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

footlights; the two-way mirror claimed paradoxically to prevent this happening. Actors consent to our sitting there in the dark; the two-way mirror did not feel consensual. On the contrary, it seemed to break the carefully worked-out group contract in which everyone was involved in an equal level of self-disclosure and what went on inside the group room stayed inside the group room. I felt I was failing the group, that I was a cheat, a voyeur, because they couldn’t see me watching them.

What made it worse was that I was getting the people in the room to write poetry, that intimate gesture of self-disclosure and trust. The power of the lyric tradition comes from the way it explodes the distinction between the poet and her reader, the poem and its auditor, often using the first person singular as a kind of collective pronoun; a shared viewpoint. I says the poem, stepping forward to speak on behalf of us all.

That’s a huge risk for the poet to take, because who is to speak for everyone? In the mid-nineteenth century Elizabeth Barrett Browning took this risk by writing and publishing as a woman. She exposed herself to misunderstanding, criticism and ridicule. In the day room, group members were taking a risk by writing as the repeatedly marginalised individuals many of them were; exposing themselves and their writing to being thought of as symptomatic cases, not poets.

What could possibly make up for this? In writing about Elizabeth I feel as though I’m at her service, just as I used to feel I was at the service of my hospital writers. I used to picture myself as a tabula rasa, the blank page for them to write on. Of course, that wasn’t true. I was bringing all sorts of things into the group room with me: I just couldn’t see myself when I was in there. The odd paradox I had slowly to learn was that, far from being self-indulgent, self-examination made me more useful to the group members. Which is true of biography, too. However hard we think about Elizabeth, we only know what we can know about her. I may be at my subject’s service, but she herself is not here.

Book Six: How to be dutiful

‘Male poets are preferable, straining less

And telling more.’ – LADY WALDEMAR

When Elizabeth shuts the door to her ‘little slip of sitting room’, she shuts out much of the imperfect world. Those she loves and depends on come in and out, of course: Crow, Flush, Papa, her brothers and sisters. But the battle of wills over who can stay with her is finished. No more wheedling and bribing: no more ponies or riding habits. Above all nobody to be responsible for, as she feels she was responsible for Bro’s presence, and death, in Torquay. At thirty-six Elizabeth has absolutely no longing for a household of her own, like the one Mary Russell Mitford struggles to maintain.

Her unexpected recovery from the near-fatal illness which followed those catastrophic losses at Torquay has left her grateful for much less than her child self would have settled for. Actual domestic comfort and care replace dreams of Balkan adventure; settled family life frees her to write. And so she has every reason to be complicit in Papa’s increasingly apparent desire to keep his children close. Her surviving brothers are busy working – Charles away in Jamaica, George as a barrister – travelling (in Henry’s case), or studying: Sette to become a barrister, Occy an architect. Her sisters have a home to run. Only Elizabeth, set aside by illness, is uniquely free to do as she wishes. It turns out that ‘the duties belonging to my femineity’ don’t even include sewing. ‘You can scarcely imagine, my awkwardness when I pretent to work! Such pricking of fingers, & knotting of thread, & sowing backwards in certain evolutions, instead of forwards!’

The busy household beyond her door blurs to a consoling thrum she’s known since childhood. ‘Domestic love only seemed to buzz gently around, like the bees about the grass’, as she later puts it. Besides, through the imagined worlds of poetry Elizabeth not only escapes but feels she transcends the slight dullness of daily life. It’s small wonder her recent work has tended to revisit that ‘sacred song with a devotional ecstacy’ which The Athenaeum noted of The Seraphim. The way this poetry turns repeatedly from the often burdensome embodied self to an uplift of spiritual feeling can seem awkward and dated to the twenty-first-century reader; for the women who’s doing it, it is an act of will, a lift-off from life.

At the same time she can’t deny the highly material facts of living in Wimpole Street, at the heart of one of London’s smartest residential districts. The capital surrounds her with its rattle and hum. Writing friends surround her too. Suddenly easily accessible, she no longer needs to cook up projects like the ill-fated Psyche Apocalypté in order to keep in touch. They can visit. If ill-health prevents her from visiting in return – well, that’s a useful fig leaf for the twin obstacles of Papa’s protectiveness and her own shyness. And the writing world seems to scent out this new proximity, as if simply being in London makes her altogether more real. Predictably, Mary Russell Mitford is among the first to visit, just six weeks after Elizabeth’s return, staying in Wimpole Street for two nights at the end of October 1841. The two enjoy a good catch-up – though disappointingly without Flush senior, who wasn’t allowed on the train: ‘How uncivilized the world is still!’

Miss Mitford’s friendship and support, including annual commissions for Findens’ Tableaux, has almost exclusively sustained Elizabeth’s writing through her Torquay exile. But now, as that writing continues to develop, Elizabeth begins to spread her wings by almost imperceptible degrees beyond this loving mentorship. By autumn 1841 the success of The Seraphim is established fact and, three years on from its appearance, Elizabeth is beginning to receive substantial commissions. The