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

has her eye on the prize. Already she ‘never can be satisfied with […] the comparative respect / Which means the absolute scorn’. What matters to her isn’t producing tolerable verse but being a true poet, judged by the highest standards. Her heart beats in her brain.

Still, the question remains hanging: what if women can’t produce real art?

Among our female authors we make room

For this fair writer, and congratulate

The country that produces in these times

Such women, competent to … spell.

In this biting parody of a kind of reviewing she has actually experienced, the poet comes close to revealing herself. But Elizabeth Barrett Browning is not ‘Aurora Leigh’. Real life differs from fiction, partly because the verse novel’s author has ‘money and a room of her own’, in the famous phrase Virginia Woolf will coin seventy years from now, in A Room of One’s Own.

Yet critical reception is a kind of mirror, even a distorting one, in which writers check their progress however much they intend not to. Reading is another. Everyone needs a companion in their sentimental education. And for a writer developing in provincial isolation, books take the place of a peer group. As a young woman, Elizabeth has plenty of accounts of the writer’s struggle to keep her company. Influential, form-expanding Romantic biographies and memoirs like Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions (1782) and William Godwin’s Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798) have long been in print. In the year she turns eighteen, ‘Lives of the Poets, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Southey’s Life of Nelson, Lockhart’s Life of Burns, Moore’s Life of Sheridan, Moore’s Life of Byron, Wolfe’s Remains’, can be read even in remote Yorkshire vicarages – as we learn when Charlotte Brontë recommends them to a friend. They are certainly available to a wealthy family like the Barretts.

Of course, these are all books by men. What would the sentimental education of a woman look like? It is Elizabeth herself who will, eventually, provide an answer. Aurora Leigh is fiction, not biography. But literary biography is always a Bildungsroman, the story of how a thinking, feeling self emerges. And in this, intimate respect, the story Elizabeth Barrett Browning tells in Aurora Leigh is also the one her life story tells us, for:

poets […] understand

That life develops from within.

Book One: How (not) to belong

And ankle-deep in English grass I leaped

And clapped my hands, and called all very fair.

Sun beats down on a shoulder of parkland, parched grass crackles underfoot, blowflies and mosquitoes hover among odours of meadowsweet and wild hop. The steep hillside is covered with drying hay that catches the ankles, but at the crest you feel on top of the world. Turn north and almost at your feet is a steep cut running east towards the Malvern Hills. Turn south and a dramatic natural amphitheatre commands the Hereford plain. Two strikingly different worlds fit together here along a single geological seam. In one direction stylish villas, a sign of Malvern’s emerging fashionability, dot the wooded slopes of Colwall. In the other, a rural hinterland reaches south and west to the border of Wales.

What are the very first things we remember? Bursts of light and colour perhaps, with the luminous quality of glass. Moments that remain as images, if not complete stories. For a four-year-old called Ba, this is her first summer in the dazzlingly fertile Herefordshire countryside; her previous homes, in County Durham and then near London, can already be little more than trace impressions. Here everything is hyperreal. Footpaths disappear into thickets; nettles taller than a man spill across fields. Even the hot, stormy weather is exceptional. Later this summer a ‘very remarkable water-spout’, with ‘two branches bent nearly, or perfectly, at right angles to each other’ will be observed off the Kent coast at Rams-gate; one of the largest tornadoes ever recorded in Britain will flatten a trail at Fernhill Heath, just the other side of the Malverns.

It’s even headier down in the closed-off valleys known locally as Hopes. Ba’s family have recently settled in one of these ‘ripples of land’, where the outside world disappears. But from Oyster Hill, this high point of their estate, ‘Commanding the romantic scenery of the Malvern and the adjoining hills, with views […] highly interesting and of great extent’, everything in the vicinity can be surveyed – just as it is designed to be. In 1810 British wealth still broadly correlates with landowning. If anything, landed gentry have tightened hold on their estates in recent decades, as the paralegal process of enclosure abolishes the common land on which tenants used to support themselves. The old subsistence farming strips are being replaced by money made visible as ornamental parks and newly managed fields ‘tied up fast with hedges, nosegay-like’: the Agricultural Revolution has transformed land, for those who own it, from a reliable but rather unexciting asset into a fashionable, and briskly profitable, gentleman’s hobby.

Unlanded money finds itself in something of a hurry to join the action, and Ba’s father is no exception. His wealth is prodigious, but it’s been generated by international trade and is held largely offshore. The precisely calibrated English class system will be only too happy to point this out to him as an inferiority. What’s more, he was born abroad, in Jamaica. So this Herefordshire estate called Hope End is the first British property he’s owned. It came on the market last autumn and, tucked away in the heartlands of rural Britain, seems to us now a surprising choice for a merchant with an eye on the rest of the world. But after some prevarication – and hard bargaining – Ba’s father has bought nearly 500 acres, with a Big House, farm buildings and cottages, ‘to make yourself, Brother & Sister & dear Mamma happy’, as he tells her. It sounds like a fairy tale, and in a way it is; though as in any fairy tale not everything’s quite as it appears. The debt of happiness ‘dear