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

grows. Robert Browning will become an extraordinary poet and an avid traveller. Eventually, after seventeen years, he’ll even make return trips to Italy. Indeed he will die there, on 12 December 1889, while visiting his son in the splendid palazzo Ca’ Rezzonico on the Grand Canal in Venice.

For Pen will never outgrow his mother’s joyous legacy. Italy and art are his destiny. After an uncertain start on adulthood, he’ll study fine art in Paris and Antwerp and become an accomplished, if never distinguished, professional sculptor and painter. His marriage to American heiress Fannie Coddington will do as much to enable his life in Italy as his father’s active support will in establishing him as an artist. He will prove a devoted heir, assiduously collecting archival material and memorabilia of his parents’ lives. He’ll give a home for life to his aunt Sarianna (whom photographs reveal he closely resembles) and – albeit at separate addresses, since their marriage fails – to his childhood intimates, Wilson and Ferdinando. But he will die intestate in 1912, and at his death everything that this first, and most loving, witness of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s life has amassed will be auctioned off and dispersed.

And Elizabeth herself? She has undergone the transformation from living, breathing woman – fluent, motivated, sometimes self-absorbed but always pushing herself onwards, fighting for breath, determined to stay alive and to speak – into a figure in the stories other people tell about her. Her own ‘low breath is gone’ from the social matrix. Yet she hasn’t fallen silent; far from it. Over the next century and a half her words will be read around the world. They continue to be heard today, in the third decade of the twenty-first century, changed into the currency of what’s now become conventional political and social thought – about slavery, child labour, rape, women’s rights – and transformed again into the more than two centuries of women’s writing that has appeared since her first book, The Battle of Marathon, was published.

Societies around the world would doubtless have changed, and women emerged as writers and poets in increasing numbers, even if Elizabeth Barrett Browning had never lived. But these more recent writing women are her heirs nonetheless. What they write – the poets among them in particular – would have been different without her. The whole direction of poetry in English would have changed. Flexible, tender, intimate: Elizabeth’s poetic voice, as she asks yet again, ‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways’, comes back to us with a directness that seems startlingly modern. It’s as if she’s looking back over her shoulder at us, her wide, sensual mouth dipping and rising in a curly bracket.

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Closing Frame

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Like Aurora Leigh, this biography is a portrait, not a self-portrait. But the imagination is greedy: as Elizabeth’s readers, we respond to elements of her life we feel mirror our own. Something that especially speaks to me, for example, is seeing what John Milton in his sonnet ‘When I consider how my light is spent’ calls ‘that one Talent which is death to hide’ squandered by family circumstance, ill-health, shyness, casual intellectual misogyny.

There’s surely nothing wrong with such feelings – let’s call them recognition, or complicity. It’s how humans have always used stories, and biographies are in the first place stories, after all. Besides, how else can we encounter our biographical subject, except by coming to meet her? Writing can never be wholly innocent of the writing self, and slowly I’m coming to accept that a biographer’s own self always frames her subject.

But Elizabeth’s poetry too composes a kind of self-portrait, or rather mirror. As she became herself through writing, her writing reflected that developing self. And so her body of work creates a kind of looking glass in which, dimly, we make out the person who wrote it: her choices and opinions, what moved her, habits and characteristic turns of phrase.

Though this is true of all writers’ work, it’s especially true for Elizabeth because poetry isn’t, to paraphrase that early hero Byron, ‘of her life a thing apart’, but her ‘whole existence’. She makes a brilliant case study in writerly self-invention: in the self on the page. Besides, this is a self that overwhelmingly repays our attention. Barrett Browning shows us that the way into good, even great, writing goes step by step, gradus ad Parnassum. You could say that her story works like a practice mirror for writers, even today.

Seven years after his wife’s death, in his four-volume verse novel The Ring and the Book, Robert describes the literal mirror in which Elizabeth saw her own face daily: the one with ‘twin Cherubs in the tarnished frame’ which hung in the drawing-room at Casa Guidi, ‘tall […] to the ceiling-top’. Today it hangs there once again, on the green wall above the red sofa, facing the windows, the balcony, and the side wall of San Felice; a shady view which it reflects only incompletely. Visitors to the apartment see their own reflections pass to and fro in the glass. Perhaps some even fantasise that they glimpse Elizabeth there too. But we don’t need to visit Florence or to believe in ghosts to encounter her. To read Elizabeth Barrett Browning is to witness how, unaware that she’s being observed, she reflects herself in her poetry. Which, with all its innovative brilliance, makes a fabulously ornate two-way mirror.

Notes

Both Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s work and Robert Browning’s writing is widely available, including online. So I’ve referenced only poem titles and (in longer poems) line numbers. However, an excellent Norton Critical Edition of Aurora Leigh is available, edited by Margaret Reynolds (New York & London: W. W. Norton, 1996); as is the comprehensive The Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (five volumes) edited by Sandra Donaldson et al. (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2010). The Norton Critical Edition of Robert Browning’s Poetry is edited by James F. Loucks and Andrew M. Stauffer (New York & London: W. W. Norton, 2007). The Wedgestone