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

The trip ended with a week in Siena and, for Wilson, the crushing disappointment of a disappearing act by Signor Righi, who broke their engagement with this cruelly practical expedient. But once they’re home, in the second week of October, Elizabeth got down to work. She started writing the second part to what will become Casa Guidi Windows, almost as a riposte to Part One, as ‘A Meditation in Tuscany’ now becomes. She also composed a prefatory ‘Advertisement’, drawing attention to the eponymous ‘Windows’ as framing, limiting device. ‘No continuous narrative nor exposition of political philosophy is attempted. It is a simple story of personal impressions’, she claimed, distancing herself from her own first response to the Tuscan dream of independence, and underlining her poem’s radically subjective approach.

Perhaps we should remember that as she wrote she was waiting for her previous book to come out, and anticipating the critical reception of the Sonnets in particular. All the same her caution now reminds us how thoroughly she’s a cultural Victorian, aiming to speak not for an intellectual avant-garde but from the heart of consensus morality. By the time Casa Guidi Windows is published next May, Elizabeth will know both the muted verdict on Poems (1850), and which way the tide of British public opinion is turning over Italy. At first her political caution seems to have been rewarded. When the book appears on 21 May 1851 it receives more than two dozen reviews in Britain, America and Europe. From The Literary Gazette and The Athenaeum to The Scotsman most chorus applause for both her sentiments and the poetry itself, especially in Part Two: critics seem to find it hard to separate poetics from politics. The Liberator praises her ‘relentless insight, into the heart of Italian strength and weakness, and […] the cardinal principles of all reform’, reminding its readers, ‘she is the only poet of the first rank in England, except Campbell, who has made a direct offering on the altar of American Anti-Slavery’. For Revista Britannica, the poem offers a riposte to Goethe’s dismissal of political poetry; for The Monthly Christian Spectator a principled response to despotism; and for Die Grenzboten proof of why Elizabeth ‘is revered as a prophet by all the ambitious minds of her race in England’.

But the feminising continues apace, some of it as a backhanded compliment: The Morning Chronicle ‘We will not call her poetess, for Mrs. Barrett Browning’s mind is masculine’; Fraser’s ‘altogether manlike’; and the The Eclectic Review, which grumbles that ‘her otherwise manly and prominent progression’ advocates violence. Much is negative: ‘Mrs. Browning […] presents us with a pleasant little volume of extracts from a journal of her residence in Florence’, sneers The Prospective Review. The Manchester Guardian’s complaint about ‘diffuse and rather commonplace reflection and regret. She is really not at home in politics and social philosophy’ becomes understandable when it declares its own political allegiance: ‘She must get better heroes than Mazzini and Garibaldi.’ Worst of all, The English Review – ‘Woe to relate! Mrs. Browning is not contented with being Elizabeth Barrett Browning; she will be Robert Browning also’ – starts the long trend in Browning reception for ignoring chronology, and poetic record, to claim that Elizabeth imitates her husband.

By the time these notices appear the Brownings themselves have left Casa Guidi. The eighteen months they’ll stay away, from 3 May 1851 to mid-November 1852, illustrate starkly the dilemma posed by Elizabeth’s health. In sunny Italy she appears as strong as anyone; it is Robert who suffers from the lack of social and cutting-edge cultural stimulation. But now, as they travel north to rejoin the cultural world, Elizabeth starts to cough. Something is on the turn. But it doesn’t look that way at first. Leaving Pen’s balia behind in a rainy Florence they set out for Paris, visiting Bologna, Modena, Parma, Mantua – and Venice, where they rent rooms on the Grand Canal for a month, and Elizabeth falls for ‘the mystery of the rippling streets & soundless gondolas’. But while she and Pen thrive in the watery city, and the toddler’s Italian vocabulary comes on apace, Wilson feels constantly bilious and Robert ‘cant eat or sleep, .. & suffers from continual nervous irritability’. He even overrules Elizabeth on how to dress their son:

Robert & I had a quarrel about it yesterday & Robert had the upper-hand. Robert wants to make the child like a boy, he says—(because he is a man)—and I […] like him to be a baby as long as possible. […] The truth is that the child is not ‘like a boy,’ and that if you put him into a coat & waistcoat forthwith, he only would look like a small angel travestied. For he is’nt exactly like a girl either—no, not a bit. He’s a sort of neutral creature, so far. But it vexes Robert when people ask if he is a boy or a girl—(oh, man’s pride!).

This is ironic. It’s not so long ago that Robert was himself the ring-letted one, rather than the high-handed husband of this cameo; a little earlier still and Elizabeth was that ‘sort of neutral creature’, the child Ba. Certainly, enough of the literary dreamer remains in both Brownings for them to retrace Lord Byron’s routes through city and lagoon three decades ago. They visit the Lido, and the Armenian Mekhitarist Monastery on San Lazzaro degli Armeni where, as part of his anti-Ottoman crusade, Byron had studied Armenian with the Superior, Haroutiun Aukerian, and collaborated on an English–Armenian dictionary and grammar that contributed to the Armenian Renaissance. Thrillingly, they even bump into Aukerian himself, ‘an old man with a white beard long below his waist, sitting under a rose-tree in full bloom’.

The third week of June sees more cultural pilgrimage. The family continues north via Padua, Petrarch’s house at Arquà, Milan Cathedral and Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper, the Italian Lakes, the St Gotthard Pass, and Lucerne. Here, on 24 June, they