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

cried out, ‘Good Heavens, there he is again! there’s Father Prout!’ We went to the inn & breakfasted, & after breakfast the reverend Lion came into the room.

This already seems almost too good to be true. Then there’s a third ‘coincidence’, the day last November when Robert, full of flirtatious high spirits, came bounding back to the Via delle Belle Donne to announce that Mahony had bumped into him in the street, taken him for coffee, and kissed him full on the mouth. Now the journalist-priest has turned up at Palazzo Guidi, where someone – who? – has given him the address.

‘Mrs Jameson says he is the bitterest of clever talkers, and that Robert is nearly the only man in the world whom he speaks well of—.’ Perhaps being based in Rome means that Mahony is starved of English literary talk. But at this point we need to cock an ear to Mary Russell Mitford’s gossip. In 1847 she thought back eleven years to 1836 and that opening-night party for Noon Talfourd’s Ion. There, as she confided to the travel writer Charles Boner, she met ‘Mr Browning’:

& remember thinking how exactly he resembled a girl drest in boy’s clothes—[…] he had long ringlets & no neckcloth—& […] seemed to me about the height & size of a boy of twelve years old—Femmelette—is a word made for him. A strange sort of person to carry such a woman as Elizabeth Barrett off her feet.

Every generation misreads the dandyism of the next, and as an ambitious young poet Robert tried hard to establish a Bohemian persona. But Mitford is making a stronger claim than this, ‘in malice’ as she admits. By the 1880s femmelette will be pre-eminently used – in French, which she speaks fluently – to indicate sexuality, rather like English twentieth-century uses of ‘effeminate’. But in the first half of the nineteenth century desire of all kinds is much less socially acknowledged than it will become, and ‘sodomy’ in particular is illegal – which is why the 1816 legal separation case divulging Byron’s proclivities led to his exile. Prohibition creates an innocence around same-sex friendships that allows them to include behaviour, like declarations of love and bed-sharing, that could be anachronistically misinterpreted as sexual. For exactly the same reason, it also allows same-sex love to be acted out in plain sight despite social conventions – and whether or not both participants realise it.

So might Robert the femmelette ever have experimented with bisexuality, or attracted crushes? The possibility will traditionally be ignored: after all, the Brownings share a passion that’s clearly sexual as well as romantic. But bisexuality isn’t disproved by a great love affair with an individual of either sex. Also, Robert is long held to have condemned Shakespeare’s bisexuality. In fact his much-cited debate is with William Wordsworth not Shakespeare, concerns literary biography not sexuality, and goes like this. In 1827 Wordsworth’s eponymous ‘Scorn not the Sonnet’ called Shakespeare’s notoriously sexually ambiguous sonnets a ‘key’ with which he ‘unlocked his heart’. But this is a conventional characterisation of sonnet form itself, not of any particular sexuality, and nearly four decades later Robert’s 1876 poem ‘House’ will retort that it’s wrong to read any poetry as confessional:

’Tis the fall of its frontage permits you feast

On the inside arrangement you praise or blame.

Outside should suffice for evidence:

[…] ‘With this same key

Shakespeare unlocked his heart,’ […]

Did Shakespeare? If so, the less Shakespeare he!

This is writing about literary celebrity by a sixty-four-year-old whose life has been marked by it for thirty years. It is not a poem about desire of any kind.

All of which matters because of what it leaves open, in late 1848, in the background of the Palazzo Guidi drawing room. The young Alfred Domett can’t have missed the strength of feelings that the young Robert waited till his departure to the ends of the earth to declare, but that proves nothing. Best-friendship can be intense, addictive. Mahony is another matter altogether. Bon viveur yet a life-long celibate when it comes to women, a priest ordained against his spiritual advisors’ counsels, the formerly brilliant seminarian expelled for drunken socialising with his students: he seems likely to know exactly what and whom he desires.

Does this cross Elizabeth’s mind as she sits in the green drawing room, watching the clock and making sure a spittoon is to hand? Probably not. With her father’s literal-mindedness about religion, she takes Mahony’s alleged priesthood as guarantee that he must be a better man than he appears. Besides, she’s pregnant, just two years married and very much in love, with a certainty that’s helped her to brave parental abandonment, storms at sea, miscarriage, and the risk of social stigma. Compared to all this, someone flirting with the man who loves her is just the faint buzz of a Florentine mosquito. And of course in the end she wins: eventually, Mahony leaves.

Elizabeth may be naïve but she’s tough. She has coped well with Robert’s illness. Her respect for his refusal to call a doctor isn’t hand-wringing weakness, but self-denial by someone who understands intimately a patient’s right to self-determination: ‘I wd have sent to Dr Harding without asking him [but] he never wd do such things to me .. often saying to me that he cd not treat me so, without confidence, whatever his own feelings might be:—’ She looks after her husband in other ways too. On 9 October, kneeling on a fauteuil to pray, she has a nasty, and slightly ridiculous, fall on to the tiled apartment floor. Her nose and forehead bleed, but she’s quick to reassure the recuperating Robert, confining her true feelings of anxiety that this may have endangered her pregnancy to letters home.

Such wifeliness is part of a burgeoning strength. By November the baby is kicking:

the second life—[…] is distinctly appreciable now […] the insertion of new gores & the letting out of waist-bands goes on steadily .. & the appetite is good, & the strength keeping up, & the morphine diminishing!

Times