TWO-WAY MIRROR
The Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
ALSO BY FIONA SAMPSON
Come Down
Stone Moon with Alison Grant
Ilmarinen and the Fire with Louisa Amelia Albani
In Search of Mary Shelley: The girl who wrote Frankenstein
Limestone Country
Lyric Cousins: Poetry & musical form
The Catch
Coleshill
Night Fugue: Selected Poems
Beyond the Lyric: A map of contemporary British poetry
Music Lessons: The Newcastle Poetry Lectures
Rough Music
Poetry Writing
Attitudes of Prayer with Tadashi Mamada
Common Prayer
On Listening: Selected Essays
Writing: Self and Reflexivity with Celia Hunt
The Distance Between Us
Folding the Real
The Healing Word
Birthchart with Meg Campbell
AS EDITOR
Percy Bysshe Shelley
A Century of Poetry Review
Creative Writing in Health and Social Care
A Fine Line: New Poetry from Central and Eastern Europe with Jean Boase-Beier & Alexandra Buchler
The Self on the Page with Celia Hunt
TWO-WAY MIRROR
The Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
FIONA SAMPSON
First published in Great Britain in 2021 by
PROFILE BOOKS LTD
29 Cloth Fair
London EC1A 7JQ
www.profilebooks.com
Copyright © Fiona Sampson, 2021
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The moral right of the author has been asserted.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 1 78816 207 4
eISBN 978 1 78283 528 8
Typeset in Garamond by MacGuru Ltd
Printed and bound in Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.
For Peter
‘… last, an amethyst.’
Contents
A note on names
Acknowledgements
List of illustrations
Frontispiece From within
Book 1 How (not) to belong
Opening Frame
Book 2 How to be ill
Second Frame
Book 3 How not to love
Third Frame
Book 4 How to manage change
Fourth Frame
Book 5 How to lose your way
Tain
Book 6 How to be dutiful
Sixth Frame
Book 7 How to desire
Seventh Frame
Book 8 How to be autonomous
Eighth Frame
Book 9 How to lose a body
Closing Frame
Notes
A note on names
Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s family called her Ba throughout her life; Robert Browning took up the habit. But for all its affection, this diminutive is redolent of the way she’s been diminished, both personally and poetically, in popular accounts. The poet signed herself EBB, and this shorthand is a godsend to researchers. But initials aren’t a name, just a slightly dehumanising, paralegal formula. So I’ve chosen the reasonable onlooker’s position and call my protagonist Elizabeth from Book 2, where she comes of age. Other family members are called by the names her own usage settled on: ‘Papa’, ‘Treppy’, ‘Uncle Sam’, ‘Stormie’; but not ‘Addles’ for Henrietta.
In refusing the premise of slavery, I won’t accept that people are ‘slaves’ or can be ‘property’. Where people in this story are enslaved, that’s how I refer to them; I use quote marks to indicate contemporary usage of ‘buying’ and ‘owning’ without accepting the terms.
Acknowledgements
I am extremely grateful to Jill Bialosky at W. W. Norton, Cecily Gayford at Profile and Markus Hoffmann at Regal Hoffmann Associates for this commission. My gratitude also goes to the Society of Authors for a Writer’s Award, and to Archipelago Publishing House, Dajana Djedović and the Museum of Language and Letters at Tršić for a residency, which enabled me to work on this book. I’d like to thank my agent Sarah Chalfant for her insightful guidance and the extraordinary fillip of her support; Susanne Hillen for her consummate copy-edit; and above all and always, my husband and first reader, Peter Salmon, for putting up with the nineteenth-century women who have taken residence with us.
I’ve benefited hugely from the generosity of the Provost and Fellows of Eton College, who have granted permission for quotation from the unpublished Browning letters as well as image reproduction rights. I would like to thank Michael Meredith, Browning scholar and College Librarian Emeritus, for his ready intellectual hospitality.
This book wouldn’t have been a realistic possibility without the mighty, exemplary and pioneering work of Philip Kelley, Browning scholar and advocate, including the monumental and still-growing corpus of The Brownings’ Correspondence, some of it co-edited with Ronald Hudson, Edward Hagan and Scott Lewis, published by Wedgestone Press. Now largely digitalised and freely available online, the Correspondence is the indispensable Browning resource, and my references follow its cataloguing system throughout: www.browningscorrespondence.com. Since 1979, the National Endowment for the Humanities, an independent United States federal agency, has supported the Brownings’ Correspondence Project with twenty-one grants totalling $3.612 million: for this visionary support everyone with any interest in the Brownings and their work must be profoundly grateful.
From the outset, Philip Kelley has been a truly generous correspondent, and I’m most grateful to him for welcoming me into the community of EBB obsessives. More, he has with extraordinary generosity read this book in manuscript, correcting errors and supplying illuminating details and connections from his wealth of knowledge: an act of exceptional support from a world-leading expert to a colleague he’s never met. Such errors as remain are all my own.
Illustrations
A shoulder of Hope End parkland. (Author’s photograph.)
Hope End House in the early nineteenth century. (Reproduced by kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Balliol College.)
Cinnamon Hill Great House, Jamaica. (By permission of Glen Carty.)
Ba aged around eight with family pet Havannah. (Reproduced by permission of the Provost and Fellows of Eton College.)
Ba aged twelve, with brothers Bro and Sam. (Reproduced by permission of the Provost and Fellows of Eton College.)
Elizabeth aged fifteen. (Reproduced by permission of the Provost and Fellows of Eton College.)
Elizabeth with Flush at Wimpole Street in the mid-1840s. (Reproduced by permission of the Provost and Fellows of Eton College.)
Outside view of Casa Guidi today. (Author’s photograph.)
The interior of Cas
a Guidi. (Author’s photograph.)
Elizabeth and Robert in 1853; matching portraits by Thomas Buchanan Read. (Armstrong Browning Library, Baylor University, Waco, Texas.)
Outside view of the Brownings’ apartment building in Via de Bocca di Leone, Rome. (Author’s photograph.)
Studio photograph of Elizabeth in Le Havre, 17 September 1858. (Armstrong Browning Library, Baylor University, Waco, Texas.)
An engraving from the Le Havre sitting annotated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. (Armstrong Browning Library, Baylor University, Waco, Texas.)
Detail of the same image as used by Rossetti for his portrait. (Armstrong Browning Library, Baylor University, Waco, Texas.)
A bronze cast from 1853 of Elizabeth and Robert’s clasped hands. (Armstrong Browning Library, Baylor University, Waco, Texas.)
Portrait in oils of Elizabeth aged fifty-three. (© National Portrait Gallery, London.)
Elizabeth and eleven-year-old Pen in Rome, June 1860. (Armstrong Browning Library, Baylor University, Waco, Texas.)
Drawing of Elizabeth in Rome, February 1861. (Armstrong Browning Library, Baylor University, Waco, Texas.)
Elizabeth a month before her death, photographed on 27 May 1861. (Armstrong Browning Library, Baylor University, Waco, Texas.)
Robert and Pen photographed in Venice on 14 November 1889. (© National Portrait Gallery, London.)
Frontispiece: From within
understand
That life develops from within.
In my favourite portrait of Elizabeth Barrett Browning she simultaneously turns away and looks back over her shoulder at us. Of course in one sense every historical figure does this: glancing over their shoulder towards the future where we’re watching them, even while they face away from us into their own time. But Barrett Browning makes the gesture particularly provocative. Her wide, sensual mouth dips and rises in a curly bracket. Sceptical, even teasing, her gaze has a directness that seems startlingly modern.
Which is an irony, since it’s an image that has been constructed by thoroughly old-fashioned means. The frontispiece for the fourth British edition of her bestselling verse novel Aurora Leigh is an engraving after an ambrotype taken specifically for this purpose. On the afternoon in September 1858 when a shutter falls on the poet’s half smile, in a stuffy studio on Le Havre harbour-front, photography is understood to be neither artistic, nor detailed, enough for portraiture. It will be another half-dozen years before Julia Margaret Cameron starts to produce her famous, markedly Pre-Raphaelite images of friends and family. And so the portrait that eventually results from this sitting won’t be created by the photographer, but by a founder member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood itself.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti is a friend of ‘EBB’, as his celebrated subject likes to style herself, and of her husband and fellow poet Robert Browning. He’s a poet himself, and from its outset a decade ago the Brotherhood has placed literature, philosophy and the book arts – illustration, fine printing, binding – at the heart of its work. This commitment combined with personal acquaintance surely makes Rossetti the safest of hands for the urgent refashioning of Barrett Browning’s public image.
But his are not to be the only hands her image passes through. First it’s engraved by a less stellar craftsman, Thomas Oldham Barlow. The artist edits the result:
The hair brought a little more down more over the forehead, and the parting line not left quite so raw. More tone on the forehead and indeed all over the face. The mouth is considerably in need of correction […] by adding a line of shadow all along the top of the upper lip, thus lessening the curve upward at the corners.
Notes and sketches sprawl over Rossetti’s offprint from the engraver’s block. It would be easy to jump to the conclusion that this creator of sultry images of his own lovers – dreamy Lizzie Siddal, heavy-lidded Jane Morris – would like to ‘correct’ the poet’s appearance. But far from disparaging her, Rossetti wants his engraver to be more faithful to the ‘photograph portrait’ they’re both working from, for example by removing ‘a sort of smile not in the photograph & not characteristic of the original’.
He’s had plenty of chances to study this ‘original’ at the Brownings’ home, ‘an evening resort where I never feel unhappy’. In the two years since the hugely successful appearance of Aurora Leigh, Elizabeth’s pioneering, nine-book Bildungsroman which is the first to tell the story of a woman becoming a writer, Rossetti has admired her work and become eager to paint her. Initial impressions – ‘as unattractive a person as can well be imagined. She looks quite worn out with illness, & speaks in the tone of an invalid’ – have turned to admiring protectiveness. Now he replaces the photographer’s stock studio furniture with a symbolic writing desk, and instructs Barlow to ‘darken’ their subject’s hair and enlarge her signature dark eyes in order to make her look a little younger and less ‘worn out with illness’. After all, this portrait’s whole purpose is to ‘extinguish’ what her husband calls ‘certain horrible libels on humanity published as portraits of her in America’: portrayals all too similar to Rossetti’s own first impressions.
Earlier, shipping the photograph to Aurora Leigh’s American publishers, Robert has assured them just a shade too urgently that, ‘What you receive, is the sun’s simple truth without a hair’s breadth of retouching.’ Well. Up from Italy to spend summer 1858 with Elizabeth’s English family, the Brownings have picked out Le Havre as a halfway meeting point. On the very last day of what turn out to be two unsatisfactory, tiring months at the Normandy port, Robert finds a ‘clever man’ to conduct a photographic session with his camera-shy wife. But the result seems to justify her resistances. Jean Victor Macaire-Warnod and his brother Louis Cyrus Macaire, who share the waterside studio, are renowned technical pioneers. Yet the photographic image that will briefly see commercial distribution in North America, and be so proudly donated to the Authors’ Club of New York by littérateur Richard Henry Stoddard, is an oddly unclear and generic image. The poet’s publishers, C. S. Francis & Co, do not use it themselves.
Look closer though and, for all Robert’s insistence that there isn’t ‘a hair’s breadth of retouching’, the picture turns out to have been clumsily overpainted. In fact within two sentences his letter contradicts itself, framing Macaire-Warnod as ‘the Artist’ who’s worked up detail that got lost in making this copy. Yet with its brushstroke hair, torso straight as a ruler and expressionless face, this naïve rendering is hardly the work of a professional. Who apart from Robert – who is a keen amateur artist – could have a motive for intervention so strong that it overrules plain sight and common sense like this?
We can’t be absolutely sure we’ve caught him red-handed. Though great American photographer Mathew Brady seems to have been authorised to sell prints of the image Francis & Co received, for $3 a pop, it’s hard to believe that he would have retouched so clumsily. But what we do know is that, luckily, Robert has kept back an untouched original. It’s this version that Barlow and Rossetti use, and we can see a detail of it in copies taken by British photographers Elliott and Fry. In it, the unexpurgated Elizabeth Barrett Browning has a dark shadow of tiredness or pain under her left eye, and the greying of her hair is difficult to assess, but she’s every bit as characterful as Rossetti’s recreation. This real-life woman has dark eyes and arched, dark eyebrows. Her nose is long; so is her upper lip, with its sexy overbite. Her face is asymmetric. Cover the right side and the left seems soulful and focused; cover the left and the right appears amused.
In the twenty-first century we recognise instantly the Brownings’ anxiety about this key publicity shot, and their need to control the image of the international celebrity that fifty-two-year-old Elizabeth Barrett Browning has become. As readers we like to feel, with Elizabeth’s fictional alter ego Aurora Leigh, that ‘This special book […] stands above my knowledge, draws me up.’ Yet we also expect a glossy, artfully posed author photo; it’s almost as if we need an ideal appearance to embody the mind we idealise a
s we read. In our own post-postmodern times, the Romantic cult of the visible and what it can express seems gobbled up by its own children, the visually framed identities that ‘are’ our social media selves. Elizabeth’s struggle with her portrait reminds us that this process is nothing new.
The irony is that, despite being so anxiously aware of the ramifications of image-making, she’s destined to become a notorious object lesson in how distorted ideas about famous individuals get established. The Brownings would have been astonished and mortified to see myths about their private life obscure first her work, and eventually even her identity. Let’s remind ourselves that Elizabeth Barrett Browning is a pivotal figure, changing the direction of English-language poetry and influencing both her contemporaries and subsequent generations of poets and readers. In her lifetime, acknowledged as Britain’s greatest ever woman poet, she receives international critical acclaim and attracts a huge readership. Yet within seventy years of her death, popular culture will have reduced this figure – who when she died was mourned as a public, political heroine in revolutionary Italy – to a swooning poetess in whose little, couch-bound life only a tyrannical father and an ardent poet-lover contribute drama.
The damage will be done above all by Rudolf Besier, author of The Barretts of Wimpole Street, a man of whom it’s probably safe to say that he makes no particular study of how women emerge as writers: though he seems happy to incorporate gossip to gee up this drama. In the 1980s Lady Anne Holland-Martin will recall to the Browning scholar Philip Kelley how, at the after-party for its premiere at the Malvern Festival Theatre, ‘It was felt [Besier’s] play needed a dramatic impact. During the conversation, those who had lived in the community for generations recalled in vivid terms the handed-down memories about Edward Moulton-Barrett … the rest is history.’ Three film versions follow Besier’s 1931 Broadway hit: a Norma Shearer and Charles Laughton vehicle (1934), 1957’s remake with Jennifer Jones and John Gielgud, and the 1982 TV movie with Jane Lapotaire and Joss Ackland. There are also no fewer than seven further remakes for television of Besier’s domestic melodrama.
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