists – and she lacks it, for all the upbringing she shares with Elizabeth. This spring she writes her mother a birthday ode so bad it’s almost good:

Oh say what love I bear

To whom? except my mère

For whom this day I offer up my prayer

And may it very soon be granted

For virtue in her is indeed strongly planted.

Does Henrietta herself know how terrible this verse is? And does she recognise how much Elizabeth’s continuing closeness to Bro keeps her at a distance? The two eldest siblings are still a pair. Writing from school, Bro nags his sister about exercise:

So my dear Miss Bazy you need not fret yourself into the Lumbago, nor keep your ‘well leg’ in bed a bit the more for it nor need it prevent the other from following it a bit the more tardily.

He launches into the geeky discussions of classical metre he knows she loves:

M is also cut off as ‘Sepulchrum horrificum’ i.e. sepulchr’ horrificum, if a vowel precedes two consonants it is long and you may not have a word of more than three syllables at the end of a line.

More surprisingly, he sometimes has to push her to write back. ‘I have no idea of writing every other day to you as I hitherto have done without having some return […] Dab it but your a cool hand by Jove!!’ he announces from Grandmama’s in Marylebone, where the boys spend school breaks that are too short to make the long trip home to Herefordshire. But he writes again the next day anyway, because the support works both ways. Sam, naughtier as well as younger, is proving more of a responsibility than a confidant. In this era, when fathers don’t want to be troubled with details of their sons’ lives, and mothers don’t understand educational experiences they’ve never had, a sister who can follow at least part of what Bro is doing – even though she refuses to acknowledge the discomfort and violence of school – is a huge emotional support.

In turn he understands how important it is that she keep working:

But those hundred lines […] when I came away you had A HUNDRED LINES to complete the poem, and though you have most certainly, got on most surprisingly,