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

change, and while some changes, including Hugh Stuart Boyd’s death in May, are sad – most are exciting. Elizabeth is cutting out morphine after nearly thirty years of dependency. The household has acquired a cook, Alessandro, whose snobbery drives Wilson mad; but the maid herself, ‘our friend rather than our servant’, has become engaged to a member of the ducal guard who plans to take a palace clerkship in order to marry her (though in fact he will open a shop). Tall and good-looking, Signor Righi is the educated younger son of a doctor; his brother a wealthy merchant in nearby Prato ‘with town and country house’. It’s a relationship across religious lines, but if Wilson were to become Signora Righi she’d be almost as well off as the Brownings themselves.

Palazzo Guidi has become a real home, as full of life as any soap-opera set: shortly, when the household is completed, Elizabeth will rename it Casa Guidi. As she turns forty-three she’s in her prime, and to cap it all on 9 March 1849, three days after her birthday, she gives birth to a healthy little boy. Though the labour is fairly long – twenty-one hours ‘during the whole of which time she never once cried out, or shed a tear’ – it’s shorter than her first miscarriage, and Elizabeth’s years of struggle with her body have prepared her for it. At a quarter past two in the morning ‘the very model of a beautiful boy’ is born. ‘The nurse says of the babe “e stato ben nutrito”, “how well nourished he has been”.’

Robert has stayed with Elizabeth holding her hand for as much of the labour as Dr Harding, the midwife Madame Biondi and Wilson, who are all in attendance, will allow ‘& I comforted myself by pulling his head nearly off.’ For her, ‘The first cry came to me in the rapture of a surprise! […] it had always seemed to me reasonable to expect some evil about the child—malformation if nothing else.’ But Robert, whose proud announcement of the birth appears in The Times on 19 March, is in no doubt that it’s the reward ‘for her perfect goodness, patience, selfdenial and general rationality. That resolution of leaving off the morphine, for instance—’ In fact, healthy late childbearing is also in the family genes: soon Henrietta too will give birth three times between the ages of forty-two and forty-seven, to two sons and a daughter.

The ‘little fellow grows prettier and bigger visibly’ daily, and the new mother thrives too, as Robert records with exuberance. Though her milk has come in, she follows custom by choosing not to breast-feed. In the first week three balie, or wet nurses, don’t work out, but by 18 March a fourth, Tecla Celavini, has been engaged. This ‘mighty woman, that would cut up into twenty Bas, aged 26, with a child of not yet a month old—good-natured, and intelligent spite of her fat cheeks which overflow her neck as she bends down’ will remain with the Brownings for over two years. But the date she arrives has a double significance. Early in the pregnancy, when Robert was ill, Elizabeth had written to Miss Mitford, ‘Nobody was ever born to be happier & unhappier than I—the “mingled yarn” is black & white.’ Now the ‘mingled yarn’ knots tight, for on the day Tecla arrives, Robert’s beloved mother dies of a heart attack without having ever met her daughter-in-law or known she has a grandchild. From elation at the birth, Robert crashes into a depressive grief: ‘Just because he was too happy when the child was born, the pain was overwhelming afterwards. […] While he was full of joy for the child,—his mother was dying at a distance, and the very thought of accepting that new affection for the old, became a thing to recoil from.’

There may in any case have been something fragile about this slightly hyperactive joy, for Robert’s sense of his own self continues to take a battering. In January Chapman and Hall published his selected Poems, omitting both Strafford, the drama he wrote for Macready, and Sordello, the long poem which in 1840 destroyed his precociously brilliant reputation. As Miss Mitford says (behind Elizabeth’s back), his poetry is now regularly dismissed as ‘one heap of obscurity confusion & weakness […] book upon book all bad […] the first edition of each having gone off in the form of waste paper’. Critics are slow to change a pigeonhole, and Poems’s reception is poor. The Eclectic Review rakes up Sordello to review alongside it, while The Atlas opens with that ‘prodigious mistake’ before going on to dedicate its review to a nit-picking appraisal of Robert’s revisions. The English Review claims the poems are immoral (and that, for example, ‘Pippa Passes’ advocates suicide) and, while the book receives serious, glowing reviews from John Forster in The Examiner and, among several positive notices in the US, Edwin Percy Whipple in Graham’s American Monthly, the Morning Post is swingeing:

We have searched in vain […] for a single passage that would place our author in a favourable light before the public, and we feel no small degree of mortification in having wasted so much profitable time in a pursuit which has proved so unpleasant and abortive.

Small wonder perhaps that the loss of his mother, that loving, unconditional admirer, overwhelms Robert. Worries about Elizabeth giving birth abroad have been triumphantly assuaged, but this sudden bereavement underscores the couple’s distance from home. That distance helped Sarianna keep back the bad news until the baby was safely born, but now it breaks apart familial support structures. Elizabeth advises her own sisters not to visit their sister-in-law with support and condolences, lest Papa create a row and intensify Sarianna’s suffering. Robert no longer wants to take a planned trip to England, because his mother ‘was so longingly anxious to have us back again .. and we waiting till it was just too late for our return to make her happy’.

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