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

is it that prompts Elizabeth to do so? Has the devil in some detail finally changed her mind? Or is it just that, away from her friend’s charm and faced with the increasingly grim realities of trying to stay alive, she at last sees things clearly? Whatever her reasons, just as when she finally relinquished her belief in her father, she now rips off her own blinkers. But this time the reward of clarity is a gathering gloom. And as the Brownings settle in for their Roman winter and the turn of the decade – finding accommodation suddenly cheap due to the threat of impending war – their friendship with the Eckleys melts away to mere formality.

Everything is becoming difficult now. In mid-January 1860 Elizabeth ventures on a rare outing. She and Robert go to Castellani the jeweller’s, to see a fashionable exhibition of presentation swords for Napoleon III and Victor Emmanuel. One popular cause meets another: the Brownings are mobbed for autographs. Fun though this might have been in the past, now it leaves Elizabeth coughing, breathless and suffering an arrhythmic heartbeat for days. Still, she’s managed to send Chapman and Hall her Poems Before Congress, and proofs of the new book arrive this month. Her title, advertising the collection’s highly political content, comes from an abandoned congress on Italian sovereignty that had been due to take place at this very time. In February she composes a Preface in which she implies that Britain, preoccupied with free trade, has failed properly to support Italian unification:

Non-intervention in the affairs of neighbouring states is a high political virtue; but non-intervention does not mean, passing by on the other side when your neighbour falls among thieves.

Not surprisingly, when Congress appears in print in March it brings down a storm of hostile reviews, mostly accusing Elizabeth of being unpatriotic. In The Athenaeum, her old literary ally but political opponent H. F. Chorley even misreads ‘A Curse for a Nation’, as being directed at ‘perfidious Albion’ rather than American slavery (although he has a point, since the poem is fierce in its injunctions, but vague about what exactly it means by ‘Freedom’ and ‘writhing bond-slaves’). Reviews in Bell’s Weekly Messenger, The Examiner, The Critic, The Bookseller, The Atlas, the Daily News, The Press, The Spectator, The Saturday Review and the Manchester Guardian are among those that follow, and Blackwood’s verdict that ‘women should not interfere with politics’ is typical. Elizabeth’s profile ensures the very breadth of coverage that makes this criticism so insistent. She feels besieged, and moves the fight to Robert’s work, fuming to Sarianna about the ‘blindness, deafness, and stupidity of the English public to Robert’, who she says is appreciated in Britain by only ‘a small knot of pre-Rafaellite men’, though in America ‘he’s a power, a writer, a poet […] he lives in the hearts of the people’.

It’s a projection, but perhaps a healthy one, of the anger and abandonment she must feel. It can’t help that the staunchly intelligent and Italophile Anna Jameson, that good friend, dies this same month. Now the sense of political abandonment intensifies too. Tuscany has come under Victor Emmanuel’s rule after a plebiscite on 11 March, but French ‘liberation’ troops enter Savoy before the vote there has even been held. Elizabeth isn’t well enough to join the crowds in the streets who witness ‘King Victor Emmanuel Entering Florence, April 1860’ – though she writes about it in her poem of this title as if she were. Or as if she were reminded of that first, triumphant procession in 1847 below Casa Guidi’s windows: ‘And thousands of faces, in wild exultation, / Burn over the windows to feel him near—’ In May, Garibaldi gambles by invading Sicily with such small forces that he could have cost the country its slowly cohering political solution, ‘the soil beneath my feet / In valour’s act […] forfeited’, as Elizabeth writes in ‘Garibaldi’; though the gamble does pay off. Robert is working on persona poems again, but Italian political themes continue to dominate her own new work, which is still appearing regularly in Britain (Cornhill Magazine) and America (The Independent).

Elizabeth manages to engage eleven-year-old Pen’s emerging sensibilities in progressive realpolitik: she tells Henrietta that he cried when he read the political poems in Congress. But political stress is attritional. In June 1860 a fifth edition of Aurora Leigh appears without further revisions. On 7 July the Brownings are once again installed in Villa Alberti, Marciano, where by September William Michael Rossetti (brother of their old friend Dante Gabriel) and Vernon Lushington witness the threads drawn thin. In their presence Elizabeth quarrels with Walter Savage Landor over Napoleon III, and Robert shows ‘some slight symptom of approaching antagonism if Mrs Browning in talking came to the outskirts of the “spiritual” theme’. Apparently, ‘Browning could express himself with some harshness to his wife when this subject was mooted’.

By 7 November though, when Garibaldi and Victor Emmanuel enter Naples together in triumph, Mrs Browning has other worries. After the usual six-week autumn in Casa Guidi, the household travel south for what is to be their final Roman winter. Arriving on 23 November, they pick a vertiginous, skinny house above the Spanish Steps at 126 Via Felice. But while this is happening Elizabeth is somewhat removed, and in a state of cruel suspense. Back in Somerset, Henrietta is dying slowly and agonisingly of cancer. She’s been gravely ill since the summer, in the lovely old stone manor house of Stoke Court, Thurlbear, which Surtees has finally been able to afford. Arabella may be the place-marker who keeps the scattering family connected, but Henrietta is the sibling with whom, since Bro’s death, Elizabeth has had most in common – especially once they both married. The dreaded news arrives on 3 December: Henrietta had died the day Elizabeth and Robert arrived in Rome. It seems against the natural order of things that she should predecease the family invalid, and perhaps Elizabeth’s profound grief is intensified