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

it will be to similar acommodation even closer to the centre of London. The costs to Elizabeth of these decisions will be, as future feminists would say, ‘written on the body’.

For now though, as friends and visitors help put it on the map, Marylebone is slowly becoming home. One of the first in touch is John Kenyon. A decade after he had stumbled across his young relative’s poetic talents, he is eager to welcome her into his richly gregarious, literary life. He has turned the home he shares with his brother-in-law, just a few blocks east at 39 Devonshire Place, into a kind of writers’ salon built on personal friendship. Kenyon happened to settle near Nether Stowey in the early days of his marriage, and there befriended many first-generation Romantic writers through Samuel Taylor Coleridge. By the time he introduces Elizabeth to the London literary scene in 1835, his friends include Charles and Mary Lamb, Walter Savage Landor, who often stays with him when in England, Robert Southey, whom he will accompany on a tour of France in 1838, and William Wordsworth. His circle also includes a number of American writers. Julia Ward Howe, who will later write ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’, describes him as ‘a Maecenas of the period’. He also knows less famous but still established writers and intellectuals, such as the poet-dramatist and civil servant Bryan Waller Procter, theologians Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, and the lawyer, journalist and diarist Henry Crabb Robinson, through whom everyone in the circle is just a handshake away from the German Romantic poets, among them Goethe, Herder and Schiller, whom Robinson met during a youthful Grand Tour.

In short, it’s precisely the distinguished writing world of which Elizabeth dreamt when she was a girl in Herefordshire, and its doors are suddenly open to her. Her instant, characteristic response is to be overwhelmed by shyness. Luckily, Kenyon persists. He’s a generous man: one measure of his philanthropy is that his charitable donations are dispersed impersonally, by a board he appoints. And he has the gift of friendship. Crabb Robinson describes ‘the face of a Benedictine monk and the joyous talk of a good fellow [who] delights at seeing at his hospitable table every variety of literary notabilities, and therefore he has been called “a feeder of lions”.’

Elizabeth may be nervous of literary lions, but within a month of moving to London she’s already writing to Thomas Noon Talfourd to thank him for leaving a copy of his privately printed tragedy, Ion, for her at their shared publisher Valpy’s. A decade Elizabeth’s senior, Talfourd is a barrister and writer who has already published a body of literary and legal journalism. His new play will premiere at Covent Garden in May to ‘success complete. Ellen Tree and Macready were loudly applauded, and the author had every reason to be satisfied.’ Talfourd’s after-theatre party is ‘largely attended by actors, lawyers, and dramatists’, according to Crabb Robinson, who’s there along with ‘quantities of poets’ including William Wordsworth, Walter Savage Landor – and the young Robert Browning, a twenty-four-year-old newcomer, who had published the monodrama Paracelsus to critical acclaim the previous summer and is included in the festivities with a toast.

Elizabeth won’t be at the first-night party, of course; but she thanks Talfourd for Ion with a letter that combines effusiveness with criticism: ‘Dare I observe that the most perceptible defect appears to me to arise from a redundancy in the language? May I observe besides that the power of concentrating thought in poetry, is a more essential one, than as it is generally estimated?’ Dare she indeed, even though as it happens she’s right? But Talfourd seems to have been more amused than offended by this precocious criticism. He keeps the letter in an album: where nearly a decade from now, and to her intense mortification, Robert Browning and Elizabeth’s brother George will stumble upon it together.

But in the spring of 1836, the young Robert Browning is being just as clumsy as Elizabeth. The pair are tyros at the same moment, if not together. Two days after the Ion party, Robert writes to William Charles Macready, the great classical and Shakespearean tragedian who’s playing the lead, offering to write him ‘a Tragedy […] to be ready by the first of November next’ on ‘any subject […] any character of event with which you are predisposed to sympathize’. This bumptiouness pays off: a year from now, Macready will join the management of Covent Garden, becoming a powerful advocate for living writers’ work; and on 1 May 1837 Browning’s blank verse drama Strafford, with Macready in the title role, will open at the house for a successful five-night run.

For the next few years, Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning – a young man six years her junior, but whose profile is enhanced by this kind of going out and about – will move in parallel through London’s culture-making circles. When they read each other, it’s from within the same rich, elbowing world of poetic competitors; a cat’s cradle of repeated crisscross encounters. This summer, Kenyon lends Elizabeth Robert’s Paracelsus and she:

wd wish for more harmony & rather more clearness & compression—concentration—besides: but I do think & feel that the pulse of poetry is full & warm & strong in it, […] a height & depth of thought—& sudden repressed gushings of tenderness which suggest to us a depth beyond.

Yet they never quite meet. Elizabeth’s gender, her shyness and her tendency to suffer chest infections all mean that she doesn’t actually enter most of the rooms in which her gifted peers join the senior poets of the day to toast, gossip or backstab each other.

The fact that she does manage to participate so fully despite this speaks to the quality of her writing. By now, au fait with how the literary world works, she’s publishing regularly in literary magazines. These new poems, starting with her ‘Stanzas Addressed to Miss Landon…’ ode, are attracting critical attention. In July