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

the greatest woman I ever knew in my life. She is very very small, not more than four feet eight inches I should think. She is brown, with dark eyes and dead brown hair, and she has white teeth and a low harsh voice, her eyes are bright and full of life, she has a manner full of charm and kindness. She rarely laughs, but is always cheerful and smiling.

The couple’s ‘charm and kindness’ draws them into the social whirl. In February they join the Prince of Prussia at a musical soirée run by the Secretary to the German Archaeological Institute. Robert goes out and about with Frederic Leighton, Bulwer-Lytton, Scottish writer John Gibson Lockhart, and the power couple of landowner and future MP Edward John Sartoris and his wife Adelaide, a well-known opera singer until her marriage. By April the weather is mild enough for concerts and picnics in the Roman Campagna, the famous local countryside that’s become an indispensable stop on the Grand Tour. Both Adelaide’s sister, the actress Fanny Kemble, and Elizabeth herself join in these entertainments, where ‘the talk was almost too brilliant for the sentiment of the scenery, but it harmonized entirely with the mayonnaise & champagne.’

Yet sadness haunts the Brownings’ six months in Rome. The poems Robert is writing return to themes of unachievable or misplaced love. His ‘Two in the Campagna’, while it echoes the plethora of landscape paintings that have made the area famous, records not parties but the fleeting nature of intimacy:

[…] I yearn upward, touch you close,

Then stand away. I kiss your cheek,

Catch your soul’s warmth,—[…]

Then the good minute goes.

It almost sounds like an accusation:

I would that you were all to me,

You that are just so much, no more.

[…]

Where does the fault lie? What the core

O’ the wound, since wound must be?

The dramatic monologues and persona poems that will soon contribute so much to his reputation are the work of someone still in love with theatre, and they are fiction. But it’s striking that so many of these personae have ambivalent relationships with women. Of course probably the most famous among them, the murderous narrator of ‘My Last Duchess’, appeared in print three years before Robert had even met Elizabeth, in 1842’s Dramatic Lyrics. And it would be simplistic to reduce the unhappy speakers of Men and Women, or indeed of any poems, to sublimated wish fulfilment: writing doesn’t work like that. But they must certainly cast, as much as capture, a psychic shadow in the Via Bocca di Leone. What is Robert’s mood as he works on them – and what does Elizabeth feel when she reads them?

Whatever the mood in the apartment, outside it the Roman climate is casting a real shadow – over the children’s health. In March 1854 Edith Story falls gravely ill once more – though she again survives – and by May Pen has become ‘a delicate, pale little creature’. And even the couple’s writing lives aren’t going particularly smoothly. Two Poems by Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, which Chapman and Hall publish at the couple’s expense this spring in aid of Arabella’s work with the Ragged Schools, doesn’t sell well; and a hundred copies of Casa Guidi Windows remain unsold, meaning that there are no earnings to speak of. Altogether, when they leave for home on 28 May Elizabeth is relieved: ‘I have’nt taken to [Rome] as a poet should […] the associations of the place have not been personally favorable to me.’

Yet things don’t improve greatly back in Florence, where they’ll spend the next twelve months, unable even to escape the summer heat, due to lack of funds. This year Elizabeth receives no annual bonus from the David Lyon; while John Kenyon, who has generously given the couple £50 every six months since Pen was born, but who’s ageing – he’s now seventy-one – forgets to send his cheque. Flush has been getting old too, and three weeks after their return, on 16 June 1854, he dies. He was thirteen, and had been in poor shape for a while:

He died quite quietly […] He was old you know—though dogs of his kind have lived much longer—and the climate acted unfavorably upon him. He had scarcely a hair on his back—everyone thought it was the mange, and the smell made his presence in the drawingroom a difficult thing. In spite of all however, it has been quite a shock to me & a sadness—A dear dog he was.

Elizabeth’s reasoned reaction seems very far indeed from her earlier passionate affection for the little creature. But what makes Flush’s going bearable is probably not only the passage of time, but unspeakable relief that it isn’t Pen they have lost; for ‘our own child became affected by the climate a week or two before we left [Rome], and frightened us considerably’, as Robert tells William Story.

But as August turns into September Elizabeth becomes frantic with fresh worry. Her father has been run over in Wimpole Street. His leg is broken, and by mid-September George is reporting that ‘permanent lameness’ with ‘one leg shorter than the other’ is ‘probable’. Elizabeth, entertaining the fantasy that the accident ‘may bring him closer to his children […] & more cognizant of their attachment & tenderness’, sends a note. The gesture’s rebuffed, even though she adopts the precautionary disguise of having Penini address the envelope: at five, the boy already has handsome handwriting. Still, the ‘beautiful and singularly intelligent little boy who promises to prove worthy of his parents’ can always raise the mood at Casa Guidi. Indeed he has already received his own first press notice from the Italian correspondent of The Critic, who now, in a precursor to twenty-first-century celebrity magazine spreads, visits the Brownings ‘at home in that Casa Guidi which has become classic in English poetry’. A further fillip comes when the David Lyon at last yields a dividend, and it proves the largest in five years.

But