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

seems to imply that she knows more than she can for respectability’s sake admit to: ‘She has shed tears enough, as it is […] I will tell you all.’ As this is July, Wilson is by now six months pregnant and must show, but everyone has their fig leaf. She’s married, and her mistress can claim ignorance.

Wilson (as Elizabeth continues to call her: Pen calls her Lily) will return to work the following July. Meanwhile, the Brownings return south four days after baby Orestes’s safe arrival. There’s cholera in Florence, so they will over-winter in Paris. A Left Bank apartment found for them by friends is too small, though it may be the one Anne Thackeray will remember as a ‘little warm, sunny, shabby, happy apartment, with a wood fire always burning, and a big sofa, where [Elizabeth] sat and wrote her books out of a tiny inkstand, in her beautiful delicate handwriting’. In fact it’s not for a further two months, until they move back to the neighbourhood of the Champs-Élysées at 3 rue du Colisée, that Elizabeth is able to resume work on Aurora Leigh. Now Paris, itself, whose ‘old charm […] has siezed [sic] on me—nothing in the world (except Venice) is so beautiful as a city’ enters her story:

the terraced streets,

The glittering boulevards, the white colonnades

Of fair fantastic Paris who wears trees

Like plumes, as if man made them, spire and tower

As if they had grown by nature, tossing up

Her fountains in the sunshine of the squares.

And in the real-life city in which these lines are being written, the opening three months of 1856 are spent fair-copying the verse novel’s first six books, Robert reading them as she goes.

His own Men and Women has just been published, to widespread but mixed reception. The Literary Gazette finds ‘all that complication of crudeness, obscurity, and disorder, by which the mystical and spasmodic school of poetry is marked’; Blackwood’s follows remarks on Elizabeth by noting that ‘Robert Browning is the wild boy of the household—the boisterous noisy shouting voice which the elder people shake their heads to hear’; The Athenaeum laments, ‘Who will not grieve over energy wasted and power misspent,—over fancies […] so overhung by the “seven veils” of obscurity, […] there is an amount of extravagant licence’. Elizabeth’s protective instincts are aroused. Understandably perhaps, she feels that this time it’s personal: three years ago several of these same publications panned Robert’s ill-fated edition of forged Shelley letters, issued by Moxon to the ‘unseemly merriment’ of critics. But now their influential friends, including Carlyle, Rossetti – who comes to Paris and visits the Louvre with Robert – and Ruskin (in the magisterial prose of Modern Painters volume 4) come to the rescue with positive reviews and good company. Throughout the spring, as Elizabeth works through the last third of Aurora Leigh and proofs her Poems (1856), Robert’s social life continues to blossom. He goes to the theatre with Charles Dickens and the actor William Macready and dines with Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, the modernising prime minister of Piedmont-Sardinia known everywhere as Cavour.

At the end of June 1856 the Brownings return to London, this time to John Kenyon’s home at 39 Devonshire Place. Each of these family summers costs Elizabeth: last time she told Henrietta, ‘There’s always a weight on my heart when I arrive. The land-sickness is worse than the sea’s.’ This year she feels additionally overpowered by the sustained effort of writing Aurora Leigh, which she had finally delivered to the publishers by the first week of August. And Devonshire Place is unusually gloomy. The couple’s old mentor isn’t there with them, but is seriously ill at his house on the Isle of Wight. Papa, as usual dispatching his household to the south coast for the weeks when Elizabeth is in England, has this year by coincidence picked Ventnor, on the island’s dramatic, leafy, south-east coast. It feels only sensible for the Brownings to follow them here for a fortnight, before spending a further two weeks with Kenyon in his home on the Solent shore at 3 the Parade, West Cowes.

The Wight’s mild, countrified climate and sea air can only do Elizabeth good. She relaxes. Proofs follow her across the Solent in batches, and Arabella and George join Robert in reading her revisions as she goes. But this interval is bittersweet. Kenyon has in many ways been the father figure that Papa ceased to be once Elizabeth grew up, and that her younger husband can never be. It’s his support, financial as well as emotional, that has made her mature achievement possible; indeed it will continue posthumously in the form of a generous bequest totalling £10,500, which, invested, gives the couple a secure income for life. Back in London at the start of October, she will dedicate Aurora Leigh, this story of a cousin’s love, to him:

The words ‘cousin’ and ‘friend’ are constantly recurring in this poem, the last pages of which have been finished under the hospitality of your roof, my own dearest cousin and friend […] therefore [… I venture to leave in your hands this book […] that as, through my various efforts in literature and steps in life, you have believed in me, borne with me, and been generous to me, far beyond the common uses of mere relationship or sympathy of mind, so you may kindly accept, in sight of the public., this poor sign of esteem, gratitude, and affection from your unforgetting E.B.B.

This is the public acknowledgement that fame allows. It’s also a personal farewell. When Elizabeth leaves Cowes on 22 September, she and Kenyon must know that they won’t see each other again. For all the pleasure with which she goes on to Taunton to spend a week with Henrietta, that sadness – and a linked sense of her own mortality – colour the book’s final revisions. Her ‘dearest cousin and friend’ will die on 3 December, but he lives just long enough to see and celebrate the masterpiece his