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

Breathes.

Price is an Oxford-educated socialite who has married into the Irish aristocracy. Wealthy and sophisticated, he counts as friends both prominent Whig politician and sometime Foreign Secretary Charles James Fox, and Sir George Beaumont, who has helped found the National Gallery. So he has no need to tolerate fools or to pander to lady hobbyists; and he recognises that Elizabeth is neither. Their correspondence is intensely serious and focuses on ancient Greek verse-forms, which both believe are the appropriate discipline for English verse. For all his resistance to neoclassical landscape, Price has received an excellent classical education, and he devotes pages to close reading of Elizabeth’s use of metre. She responds in kind, displaying the width and depth of her knowledge: her first letter alone recruits Abraham Cowley, Thomas Gray, Sir John Denham, Edmund Spenser, John Milton and Alexander Pope. The tone of intellectually engaged argumentation is one a young man of her age and class might share with his college tutor, something Price recognises and commends: ‘This very amicable controversy, may, I think, be of use to us both; for you are well furnished with arms, & dextrous in the use of them.’

But Price is seventy-nine when this correspondence starts. When he dies just over three years later, in September 1829, Elizabeth is – luckily perhaps – still too young to understand quite how rare such formative friendships are. She grieves for Sir Uvedale of course, and composes an exequy; but she isn’t devastated. She isn’t even fully convinced by his legacy, which after all surrounds her. Papa’s house at Hope End is a gigantic Picturesque folly. But Elizabeth is not at all convinced that she doesn’t prefer the ‘Sublime’ and ‘Beautiful’, comparing, ‘Herefordshire all hill & wood—undulating & broken ground!’ with ‘Worcestershire throwing out a grand unbroken extent […] to the horizon! One, prospect attracting the eye, by picturesqueness: the other the mind—by sublimity.’

Perhaps that’s partly because this ‘sublime’ vicinity has produced the third, and most intense, of her new friendships. Hugh Stuart Boyd, a forty-five-year-old soi-disant scholar living off the proceeds from his County Antrim estates, has settled in nearby Malvern. With his wife Anne and daughter Annie, five years Elizabeth’s junior, he lives first at Ruby Cottage, Malvern Wells, and then, from May 1828, at Woodland Lodge, Great Malvern. Boyd is so impressed by Elizabeth’s Essay on Mind that in February 1827 he writes to her out of the blue and without being introduced. It’s a not insignificant gesture that verges on social transgression.

The letter itself is lost, but we know something of what it contains from Elizabeth’s reply. Evidently, he’s enclosed some verses in Greek addressed to her, but also expressed interest in her ‘improvement’. Combining flattery with criticism is, did she but know it, the classic move an older man makes on a younger woman. It works so well because young women are so often in the grip of self-criticism; learning the delicate paradox of excelling at being secondary. And Elizabeth, on the cusp of twenty-one, responds. Like many women her age, she’s been practising self-flagellation, behind the stalking horse of self-improvement, for years. Besides, she’s already primed by her father to attach herself to authority, and to believe that criticism is a sign of male affection. Indeed Boyd’s letter arrives just when she’s feeling demolished by her father’s dismissal of a new poem, ‘The Development of Genius’: she simply assumes that his verdict is both authoritative and disinterested. She seizes on Boyd’s approach and fires off in response one of her epistolary pyrotechnics, full of allusions and accompanied by some Greek verses of her own.

She also starts a one-step-forward, two-steps-back dance that we’ll come to recognise:

I regret that the distance between Hope End & Malvern, & my own incapacity to walk or ride far, should present anything like an obstacle to my availing myself immediately of Mr Boyd’s very kind offer of pointing out to me personally his objections to my Essay.

For Elizabeth may be intellectually accomplished but rural seclusion – not to mention a deeper retreat, into the privacy of her own room – has turned the confident, boisterous child into a shy young woman who hates going out and about. She especially hates paying visits, which in these days of slow travel often require an overnight stay. It’s not a solitary vice. Social shyness is a sanctioned family trait. Henrietta records a day in February 1827 on which:

Mama was on the lawn superintending the dusting of the curtains, luckily she escaped before [a cold-calling family] saw her. Luncheon was ordered, I was sent for & there they sat never attempting to go till it was becoming quite dark […] Pray fancy Mama & me by ourselves obliged to entertain these four people.

Elizabeth even found visiting Sir Uvedale Price challenging. Though her trip to Yazor in October 1826 went well – he entrusted her with the proofs of his An Essay on the Modern Pronunciation of the Greek and Latin Languages – their intimacy remains founded on the extraordinary mutuality of their literary confidence. So her reluctance to turn what quickly becomes an in-depth epistolary relationship with Hugh Stuart Boyd into something in real time is not surprising. Eight months in, convention will remain an alibi for shyness: ‘As a female, & a young female, I could not pay such a first visit as the one you proposed to me, without overstepping the established observances of society.’ Whether or not this is her father’s view, as she claims, in the event she manages to hold off meeting Boyd for over a year – until one day in March 1828 her carriage passes him on the road.

She doesn’t stop. She’s on a rushed errand to prevent friends from setting out to visit her mother, who is ill with the rheumatoid arthritis that within months will kill her. But, in a sign of things to come, Boyd is so petulantly affronted by this that he threatens to