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

she’s insulated from the usual social and familial pressures to conform by financial independence, and by living abroad.

All the same, as Elizabeth makes light work of hurts that must still be fresh from the reception of Casa Guidi Windows and Poems (1850), twenty-first-century readers can find themselves asking whom this passage addresses. Does it matter how a woman becomes a poet? Who exactly is Aurora Leigh for? But in the mid-nineteenth century poetry is culturally central, poets are cultural superstars who make attractive fictional protagonists, and what they feel and do is of real popular interest. Indeed, as The Critic’s feature writer has shown, there is popular appetite for details of Elizabeth’s own life. And so it’s neither a surprise, nor cheating, when scenes from her own experience are woven through her novel, whose protagonist Aurora, born in Elizabeth’s beloved Italy, is orphaned and sent to live with an aunt in a rural setting remarkably similar to Hope End.

This paternal relative turns out to be (it is somewhat schematic) a cold disciplinarian; nevertheless the teenager develops into a poet. Her cousin and neighbour Romney falls in love with her and proposes. He’s wealthy and loving, but he doesn’t see the point of Aurora’s newly discovered vocation: so she refuses to marry him. Romney goes on to a sublimated life of good works on which he spends his fortune, despite never managing entirely to turn the social tide, only (as we learn eventually) to lose everything and be blinded in a fire. Aurora moves to London and writes successful verse but is blocked when it comes to Real Art: she can never quite produce her masterpiece. One day a wealthy socialite, Lady Waldemar, turns up to enlist her help in dislodging Marian Erle, one of Romney’s charity cases to whom he’s become engaged in an overflow of feeling. Lady Waldemar wants to secure him for herself. Though Aurora and Romney now meet again they still don’t understand each other’s life choices; it’s the titled lady herself who manages to dislodge Marian Erle (‘Marry an Earl’!) by having her abducted to Paris and sold into prostitution.

Marian is living there in destitution with the child who is the result of this rape when by shameless authorial contrivance Aurora – travelling south in search of poetic inspiration – chances to encounter the pair and takes them in. In another tangle with reality, the fictional ménage travel on to Elizabeth’s own home city, Florence, where they settle and where Aurora learns that the semi-autobiographical poetry manuscript she sold to fund her travel has been published and has achieved huge artistic success. Back in England, Romney reads it with admiration and understands her at last. Believing that Marian jilted him at the altar, he has become engaged to Lady Waldemar; but this relationship sours when a letter from Aurora forces her to admit all. Eventually Romney comes to Florence in search of his first fiancée, by whom he plans to do the right thing, but, luckily for the gradually converging protagonists, Marian wishes to devote herself to the joys of motherhood, and anyway realises that her own love was just hero worship. After 11,000 lines, Romney and Aurora are able to unite their social and poetic vocations: in the concluding symbolism of their story, ‘last, an amethyst’.

None of this is quite as whistle-stop as it sounds: Aurora Leigh comprises a lengthy nine books. But it does manage to be simultaneously a page-turner and a radical read. After publication Elizabeth will admit that she ‘expected to be put in the stocks & pelted with the eggs of the last twenty years’ singing birds, as a disorderly woman & free thinking poet’. Instead, ‘People have been so kind, that […] I really come to modify my opinions somewhat upon their conventionality, .. to see the progress made in freedom of thought—Think of quite decent women taking the part of the book.’

This wider readership from ‘decent’ society will make the book a bestseller whose first edition sells out in a fortnight. But Elizabeth’s Ideal Reader remains her alter ego. There’s a sense in many passages that she’s trying to pass on a baton to an as yet unknown, perhaps even greater, woman poet. Did she but know it, this is exactly what she’s managed. Among the many women readers Aurora Leigh will influence around the world and who subsequently become poets, from ‘Michael Field’ to Charlotte Mew, is Emily Dickinson, who will write her a number of memorial praise poems:

Silver – perished – with her Tongue –

Not on Record – bubbled other,

Flute – or Woman –

So divine –

All this, though, is in the future. In 1855, Elizabeth is working away steadily at her epic Künstlerroman. That brilliant riff on ways to dismiss women’s poetry comes immediately after a passage (in Book Four) in which one particular man, future partner Romney, dismisses Aurora’s own poetry in particular. Aurora Leigh will become a highly influential book, and here it tells us that there is an asymmetry at the heart of heterosexuality:

I held him in respect.

I comprehended what he was […] but he

Supposed me a thing too small, to deign to know:

He blew me, plainly, from the crucible

As some intruding, interrupting fly,

Not worth the pains of his analysis.

A man treating the woman he loves like an insect makes an arresting, even disgusting, image; this is going much further than simple enquiry into women’s writing. Once again, we should beware assuming that a poet is being autobiographical, especially because women poets are so readily assumed to be confessional in that ‘vile woman’s way / Of trailing […] the personal thought’. But nor should we assume that either Browning is incapable of dramatising ambivalences within their own life as fiction. As Elizabeth completes Aurora Leigh things are changing, at any rate beneath the surface, in the apparently happy Browning household.

By consorting with one of Britain’s leading poets, Robert has gained social entry into her literary and poetic league: at which point it would be