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

Three of her brothers also write: George sends a package of magazines and a book he’s careful to inscribe ‘Mrs R Browning’. Henry, long the most resistant to their father’s sway, mails a letter; and so does Stormie, settled this spring back in Jamaica away from Papa. Treppy sends loving greetings. But in a way their father is right. Elizabeth’s departure has gone to the heart of the family’s sense of itself. Now the sisters openly criticise Papa to each other – ‘It really does at this distance, appear to me a quite monstrous state of things’ – and Elizabeth unapologetically includes Henrietta’s unofficial fiancé Captain Surtees in family greetings.

She leaves out Bummy, though. When their unmarried aunt shouldered the ‘wicked stepmother’ role after her sister’s death in 1828, she sometimes crossed swords with the strong-willed eldest Barrett daughter. Even in the Torquay years, according to Henrietta, ‘She has sometimes been disposed to scold me a little, & sometimes to look coldly upon Ba which has made her feel nervous & fidgetey.’ Perhaps caring work is simply not Bummy’s nature. But what she feels about her brother-in-law, whom she’s known since they were both teenagers, is an intriguing blank. Presumably she found him likeable enough when she became his confidant during the difficult departure from Hope End. Fifteen years later, this impression of intimacy is reinforced as she takes his side against the newlyweds. It’s entirely possible that she expects to gain absolutely nothing by this. Marrying a dead wife’s sister has been illegal since 1835; it was ‘voidable’ and attracted social opprobrium even before then. But feelings can’t be legislated for, perhaps. We shouldn’t forget that back in 1828 Bummy was only a couple of years older than Elizabeth is now; plenty young enough to feel the push and pull of flattery and desire.

Or perhaps her motives are purely principled. After all the family sense of what’s possible, even morally permissible, has been shaken. It will take Surtees and Henrietta another four years to follow Elizabeth’s precedent, but this is rapid progress by Barrett standards. Besides, three more unofficial liaisons are to follow. Sixth son Alfred, the unfortunately nicknamed Daisy, having celebrated Henrietta’s 1850 marriage with a seventy-two-stanza epic, will go on to marry against Papa’s wishes in 1855. Even after their father’s death the Barrett boys seem to associate romance with the clandestine. Stormie’s two daughters, born out of wedlock in Jamaica (Eva, the first, just before Papa dies), are educated on the island by a governess – whom Stormie briefly marries – and later in France. The girls, their mother and the governess all have mixed heritage, and it’s noticeable that Stormie never brings them home to his Montgomeryshire estate. But then neither, in the previous generation, did everyone’s favourite, Uncle Sam: and it is his illegitimate daughter Elizabeth – Stormie’s and indeed Elizabeth’s first cousin – who will be the mother of Stormie’s children. Finally, after joining his brother in Jamaica, in 1864 Sette too will have a mixed-heritage daughter by his ‘housekeeper’. All these illegitimate Barrett children, whose pasts and futures uncomfortably straddle both sides of the Caribbean’s violent racial divide, face lives destabilised by their fathers’ clandestine behaviour. And so damage passes down through the Barrett family.

But these ripple effects are in the future. Summer 1847 sees Elizabeth increasingly out and about, exploring Florence’s tawny-stuccoed neighbourhoods and its art treasures. ‘It is so delightful to see her enjoyment, everything that is beautiful from sentiment or form or colour she seizes directly, but particularly in sentiment’, Fanny Hanford reports. Michelangelo’s tomb and Galileo’s villa are trumped by a tea party with a couple who actually knew some of Elizabeth’s literary heroes. The Hoppners befriended Byron and the Shelleys in Venice, when Mr Hoppner was vice consul there. Though Elizabeth is thrilled by the connection, she doesn’t quite seem to realise that these were no casual acquaintances, but the family who fostered Byron’s daughter Allegra and took in the distraught Shelleys when their daughter Clara died in 1818. Apparently:

On their arrival they ate nothing except water gruel & boiled cabbages & cherries, because it was a principle of Shelley’s not to touch animal food, & […] Mrs Hoppner did, as she said, ‘seduce’ him into taking roast beef & puddings .. ‘Dear Mr Shelley, you are so thin[‘]. (Fancy all this said with a pretty foreign accent.) ‘Now if you wd take my advice, you would have a very little slice of beef today—You are an Englishman & you ought to like beef—A very little slice of this beef, dear Mr Shelley’—And so, she said, by degrees, he took a little beef & immediately confessed that ‘he did feel a great deal better’.

As literary gossip this is astonishingly incomplete. Yet for Elizabeth it establishes continuity, across the intervening quarter century, between her own and the Romantic poets’ lives. After all, she and Robert have also fled to Italy in search of freedom to live as they choose. And her belief that their relationship is profoundly more authentic than mere convention – ‘we could not lead the abominable lives of “married people” all round—you know we could not’ – is innocently, but undeniably, Shelleyan.

The couple’s own literary life is continuing. They’re both at work, Elizabeth composing Poems (1850) and Robert polishing Poems 1849, and Elizabeth’s poems appear regularly in Blackwood’s. In July they upsize to a comfortable, seven-roomed apartment on the piano nobile of Palazzo Guidi, ‘which belonged to the Guidi who intermarried with Dante’s Ugolino family of Pisa’. It will become their permanent home, and inspire one of Elizabeth’s most important poems, but they don’t know that yet. For now, they’ve simply taken a three-month lease on furnished rooms recently vacated by ‘a Russian prince’. The Palazzo is ‘In THE situation of Florence’ on Piazza San Felice, a hundred yards from the Pitti Palace; admission to the green maze of the Boboli Gardens beyond is included in the rent:

The eight windows which are very large […]