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

at 58 Welbeck Street, again roughly a hundred yards from 50 Wimpole Street. Again they see Henrietta and Surtees Cook, who again come to stay nearby; again they also meet old friends and new. Through Jane Carlyle, they meet Mazzini in person; the wealthy, hop-farming Paines of Farnham introduce clergyman-novelist Charles Kingsley; through Coventry Patmore they meet John and Effie Ruskin, lunch with the couple and view Ruskin’s collection of Turners; and at the christening of Hallam Tennyson, Robert meets F. T. Palgrave, later the famous anthologist. After escorting his disgraced father into French exile, Robert is back in town with Sarianna to help dispose of Robert senior’s home; Elizabeth’s intelligent, self-effacing sister-in-law spends the rest of the summer with the couple.

Their only other disruption comes in August, when Wilson asks for a pay rise from £16 to £20. The Brownings, short of money, refuse; Wilson responds that she needs to find better-paying employers. But in fact she and the Brownings are by now friends and housemates as much as employers and employee. By the time she goes north on 3 September to spend three weeks with her family, she has already agreed to stay on. The relief is huge. The household relies on her: while she was away on the equivalent trip last year, Elizabeth found herself in a ‘dreadful state of slavery, with Wiedeman hanging to the skirts of my garment whatever way I turned’.

On 16 October the household is back in Paris. From the Hôtel de la Ville l’Évêque they watch Louis-Napoléon’s triumphalist return from the tour that set in motion his process of becoming emperor. A week later they set off south. This is abrupt, but Elizabeth has been coughing since September, and John Kenyon has given them the money for a swift return to Florence. They travel overland via Lyon, Turin and Genoa, where Elizabeth is so weak that they rest up for ten days. ‘I was no longer flesh of Robert’s flesh, only bone of his bone. Fever and cough every night had completely wasted me away’, Elizabeth tells Mrs Jameson later. They arrive home on 10 or 11 November:

To my deep joy .. I cant tell you how pleased I felt. Dear Florence, I do love it certainly, though Robert (demoralized man that he is by the too enchanting Paris) maintains that it’s dead & dull […] I feel myself back in my nest again, and cant enjoy it too much.

Within a couple of days, even her cough is better: ‘We have no fires on this fourteenth of November, nor think of fires .. and I have half forgotten my cough .. it’s all but gone .. and the chest is as free as a bird.’

This time, though, individual bodily autonomy will not be confused with civic liberty: ‘Neither I nor Baby can be said to flourish less for the revolutions and counter-revolutions, the putting up & pulling down of liberty trees, & the invasions of Austrian & French armies.’ Back in Paris, on 2 December Louis-Napoléon is crowned Emperor Napoleon III. But here in socially and economically depressed Florence, life is altogether quieter. Pen’s old balia visits, ‘kissing [Pen] again & again […] She almost knocked out all my front teeth with her energetic kisses—’. Though Alessandro has found another job, his children come over. ‘Madame Biondi […] and Mr Stuart .. and the Cottrells & heaps of other people’ come through the door. The frightening decline in Elizabeth’s health has been halted, and it’s the start of ‘a very happy winter, with nothing from without to vex us much’. By the spring, revising Poems for its third (1853) edition, and with Robert deep in Men and Women, Elizabeth has also started work on that project she’s had so long in mind: the new, narrative poem that will become Aurora Leigh.

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Eighth Frame

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Could you look me in the eye? In the biblical tradition from which that compassionate philosopher Emmanuel Levinas comes, the encounter with the other person isn’t a response to the entire face. It’s only the eyes that are ‘the light of the soul’, where personhood sees and is seen. And surely this is why people who are going to be executed are blindfolded or hooded: not really to protect them from seeing their fate, but to protect the executioner from seeing them and being seen by them. To protect the executioner from seeing himself fail his primary duty – that of recognising, and preserving, the other person.

In photographs taken by the highly accomplished Fratelli D’Alessandri in the last two years of her life, we see Elizabeth trying to look her photographer in the eye. Posing with and without Pen, her chin is ever so slightly down and she glances ever so slightly upward. It’s the pose that Lady Diana Spencer made famous: as a shy young royal fiancée, Diana looked dazzled by the world’s gaze.

Elizabeth too has been a shy young woman. Now she simply seems worn out. Success and illness have both worn down her defences. She looks towards Father Antonio D’Alessandri – towards this figure whose face, as she tries to find it, is hidden under a blackout hood – as if the camera’s inspection is something she must bear. (She’s trying to stay still too, of course.) On 27 May 1861, four weeks before her death, she looks at the camera that will deliver its final verdict, and her eyes seem to express an undefended acceptance. She looks at the lens with sincerity and expectation.

Book Nine: How to lose a body

It is the hour for souls.

Now things begin to speed up. In September 1853, Elizabeth and Robert spend their seventh wedding anniversary in Bagni di Lucca, ‘this green, cool, bright, quiet, noisy place’, as Robert calls it, where they’ve once again rented a house for the summer. Seven-year relationships are notoriously ‘itchy’, as inner and outer stories shift, a shared history beginning to obscure the initial connection, but the couple seem happy enough: ‘Well—here’s the wedding-day. Robert