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

whole vision of majestic [plaster] heads from Brucciani’s—busts of poets and philosophers.’

This ‘little slip of sitting room’ is a gift, an acknowledgement – and something of a gilded cage. It lays out a future that Elizabeth, of all the siblings, is expected to spend indoors, reading and writing. And her father’s ‘abundant kindness’ in making this as pleasant as he can for her does in fact create the ideal conditions for work, since it’s not entirely true that, as Virginia Woolf will put it, ‘A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write.’ The money, at least, needn’t absolutely be her own: for now, Papa’s wealth genuinely enables Elizabeth’s writing life.

In fact Edward Barrett Moulton-Barrett will receive such a bad posthumous press from his daughter’s admirers that it’s worth reckoning up just how important he is for her emergence as a poet. Ever since she was fourteen and he paid for her debut publication, The Battle of Marathon, he has encouraged Elizabeth’s writing both practically and emotionally: his ‘admonitions have guided my youthful muse, even from her earliest infancy’, as that volume’s dedication puts it. There’s more to being born into the right family than financial comfort, access to the parental library, and decent home tutoring, essential though these are. Without Papa’s consent, An Essay on Mind would not have been published when Elizabeth was twenty; if he hadn’t urged her to submit the manuscript, Prometheus Bound wouldn’t have appeared when she was twenty-seven.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, gifted women are dependent on fragile connectors of good fortune. It’s Elizabeth’s particular luck, for example, that her father isn’t interested in rushing his daughters into dynastic marriages: perhaps his own empire-building father-in-law put him off. In any case a strong, almost fundamentalist religiosity has now combined with what he views as his own worldly failure to make him see prayerful morality as life’s most important work. Like nothing so much as the founder of one of those Catholic religious orders of which the Nonconformist in him must disapprove, he sees a cloistered existence dedicated to study and prayer not as half-lived, but as the best of all possible lives. ‘We are dying & all are dying around us daily, eternity is hastening, be it our study to prepare for it’, as he notes in a characteristically cheery missive to George. For this Revivalist Christian, prayer is an active, even heroic, intervention in the world rather than a retreat from it. In making the virtually housebound Elizabeth a domestic repository for the Christian duty ‘to watch and pray’, he is allotting her what he sees as a pivotal role; albeit one with more than a passing resemblance to mediaeval anchoress, or village sin-eater.

In coming years Papa will get in the habit of coming to pray with Elizabeth every night. But religiosity is just one face of her culture’s emerging obsession with the figure of an imprisoned woman. Beyond the immuring walls of the Barrett home this is becoming highly sexualised. One of Elizabeth’s emerging poetic peers, Alfred Tennyson – three years her junior – has already published two poems, ‘Mariana’ (in 1830) and ‘The Lady of Shalott’ (in 1833), fetishising walled-up women. Mariana in her ‘moated grange’, pining for lost love, is one of Shakespeare’s ‘spare’ characters from Measure for Measure; in coming decades, Tennyson’s poem will inspire famous paintings by John Everett Millais and John William Waterhouse. In a tangentially Arthurian story which generates three further Waterhouse canvases, his Lady of Shalott is locked in a tower and cursed to weave perpetually – until she falls fatally in love with Sir Lancelot:

She left the web, she left the loom,

She made three paces thro’ the room,

She saw the water-lily bloom,

She saw the helmet and the plume,

She look’d down to Camelot.

Thwarted sexuality suffocates these fantasy figures, and it is striking how much they resemble later stories about Elizabeth – which she herself will protest. In 1844 she will be hurt when someone who she by then thinks of as a friend, Richard Hengist Horne, presents her as a reclusive invalid in his encyclopaedic A New Spirit of the Age: their relationship will never fully recover. A year later she’ll challenge even Robert Browning, ‘Do you conjecture sometimes that I live all alone here like Mariana in the moated Grange?’ Twentieth-century popular fiction will turn the indoor years of her thirties into a thrumming Oedipal drama; or else portray her as sexually unawakened, a dammed-up force ready to burst into creativity once she’s roused with a kiss. But if the reality of authorship is much more quotidian, it’s also more self-directed. For all her father’s support, it’s Elizabeth’s own strong will that has driven her forward through her piecemeal poetic education, over the threshold of the banal and into writing of real literary merit. She is a big personality crammed into the small frame of a diminutive body – and of a restricted life.

That personality finds the space to emerge on the page. It’s impossible to ignore the spikey intellectual charm of Elizabeth’s letters, as when she beautifully folds doubled puns, reflexivity and reflection into a thank-you note to John Kenyon:

I have not been asleep over Landor’s [work]. It is easier to dream than to sleep over a volume of his: and perhaps very beautiful as these are in many parts, one of my dreams is, that they express coldly, & with a hard stiff stoney outline, what the Greeks were. There were living Greeks—were there not? as well as Greek statues.

Nor can we discount the simpler, warmer tone she uses to Arabella about:

flannel waistcoats up to the throat—& next the skin—& most of the most disagreeable things you can think of besides .. provided that you happen to be particularly imaginative while you think!—[…] Tell us everything about everybody—us meaning Henrietta & me. I never show your letters & so you may open your heart!

Yet these are both ways of writing in persona.