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

no surprise that the young woman should fall in love by way of ‘exalted’ literary passions that helpfully conceal her own feelings. After all, if she asks herself why ‘Mr Boyd’ matters to her so much, she has only to reach for her own Preface to the Battle of Marathon: ‘Poetry is the parent of liberty, and of all the fine arts.’ The Achilles heel of young poets, their idealistic passion for writing, creates ready fodder for the literary casting couch.

The relationship is manipulative from the outset. Elizabeth’s very first entry in a diary she keeps for eleven months from June 1831 records, ‘I suspect that [Mr Boyd’s] regard for me is dependant on his literary estimation of me, & not great enough, for me to afford the loss of any part of it.’ Love capriciously withheld, or simply not requited, can be addictive, forcing the lover to understand that what affection is bestowed by the beloved is conditional, and to scrutinise their own behaviour for ways to ‘earn’ more. Nothing else makes sense of the incompatible ‘truths’ that the beloved claims to return their love, yet doesn’t show it. When this is sustained for years by the alibi that consummation is impossible because the beloved is married – and, as so often the case with older men and younger women, Boyd is – the unspoken contract becomes increasingly abject, creating an association between love and suffering.

‘Why shd. I wish so much to be with a person, who certainly does not wish so much to be with me. Why shd. I take pleasure in lacerating myself, & kissing the rod?’ By now Elizabeth’s every encounter with Boyd is barbed with anxious comparisons. In November, ‘He does not like Miss Bordman as much as he used to do. He says that he does not like her much’, but in December he names Harriet Mushet, a ‘rival Queen’. At this game’s perverse arrival point, pleasure vanishes even for the instigator, as tearfulness replaces wide-eyed eagerness and, in the cliché, ‘She’s just no fun anymore’. But, missing infusions of admiration, even the manipulator may come to believe in his own affection. ‘He put his hat before his face, & talked […] “of course he felt gratified and obliged by the sentiments I expressed.” “Gratified & obliged!”—Well!’

There is simply no excuse for this. Fanning the flames is no way to handle a crush:

Mr Boyd attacked me & made Miss Steers attack me on the subject of science standing higher in the scale of intellect than poetry. […] And when she was gone, Mr Boyd said—‘I hope you did not think that I wished Miss Steers to stay for my own sake. I was quite disinterested about it—’.

But at twenty-five Elizabeth is caught in a perpetual adolescence of obedience: she doesn’t yet recognise the flawed human three-dimensionality of older men. ‘How I ought to love him!—ought!—how I do!—’ she frets, about her father. And she obeys Boyd too, as he puts her through her paces, even though by now she realises her feelings for him are adulterous:

How could I write a diary without throwing upon paper […] the thoughts of my heart as well as of my head?—& then how could I bear to look on them after they were written? Adam made fig leaves necessary for the mind, as well as for the body.

This diary entry is one of the first times she mentions a separation between the ‘thoughts of my heart’ and ‘the thoughts of my head’. What she does next – of course – is to share the insight with Boyd.

Three weeks later, ‘On opening my drawer I saw the ms of Thoughts versus Words, & a Thought struck me that I wd. address & send it to Mr Boyd.’ The piece is full of confident humour and her years of study:

Philosophical Thought [is] a personnage of retired habits and eccentric disposition […] a silly report was once spread about his children the Ideas having had the use of their eyesight from the moment of their entrance into the world. […] Poetical Thought […] is still a great dresser, & flirts away most vigorously with the Words. […] Philosophical Thought & Poetical Thought used to be good friends—but […] from the beginning there have been temporary coldnesses between them,—and they had one serious quarrel about Plato.

The philosophical in-jokes are executed with such lightness of touch that it would be easy to miss how watertight these allusions are: Plato banned poetry from his ideal Republic, characterising it as both emotive and imitative; in the same work he produced his famous image of the cave, in which we sit seeing only the shadows of things, not the things themselves. And miss them Boyd does. Four days later he sends back a message, via his wife, saying he ‘likes the talent, and nothing else, of my “Thoughts”.’

The trouble with a ‘mentor’ whose mind is second rate, and who has complicated motives to prevent you thriving, is that their failures constitute such poor advice: Elizabeth’s essay will appear in the prestigious pages of The Athenaeum. But not for another five years. Meanwhile, its author falls into a depression:

I feel bitterly— as I have felt—for some time at least. […] Well! It is better far better that I should go away; better in everyway, & perhaps for everybody. Better for me, I dare say.

Which reminds us just how adolescent Elizabeth’s preoccupation with Boyd is in tone. Still, it’s keeping real worries at bay. A dispute over Papa’s inheritance is placing the family under gathering financial pressure: the rumour is that they may even have to leave Hope End. Such a dramatic change is still for now unthinkable. Yet it would at least free Elizabeth from her impasse. For these first struggles to release herself from Boyd’s emotional double bind are doomed to fail: she’s fighting against herself.

In fact it is Boyd who will leave the district first, three months before the Barretts’ departure, in May 1832. Yet