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

easy to forget, as many a muse has done, that he isn’t there in his own right. Now he increasingly replaces his wife at literary events. Back in January 1855, while she was ill, ‘Mr Frederick Tennyson gave “punch” on the twelfth night to those whom Mr Lytton designates as “the brethren” .. viz Robert, Mr Norton, & Isa Blagden’: only Elizabeth’s name is missing from the list. And her growing isolation takes several forms. Though she knows other women writers – whether good friends like Anna Jameson or esteemed acquaintances like George Sand – Elizabeth has no other serious women poets in her life. Florentine acquaintances include ladies like Mrs Kinney, whose amateur verse is everything that Elizabeth (and Aurora Leigh) reject. Still, she throws herself into inspiring and encouraging younger women who will become serious writers: Anne Thackeray, or Isa Blagden, ‘a single lady, with black hair, black eyes, yet somehow not pretty, who does literature, leads a London life among the “litterateurs” when she is in England’. And not only writers: last spring the Brownings made ‘a great pet’ of ‘a perfectly “emancipated female”’, sculptor Harriet Hosmer, a young American who ‘lives here all alone […] dines & breakfasts at the caffés precisely as a young man would,—works from six oclock in the morning till night, as a great artist must’. This could be an exciting new role for the woman who remained a tyro herself for so long. But it’s being performed against the perhaps similar background of mothering little Penini – as well as of the Italian machismo that infects even him:

he feels his advantage of belonging to the male sex, to a degree that quite startles me—there’s a sort of instinct in it—I suppose. One morning […] Ferdinando spoke of some tradesman in Florence who would only employ men. Penini broke out suddenly with .. “Benissimo! Tutte le donne sono cattive, eccetto mia mamma—Mamma solamente e buona.” [‘Very good! All ladies are wicked except my mama – only Mama is good.’]

‘Ferdinando’ is Ferdinando Romagnoli, the Brownings’ cook, who is making his presence felt in more ways than one. It’s not only Penini who adores him. On 12 June 1855, the day before the ménage leaves for Paris and London, he marries Wilson – now clearly recovered from her chagrin at the disappearance of the prosperous Signor Righi – at the British Embassy. As this simplifies the household to two married couples with just the six-year-old Pen to look after, many things including travel should now be easier than in previous years. Yet the party manage to miss the boat at Livorno, and have to set out all over again a week later – when accidental delay turns into happy accident. Travelling via Corsica, at Marseille they bump into Elizabeth’s brother Daisy, in France ‘On His Majesty’s Business’.

On 24 June they arrive in Paris for three weeks at 138 Avenue des Champs-Élysées with Sarianna and Robert Senior, whose disgrace causes no embarrassment here. This is a happy visit; one highlight a party where Elizabeth and Robert meet Prosper Mérimée, François-Auguste Mignet, the leading tragedienne Adelaide Ristori, and philosopher Victor Cousin. On 10 July Elizabeth Wilson becomes Mrs Romagnoli according to the Catholic rite as well as the Anglican one. Now legal under Tuscan as well as British law, the Romagnolis set out next day with their employers for three London months at 13 Dorset Street, less than half a mile from Wimpole Street.

Right from the off it’s a sociable stay. Adelaide Sartoris calls on the day they arrive; two days later, breakfasting with John Kenyon, the Brownings meet ‘half America & a quarter of London’. They may be visitors, but they’re at the heart of the artistic and intellectual establishment. They spend time with John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle, Frederic Leighton, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Alfred Tennyson. It’s a summer of artistic collegiality among distinguished peers, the personal and the artistic integrating not only within the poetry that both Brownings are writing, but in their joint outer life. When, one late September evening, Robert joins Tennyson in reading aloud to friends – though Elizabeth does not – the circle gathered to listen includes the painters Ford Madox Brown and William Holman Hunt.

But privately things are more complicated. In Wimpole Street, Papa’s strength is beginning to decline. He turned seventy in May, and is now having daily healing sessions with a ‘mesmerizer’. Still, he’s no spent force. In August he catches Pen playing with his uncle George at Wimpole Street and, though he doesn’t quite order the child out, demands, ‘And what is he doing here, pray?’ before freezing the topic shut and, later in the month, moving his household out of reach to Eastbourne on the excuse of another Wimpole Street redecoration. The Brownings’ own household is changing shape too. By late August it’s apparent that Wilson is pregnant, and she’s planning to go home to Lincolnshire to have the baby.

Elizabeth experiences again the separation anxiety she felt when Crow left to start a family; and indeed the circumstances are similar. Orestes Wilson Romagnoli will be born on 13 October 1855, so Wilson must have fallen pregnant early in the year. Apparently, like Crow, she felt unable to admit to her mistress that both summer ceremonies were shotgun weddings; also like Crow, she had her reasons. After all, it’s only four years since the Brownings dismissed their Parisian cook because of her ‘reputation’.

Or perhaps Elizabeth knows – or at least guesses – the truth all along, and is covering for a loved and trusted intimate. Her own five pregnancies mean she’s no longer innocent about the physical symptoms, and as the Casa Guidi apartment isn’t huge she may well have an inkling of sleeping arrangements. She and Robert fight, with real protective urgency, to get the marriage correctly solemnised in Paris (although Ferdinando is clearly not contemplating abandonment: he even offers to convert to Protestantism) and, writing to Arabella on the Romagnolis’ second wedding day, Elizabeth