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

she’s mailed the letter Elizabeth loses the baby. Possibly the bleeding she’d experienced was a sign that the pregnancy was already lost or unviable. Yet, again, she seems not quite bereft. Possibly she still can’t imagine a new kind of love to rival her grand amour. As she wrote to Miss Mitford while she was still pregnant, ‘Of course, it is natural to be rather anxious—one is not more nor less than a woman. Still, it strikes me often, that I have no right to ask for more […] Robert has the dear goodness to say that he never cd love his child as he loves his wife […] Perhaps, God should keep his gifts of children, for such women as have missed something of the ideal of love.’

And there’s always poetry to absorb her energy and emotion. ‘A Meditation in Tuscany’, the long political poem she’s been working on and now sends to Blackwood’s, includes impressions recycled from her letters:

And all the thousand windows which had cast

A ripple of silks in blue and scarlet down

(As if the houses overflowed at last),

Seemed growing larger with fair heads and eyes

[…]

At which the stones seemed breaking into thanks

And rattling up the sky, such sounds in proof

Arose; the very house-walls seemed to bend;

The very windows, up from door to roof,

Flashed out a rapture of bright heads […]

This is politics as crowd scene: even the writing is crowded. In its transferred epithets, their fluidity mimicking the fast-changing revolutionary scene, we see the idea of ‘Italy’ – abstract, historical – brought to life by the people, ‘IL POPOLO—/ The word means dukedom, empire, majesty’. For Elizabeth, the ideal of a free Italy is inseparable from the vibrant physicality of daily Florentine life.

Revolutionary enthusiasm is all mixed up with personal experience. These initial eighteen months in Italy are her first sustained chance to enjoy bodily autonomy and the vivid sensuality of an outdoor life since she was a fourteen-year-old tomboy; even her pregnancies a sign that she’s ‘not more or less than a woman’ than the ‘black-eyed’ mothers with their children in the streets. Warm climate, Italian food, novel surroundings and the sexiness of new marriage have all contributed to a bodily resurrection. Elizabeth’s gift for passionate imaginative identification has always been attractive: as Uncle Sam remarked decades ago, she has a gift for love. Now her ardent, optimistic ‘A Meditation’ reverberates with the poet’s own Risorgimento as it portrays emptied tombs and compares the ruined architecture of Italy’s historical reputation with a resurrected national future.

Blackwood’s eventually turns down this ‘grand’ poem on the insular British grounds that these are foreign affairs, incomprehensible without extensive footnotes. But Elizabeth’s own attitude is changing anyway as she and Robert become increasingly anxious about the influence of French revolutionary politics on the Italian quest for independence. It’s all very well that the leaders of the French Second Republic, declared on 26 February, include their fellow poet Alphonse de Lamartine. But the Brownings are liberals, not socialists. For them, France’s 1848 Revolution is frightening. It realises some of the socialist philosopher Charles Fourier and anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s utopian ideas about cooperative organisations along with Louis Blanc’s droit au travail (the right to work); and ‘Really we are not communists’, Elizabeth finds herself reassuring Kenyon. ‘Nothing can be more hateful to me than this communist idea of quenching individualities in the mass.’

Revolution as self-determination does appeal, and Elizabeth understands individuation not least because she herself has laboured to achieve it. ‘Life develops from within’, as she’ll put it in Aurora Leigh, seven years from now. She knows at first hand how easily individual human flowering can be blocked, ‘As if the hope of the world did not always consist in the eliciting of the individual man.. But like most people who don’t have to earn their living, she doesn’t understand economic bondage. Unless what Elizabeth calls ‘matters of material life’ are arranged differently, whoever rules Italy the labouring poor will remain desperate, the small traders worse off than bankers and bishops. Sure enough, in The Communist Manifesto, which is published in London this very month, February 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels aim their critique not at grand dukes but at exploitative business owners like her own family.

Elizabeth rather resembles the second-generation Romantics, in whose steps she so admiringly treads, in being moved by the idea of ‘liberty’ but failing to see that her own privilege is complicit in denying it to the many. It remains ineluctably the case that her escape from Wimpole Street was made possible by slavery money. And in the twenty-first century, ‘A Meditation in Tuscany’, which eventually appears in 1851 as Part One of Casa Guidi Windows, feels lacking in intellectual underpinning. Yet at the midpoint of the nineteenth century it is radical; forcing a British readership otherwise protected from these proto-revolutionary scenes into imaginative complicity with ordinary Italians. Elizabeth turns the reader into a fellow revolutionary participant by evoking her own enthusiasm in all its vulnerability rather than hiding behind the conceit of an omniscient narrator; she puts her own self in the frame as advocate. As The Globe and Traveller will write, on the poem’s eventual appearance, ‘when the exponent of Italian feelings is the most gifted of England’s poetic daughters […] the claim on her own country’s hearing becomes paramount’.

Meanwhile the Browning household is undergoing its own revolutions. Lateral thinking saves the day when Robert realises that renting unfurnished is much cheaper than a furnished let. Political crises keep property prices low: he manages to resecure the apartment at Palazzo Guidi for just twenty-five guineas per annum, and the household returns there on 9 May 1848. As Elizabeth tells Arabel, ‘Next summer we shall [sub-]let our apartment for at least eight pounds a month […] & return here in the winter to a rent-free residence.’ With canny furniture-shopping they can create a smart asset and fund their travel:

The carpet is down in the drawingroom & looks very well. The walls are green, the