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

Spot of an Old Dream of Symmetry’. This essay is the opening panel – the left-hand to the double-sided mirror – of her 1974 classic, Speculum of the Other Woman. In it, she talks about how women’s writing, trying to fit itself to conventional literary models that are historically male, has to ‘fake it’, for all the world like a compliant wife. Starting with her childish fantasies about growing up to be a Byronic soldier-troubadour, Elizabeth engages with this problem quite consciously all her life. Irigaray goes on to say that ‘Woman’s special form of neurosis would be to “mimic” a work of art, to be a bad (copy of a) work of art.’ Here too Elizabeth is in the frame. At least one cause of her slowness to arrive at poetic maturity must be the years she spends trying on various literary models, classical and theological. It’s almost as if these genres were so much fancy dress – and writing were a kind of role play.

Book Five: How to lose your way

[…] salt upon your lips.

Elizabeth is in bed again. The cough that’s been troubling her since that first London autumn has settled on her chest. Never an early riser, now she’s under orders to lie in till lunchtime and to avoid going out in a frost that is ‘daggers for all weak chests’. No one’s exactly worried about her: Dr Chambers is convinced that her lungs are ‘without desease—but so weak, that they struggle against the cold air—which occasions the cough’. But, with ‘one cold upon another falling upon the chest & producing cough’, she hasn’t left the house in four months.

There’s nothing gentle or genteel about such a cough; about gasping for breath. Violent spasms: the whole body forced into an upright position, because to lie down is to suffocate in the too-heavy air. Coughing without drawing breath, coughing till you retch, eyes streaming, nothing to you but the red O of your coughing mouth. And then, just when you think there might be a moment’s calm, the cough starting its obsessional, insatiable irritation over again. At night, loud in the silenced house, your self-conscious coughing keeps not only you but the person in the next bed, the next room, awake.

Coughing and wheezing, hacking and whooping: none of this is in the least romantic. And the paraphernalia that comes with it’s not much better. Inhaling a gloop that prisms and swirls slowly in steaming water, Elizabeth has to keep moving her long hair out of the way. Besides, what to do with the gloop she herself coughs up, those slugs of yellow, grey, green mucus suddenly at the back of her throat and on her tongue? Lace handkerchiefs are wasted on this, the heavy lifting of the respiratory system, though she has a spittoon.

Asthma meets bronchial infection in a cunning marriage. Asthma-narrowed bronchi are perfect harbours for infection and the gunk it produces: those gummed-up bronchioles in turn create the irritation that increases asthmatic inflammation. Untreated childhood asthma prevents the lungs developing fully, thus ensuring itself a future in the body. So Elizabeth coughs. Altogether she’s finding it hard to keep her spirits up. Her third-floor back-bedroom window offers an austere view of parapets, ‘high star-raking chimneys’ and a slice of winter sky; indoors, the chick hatched by her Barbary doves has died after protracted ailing ‘one cold night’, and the parent birds are so ‘spiritless, songless’ that she’s brought the pair into her own bedroom to warm them up. As she pets them, it’s almost as if she’s picturing herself as still the girl who fed the Hope End chickens by hand. She ‘should name it as a grief […] to lose either of them’, but caged birds are a poor substitute for country air and childhood freedoms.

Once again paper friendships keep Elizabeth occupied. But now instead of daydreaming about the ancient Greeks, or admiring writers from afar, she has actual literary correspondents. John Kenyon, who’s been unwell himself, sends her a manuscript. Poems: For the Most Part Occasional includes ‘Destiny’, which takes lines from her own version of Prometheus Bound as its epigraph; she responds with a series of detailed critiques. Meanwhile, Mary Russell Mitford is thinking of applying for a raise in her civil list pension, and asks Elizabeth to mobilise a cousin-in-law’s support.

Miss Mitford’s tone is particularly warm. ‘My dear Love,’ she opens on 1 February 1838, ‘I have got to think your obscurity of style, my love, merely the far-reaching and far-seeing of a spirit more elevated than ours.’ If this doesn’t embarrass the younger poet, it must boost her self-esteem. Sure enough, she’s soon asking Kenyon about possibilities for publishing The Seraphim. Within a month publication is underway, and with new-found confidence Elizabeth is able to decline Mr Boyd’s offer to go through her proofs: ‘My dear friend, I do hope that you may not be very angry, —but Papa thinks and indeed I think that as I have already had two proof sheets of forty eight pages, and the printers have gone on to the rest of the poem, it would not be very welcome to them if we were to ask then to retrace their steps.’

Dragons are being slain all round. ‘Do you know that Mr Valpy is giving up business?’ she gossips, with not a little schadenfreude. She’s yet to forgive her former publisher for how he handled her Prometheus Unbound – perhaps it’s a useful distraction from the book’s critical failure – and has vowed ‘to put no more mss to be changed to print, in Mr Valpy’s hands’. She writes about her new collection to Miss Mitford with relaxed certainty, punningly invoking Lord Byron’s famous take on sexual regret: ‘So now, there is room for only “the late remorse of fear”.’ One reason for this changing tone may be developing social maturity, but Elizabeth also knows that these poems are good. With Papa, she believes the book’s long title poem, ‘rather a dramatic lyric than