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

at the start of 1855 life closes in again. That dear friend and onetime close confidant Mary Russell Mitford dies on 10 January, and over the winter Elizabeth suffers ‘the worst attack on the chest I ever suffered from in Italy’, which she blames on ‘more frost & a bitterer wind than are common to us’:

The cough was very wearing, & the night-fever most depressing .. & by the time there was a possibility of sleep for either me or poor Robert (who passed his nights in keeping up the fire & warming the coffee) of course I had become very weak & thin.

Meanwhile, back in London it’s not only Papa who needs nursing. Treppy, by now eighty-six, won’t die for another two years. But she’s becoming paranoid, perhaps actually suffering from dementia. Arabella, who undertakes the family visiting duties, is one of the few people she usually tolerates. But the old lady:

constantly supposes that people mean to poison her […] and now she has begun to distrust Arabel! […] What Arabel has to go through you may suppose. Only she has a nature great enough in its affections […] however at the cost of many & bitter tears—

Arabella’s life may indeed be feeling bitter. At forty-two she’s still just young enough to escape Wimpole Street, as her sisters have at similar ages, for marriage, children and a home of her own. But unlike them she has no one waiting in the wings. She has become one of those convenient women with no life of their own, ceaselessly available in the nineteenth century to hold upper-class families – and wider society – together. Rather like Bummy, in fact. Her famous sister is among many who takes this free labour for granted, viewing care work as ‘not […] the best use to which we can put a gifted & accomplished woman’.

Even before her current high-profile work in the military hospitals of the Crimean War, Florence Nightingale has been professionalising and dignifying nursing. Elizabeth has met and liked the younger, Florence-born woman but, despite admiring her work, believes encouraging women into caring roles is ‘retrograde—a revival of old virtues!’ as she tells Anna Jameson:

Since the siege of Troy & earlier, we have had princesses binding wounds with their hands—it’s strictly the woman’s part .. & men understand it so […]. Every man is on his knees before ladies carrying lint,—calling them ‘angelical she’s,’ .. whereas, if they stir an inch as thinkers or artists from the beaten line, [….] the very same men would curse the impudence of the very same women & stop there!—

As this swift return to her own preoccupations reveals, Elizabeth is never quite able to face what her sister’s life must be. Later, when Arabella announces plans to adopt a foundling, she’ll comment with excruciating tactlessness that having one’s ‘own’ child is much better. But it’s no coincidence that Elizabeth is reflecting on women’s roles. She’s now deeply involved in writing her exploration of how women are shaped by what they’re allowed to do – Aurora Leigh. In January:

Robert & I do work every day—[…] I have some four thousand five hundred lines towards [the book]. I am afraid that six thousand lines will not finish it. I shall be ready, at any rate—for I work on regularly.

But by early March summer publication is looking much more likely for Robert’s ‘large volume of short poems’ than for her verse novel:

here are between five & six thousand lines in blots .. not one copied out .. & I am not nearly at an end of the composition even—

In fact she won’t complete Aurora Leigh until the following summer. By the time she does so, in June 1856 in Paris, it will have sprouted into nine books and more than eleven thousand lines.

That draft in blots takes her to about the halfway mark, and the brilliantly metafictional 570 lines, or roughly a twentieth of the entire work, that constitutes one long ars poetica. It’s in this relentless first half of Book Five that the poem’s narrator, who so closely resembles Elizabeth in her dedication to becoming a woman poet, agonises over the work of poetry that could and will be – inside Elizabeth’s own tour de force – her masterpiece. Long before postmodernism, Aurora Leigh’s first readers must have had an especially vertiginous sense of falling into the poem they were reading: even today, the effect is of a curious lip-synching or feedback as Elizabeth and Aurora, author and character, chorus their lines.

Elizabeth starts by rehearsing the usual put-downs women writers internalise: our writing can’t achieve artistic greatness because we don’t care enough about it, being preoccupied by masculine approbation and our private lives, which trap us in confessional mode. It’s tediously familiar stuff, to poets at least, even in the twenty-first century:

Too light a book for a grave man’s reading!

[…]

We women […] strain our natures at doing something great,

Far less because it’s something great to do,

Than haply that we, so, commend ourselves

[…]

To some one friend. […]

We miss the abstract when we comprehend.

We miss it most when we aspire,—and fail.

Yet, so, I will not.—This vile woman’s way

Of trailing garments, shall not trip me up:

I’ll have no traffic with the personal thought

In art’s pure temple. Must I work in vain,

Without the approbation of a man?

It cannot be; it shall not. Fame itself

[…]

Presents a poor end […] Art for art

[…]

Although our woman-hands should shake and fail;

And if we fail.. But must we?—

Shall I fail?

In 1855, when most leading British women writers conceal themselves with anonymity (‘A Lady’, ‘the author of Frankenstein’) or a masculine pseudonym (‘George Eliot’, the ‘Bells’), it seems daring for Elizabeth to address this problem so directly under her own name – or Aurora’s. But she’s better placed than most to make the case with some impunity. Unusually for a woman, she has emerged from the same literary training as her male peers – an education in translating classical verse – so her project makes sense to them. Besides,