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

power and powerlessness’, wrote the brilliant British philosopher Gillian Rose, introducing her often self-reflexive essays on Judaism and Modernity in 1993.

Elizabeth uses the poetic tradition in a similar way. Of course, Aurora Leigh isn’t a self-portrait as such. But its author’s lifelong relationship with poetry, from precocious obsession to the literary homage that is her final poem, starts and ends with a fierce credo of art for art’s sake that has nothing to do with an ivory tower but everything to do with poetry in the world. It is poetry as political action, as prayer, as a way of life; and what Aurora Leigh captures is this notion of a life as and for writing. Like Gillian Rose, Elizabeth asks and resolves her life’s questions through the tradition she practises. Like Rose, she does this not by stepping outside it to reflect, but in the very process of contributing to it.

Her poems may not be autobiographical or largely confessional, but because they are the record of becoming herself, they record her life. Stephen Spender encapsulates this two-way, mirroring relationship between the poet’s self and their work in his 1964 poem ‘One More New Botched Beginning’. It’s a memorial to lost friends, the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty and fellow poets Louis MacNeice and Bernard Spencer. That all three were writers, and famous ones at that, is also to the point of this strange, touching and rather wandering poem. Life stories get drafted and redrafted, interrupted and lost, just like poems, it says. Our own continual process of rehearsal is carried on after death by our friends, and – for famous writers – by a posterity of strangers.

Book Eight: How to be autonomous

Inward evermore

To outward,—so in life, and so in art

Which still is life.

The auspiciously named Via delle Belle Donne, near the Piazza di Santa Maria Novella in Florence, is a cool chasm into which the bright April sun only just makes it between the wide eaves of Renaissance town houses. But less than 200 metres away are the giant chess pieces of the Duomo, Baptistery and Giotto’s tower. It’s here, just a month after Elizabeth’s miscarriage, that she, Robert and Wilson settle into comfortable new lodgings. They’re in search of a better climate, closer to where the action is. Happiness, it seems, is infinitely perfectible:

I persuaded Robert to get a piano—and we have a good one, a grand […] including the hire of music, for about ten shillings a month. […] Our payment for the apartment includes everything […]—we have real cups instead of the famous mugs of Pisa, & a complement of spoons & knives & forks, nay, we have decanters & champagne glasses […] As Wilson says succinctly, “it is something like”.

Once again the couple order in their meals from a trattoria, and they acquire a ‘ “donna di faccenda” […] who comes for a few hours everyday to make the beds, clean the rooms, brush Robert’s clothes, wash up the cups & saucers &c &c.’ In 1847 Florence is crisscrossed by English households and the network of tradespeople attuned to their needs. It attracts English visitors too. A couple of days after their arrival, the Brownings find themselves hosting Anna Jameson and Gerardine, homeward bound and eager to toast 23 April, Shakespeare’s birthday, with ‘a bottle of wine from Arezzo’. The runaways seem to have set young Geddie a poor example: in Rome she’s fallen in love with ‘A bad artist,! an unrefined gentleman,!! a Roman catholic! (converted from Protestantism!) a poor man!! with a red beard!!!’ as Elizabeth notes with amusement. Nevertheless, the women stay a week, celebrating the ‘matrimonio miracoloso, with as much love at the end of nearly eight months as at the beginning’, of which Mrs Jameson is such a key witness for literary London.

And literary London signals its approval. In May, ‘Mr Forster of the Examiner’ sends greetings, while news arrives that John Abraham Heraud, editor of The Christian’s Monthly Magazine, is lecturing ‘on the poems of Robert & Elizabeth Barrett Browning “now joined together in the bonds of holy matrimony.”’ ‘Certainly if ever there was a union indicated by the finger of Heaven itself, and sanctioned & prescribed by the Eternal Laws […] it seemed to me […] to be this!’ purrs Robert’s literary mentor Thomas Carlyle. Fashionable callers at the Via delle Belle Donne range from American artists – writer George William Curtis, and sculptor Hiram Powers – to old neighbours from among the English gentry.

Elizabeth’s flattering ‘Hiram Powers’ “Greek Slave”’ will appear in her Poems (1850). The Brownings respond differently to Hope End acquaintances Compton John Hanford and his sister Fanny, getting them to witness the marriage property settlement that Robert has asked John Kenyon to have drawn up. And it doesn’t hurt one bit to have such well-connected visitors witness this legal agreement, by which Robert returns to Elizabeth all the wealth that otherwise passed automatically to him on their marriage, and in so doing proves he’s no bounty hunter. Elizabeth seems to come over all aflutter at this, telling Arabella:

It was half past ten oclock, & Robert said .. “Now, Ba, do you lie down on the sofa, and I will read this to you”—“Oh,” I exclaimed, throwing myself down in utter prostration of body & soul, .. “if you read a page of it to me, I shall be fast asleep! […] It’s your Deed, you will please to remember, yours & Mr Kenyon’s, & not mine by any manner of means. […]—Well & how do you think the discussion ended? He would’nt read it either—

Don’t believe a word of it. This is a scenario staged by a woman as determined as she is intelligent. Elizabeth wants to give Robert all she possesses, and also to put that impulse in writing. But at the same time she’s determined to make his renunciation as public as possible.

The sisters are corresponding regularly now, though Elizabeth still gets homesick: ‘I dream of you all often & cry in my sleep.’