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

The critical response will be, by her standards, muted; several critics assume that this is largely a reissue plus some new translations. It will also be the first time that she’s widely characterised as a ‘poetess’: as if marriage has gendered her, removing her liberty to be pure ungendered mind. The Christian Register will dismiss her work as ‘deficient in that weight and breadth of thought—that enlarged view of life, which is as essential to the highest poetry as to the highest philosophy.’ The English Review will wheel out Arthur Thompson Gurney for a hatchet job, which starts with a 1,300-word rant on the ‘endless twaddle’ of ‘Female Poetry’ and gratuitously brings in Robert as ‘Upon the whole […] the higher and the master spirit’. The Morning Post has graciously ‘ALWAYS been of opinion that Elizabeth Browning is the best English poetess […] since the days of Felicia Hemans […] The grace and sensibility which are so charmingly characteristic of female genius are found throughout her poetry.’ And so on. Even The Athenaeum will crystalise the double-edged compliment: ‘Mrs. Browning is probably, of her sex, the first imaginative writer England has produced in any age:—she is, beyond comparison, the first poetess of her own.’

And yet: she’s arrived at a canonical moment. In 1850 there is, as Harper’s will put it, ‘a wide circle which has learned to venerate Mrs. Browning’s genius, […] the most remarkable poetess of modern times.’ Her body of work isn’t huge and she’s not yet a bestseller, but almost by stealth she has become one of the undeniable poets. Gurney is right in one way, though: she is undeniably a woman. 1849’s summer pregnancy had been ended in the second half of October by a bleed bad enough to make Elizabeth faint. And there is one final throw of the dice: this spring, at the age of forty-four, she falls pregnant for the fifth and final time.

Spring 1850 is an exciting time in general. On 6 April Henrietta and Surtees finally marry, after a wait of six years. Money is still a worry but to delay any longer would be folly: at forty-one, the bride is even older than Elizabeth was on her wedding day. Like her older sister, Henrietta tries her best not to elope. She and Surtees ask her father’s permission, which he refuses on the perverse grounds that she’s a hypocrite because she’ll go ahead and marry whatever his response. But this time the Barrett brothers ‘though generally obtuse on such matters’, Elizabeth drily observes, are more supportive. Treppy even braves the wedding itself. Only Bummy, ‘whose conduct has been, I do think, shameful & most treacherous’, as Arabella says, betrays her niece by sending Papa the letter in which Henrietta confided her plans, commenting, ‘I grieve for you dearest Edward—.’ The match holds up a mirror to Elizabeth’s own hard-won happiness:

what emotion this […] has stirred me to! How I have felt every line of it, gone with you through the whole trial .. no less bitter indeed, because, if God pleases, happiness & love catch up the ends of it for ever.

But now the literary world holds up a mirror too. This same month, shortly after his eightieth birthday, William Wordsworth dies (symbolically, on Shakespeare’s birthday). Almost immediately the question arises of who will succeed him as Poet Laureate. On 1 June The Athenaeum publishes its opinion that, ‘There is no living poet of either sex who can prefer a higher claim than that of Mrs Elizabeth Barrett Browning’, and that to have a female laureate ‘would be at once an honourable testimony to the individual, a fitting recognition of the remarkable place which the women of England have taken in literature of the day, and a graceful compliment to the Sovereign herself.’

As Elizabeth tells Arabel, ‘Somebody of the name of Langley suggested it first, in the Daily News—The Globe took it up—& Robert saw it in two or three other English papers, besides Galignani’, we glimpse, fascinatingly, her pragmatism:

it’s curious to myself that I should seem to have a chance—a faint one though, because the gallantry of Englishmen always takes care, carefully taking off its hat, to push a woman against the wall, upon principle. Besides, even among the candidates named, both Leigh Hunt & Tennyson are worthier than I .. & except as a proof that women have made some way against prejudice, I should shrink from the very thought of appearing in the competition.

In fact, of course, it will take another century and a half for Britain to create its first woman Poet Laureate. It is Tennyson who is finally appointed in November, just three weeks after Elizabeth’s Poems (1850) has appeared. If she’s disappointed, her correspondence gives no suggestion of it. Instead, reading Tennyson’s In Memoriam in December, she finds it ‘appeals, heart to heart, directly as from his own to the universal heart’.

Besides, there has been a more critical disappointment in her personal life. On 28 July she suffered a near-fatal miscarriage, losing ‘above a hundred ounces of blood within the twenty four hours’ as Robert over-shares with John Kenyon. A month later she was still pale – ‘when I look in the glass […] I see nothing but a perfectly white & black face, the eyes being obliterated by large blots of blackness’ – when the family moved to the countryside for the summer cool. They had rented the Villa Poggio al Vento outside Siena, which, as its name suggests, sits on a sunny, windy knoll with a ‘vineyard up to the door, with the purple of grapes caught sight of down the vistas of vines—& magnificent views beyond all’. Little Wiedeman had also been ill, with heatstroke turning to fever, but both patients recovered quickly in the country air; even though ‘except the blackberries & grapes, .. yes, & except the donkey, & the pigeons, & the pig, & the great yellow dog [Baby]