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

But Elizabeth pays, and agrees to share the financial and legal responsibility with Bummy, who is now closing up her own home in rural Frocester, Gloucestershire to resume the care of her eldest niece.

However the heavy lifting, literal as well as metaphorical, will be done by Elizabeth’s new maid, a country girl from Lincolnshire called Elizabeth Crow. Just before they left London her predecessor, who had worked for the family for a couple of years, ‘& had professed her willingness to go anywhere with me’, announced that she wasn’t well enough to come to Devon. Elizabeth, who like all members of her class tends to treat servants as invisible necessities, manages briefly to make sympathetic noises – ‘and indeed she is not well, poor thing, nor does she look so!’ – that are conspicuously muted compared with, for example, the terms in which she worries over Miss Mitford’s dog Dash. Although perhaps this is a symptom of scepticism: ‘We have some reason for suspecting fear of the sea-voyage to have had a little to do with the change.’

Elizabeth Crow is altogether more robust. She is in her early twenties, strong and energetic, with a northerner’s brisk manner. She’s also intelligent, as her mistress gradually realises: ‘She is an excellent young woman—intelligent bright-tempered & feeling-hearted,—more to me than a mere servant; since her heart works more than her hand in all she does for me! And her delight in [Miss Mitford’s book] Village which I gave her to read, was as true a thing as ever was that of readers of higher degree.’ But even Crow, as the Barretts call her, will be overruled by Elizabeth’s new physician. Dr Barry of Torquay is ‘a young man—full of energy—with a countenance seeming to look towards life—devoted to his profession & rising rapidly into professional eminence—a young man with a young wife & child, & baby unborn.’ An advocate of fresh air and early rising, he’s initially certain his methods are working for Elizabeth; a month after her arrival, he declares that ‘the respiration is clearer on the affected side.’

In fact his regime leaves the patient ‘haunted throughout by weakness, an oppressive sense of weakness, & […] such lowness of spirits, that I could have cried all day if there were no exertion in crying! For Dr Barry forbids her ‘London habit (very useful in enabling an invalid to get thro’ a good deal of writing without fatigue) of lying in bed until two’, and forces Elizabeth out daily in the invalid chair; with the result that she ‘seldom failed to come back quite exhausted & fit for nothing better than reading nonsense.’ Worse:

On the occasion of my writing case being accidentally visible—‘Have you been writing today Miss Barrett’. ‘No’—‘Did you write yesterday?’ ‘Yes’. ‘You will be so good as not to do so any more’!!—And again—‘You have observed my directions & been idle lately Miss Barrett?’ ‘Yes’. ‘And within these last three weeks you have never written any poetry? […] if you please to do this, neither I nor anyone else can do anything for you’.

Life has got stuck once again: it’s as if she had never escaped from Gloucester. To be exiled in Torquay, away from her newly flourishing literary life and many of the people she loves, is bad enough. ‘These partings are dyings’, she tells Arabella on the eve of George’s departure for London; and she means it literally, since despite the doctor’s assurances it’s not certain that she’ll live to see absent friends and family again. But to be forbidden to write is to be denied what is by now the central purpose of her life, as well as her habitual coping mechanism.

Barry is just another in the long line of medics who ban writing women from the one activity that probably makes them feel better and stronger than any other. His idea that writing is over-stimulating for the female, but not the male, system isn’t new; nor is it about to vanish. Seven years from now, Elizabeth will manage to be funny as well as furious about this:

I had a doctor once who thought he had done everything because he had carried the inkstand out of the room—[…] He gravely thought poetry a sort of disease .. a sort of fungus of the brain—& held as a serious opinion, that nobody could be properly well who exercised it as an art—which was true (he maintained) even of men—[…] for women, it was a mortal malady & incompatible with any common show of health under any circumstances.

But at the moment it’s simply depressing. She had hoped, ‘Encouraged by Dr C’s permission, to manage here without medical visits, & to trust simply to God’s sun & air’. However, far from taking the patient off drugs, Barry has upped her dose of digitalis, and added ‘the blister &c applied without any particular call for it’, and inhalations of ‘what, Dr Barry WONT tell me for I asked him twice & was answered each time by an evasion’. Things seem to be getting worse instead of better.

The only bright spot in the autumnal gloom is that Papa has given permission for Bro to stay on in Devon, even though both men would prefer he returned to London. Father and daughter share not only the tendency to hole up, but a desire to keep their loved ones holed up with them. Keeping ‘Brozie’ in Torquay with nothing to do except chaperone his sister prevents his having to return to Jamaica, but it must also ‘quench the energies of his life’, to paraphrase Elizabeth’s own perceptive phrase. Of course, there are compensations. Sheltered by ‘the slant woods of Beacon hill’, the siblings’ new home at 3 Beacon Terrace stands ‘immediately upon the lovely bay—a few paces dividing our door from its waves—& nothing but the “sweet south” & congenial west wind can reach us’. A handsome Regency mid-terrace, its frontage dressed with a wrought-iron balcony and double-height ornamental pilasters, it’s roomy enough for