Still, Nuttall won’t be the last clinician to warn writing women about imaginary dangers posed by an ‘active turn of mind’. Does his patient object? We can’t be sure, but it’s just three weeks after this pronouncement, on 24 June, that Cother is called in to give his opinion – which is that something serious is amiss: ‘Probably referable to derangement in some highly important organ […] At the same time that I confess, the positive proofs are wanting of the existance of diseased spine, I must say that this is the best inference, I could draw.’
From her room in Gloucester, Ba protests the frightening diagnosis that ‘the spine’ could be ‘the seat’ of her illness even while insisting that she’s sicker than Mamma realises. Small wonder if she sends mixed messages as she waits nervously to see what Dr Baron will find when he comes, soon after her arrival, ‘to examine my back accurately and with particular care in order either to remove or satisfy his own doubts’. Unfortunately for her the upshot is that he agrees with Cother, and recommends confinement in a spinal sling. Ba is to spend the coming months ‘a young lady on her back’.
It’s bad news. But all the same, ‘I do not wish to return home my dearest Mamma till I am well and perhaps the wish may be natural considering that illness casts a shade of apathetic gloom.’ And it could be worse. She won’t actually be subject to fierce mechanical traction; her spine will be held motionless in position, perhaps lightly stretched by gravity. Ba and her doctors have left no description of this sling, but those in use at this time are harnesses, often with front and back plates for the torso and a collar that fits under the chin. Since the seventeenth century, doctors have also been using Francis Glisson’s hanging sling, which suspends the vertebral column from a collar round the patient’s neck; Ba is lying down, and hers may be attached to the bedhead. The apparatus, with its pulleys and cord, looks a bit like the home-made machines of Heath Robinson, or Wallace and Gromit. For the patient herself, though not particularly painful, it is restricting. Ba can’t move her head, which makes reading difficult and writing impossible.
By the time 1821 turns into 1822, her bravado has worn off. She writes to Aunt Bummy with understandable self-pity:
I have often entertained hopes that you and dear Grandmama might be inclined to enliven my confinement but alas! how often have I been disappointed! I fear many months must yet pass ere I change my position and tho’ I endeavour to be as patient as I can yet dearest Bum the prospect is melancholy. Oh! how I do wish you were here but it would be too much I fear to ask!
Company is the only way out of the imprisoning, imprisoned body in the apparatus. Ba arrived in Gloucester accompanied by her favourite uncle, Sam, and she will always remember how he ‘was […] to me Uncle brother friend & nurse when I lay in the long weary sickness at Gloucester. I can never forget that —& the gratitude and the love were as one.’ Papa’s unmarried brother is standing in for the man himself, who will visit just once, around New Year. By autumn 1821, the patient has ‘my learned companion Master Bro by the side of my classical couch hurling a look of contempt at Doctor Baron and of defiance at little Tommy Cooke.’ Aged just fourteen, Bro as eldest son is taking his turn as Papa’s deputy. But he’s also her favourite brother, and this temporary renewal of their childhood complicity must feel like some kind of remission.
The siblings have two months together, recreating their old intimacy, before late October brings a visit from Mamma – who has brought along the family’s third son, six-year-old Stormie – heralding Bro’s return to school. Luckily, the renewed separation causes no relapse; Ba’s mother finds her ‘considerably better’. And when no family are in attendance there’s always ‘Little Tommy Cooke’, who ‘is quite divine and excels at my toilet with as much grace as ever’. This diminutive says a lot: for all Dr Baron’s social climbing, in 1821 gentry regard doctors as little more than expert servants. Whether he’s a medical student, as seems likely, or just a male treatment assistant, Cooke assumes primary nursing responsibilities. Coming from a large family, Ba is probably used to a lack of privacy, but intimate care by a young man implies to the twenty-first-century observer that some boundary is being crossed. Yet in 1821 it’s not unusual. Hospital nursing is regarded as such dirty work that the women who take it up are, in Florence Nightingale’s words, ‘too old, too weak, too drunken, too dirty, too stupid or too bad to do anything else’.
There’s yet one more medic involved. Back in spring 1821, before Nuttall and Cother were called in, family doctor Mr John Carden examined Ba. In early autumn he reappears at the Spa Hotel to prescribe ‘setons’ or puncture threads, which, like the cupping (applying a hot cup to the skin to raise blisters) she has already endured, are supposed to facilitate the discharge of undesirable matter. Carden is sure that an external cause, whether poison or an infection, is the root of Ba’s illness, because when he was first called in she, Henrietta and Arabella were all suffering from the same symptoms. He prescribed all three a bark draught (a kind of tonic given for scurvy and as an astringent) and as a follow-up added valerian, which in the twenty-first century will still be a herbal remedy for diseases of the nervous system. This apparently cured Arabella, but both elder girls went on (coincidentally?) to develop measles; at which point Ba’s recovery halted.
Contemporary sources suggest that the bark Carden prescribed may have been elm, which is only very mildly toxic. Much more harmful is the opium Ba has been prescribed, presumably also by him. As Cother remarks with acerbity in June, ‘I understand she has taken a variety of powerful medicines without any permanent benefit. Opium at one time relieved the spasms but it has ceased to have that effect.’ He’s right. It’s a powerful drug for a young body to tolerate. Small wonder that by the time he examines her:
The mind has ceased in a great degree to engage in those investigations and pursuits which formerly constituted it’s greatest delight, and there appears to be a degree of listlessness perceptible to those around her.
Even in tiny quantities opiates are famously addictive; and they constipate. No surprise that someone who’s also confined to bed has lost her appetite. The fifteen-year-old, ‘has only a relish for highly seasoned food. She has shrunk so much as to have produced in the minds of her friends great anxiety.’
It also sounds very much as though she’s depressed. In the strange limbo of the room at Gloucester, her life is to all intents and purposes suspended: rather like her spine in its harness. Despite Mamma’s ‘daily dispatches’, this time emptied of everything and everyone she loves must drag. In the monotony it would be easy for symptoms to enlarge to the point of hypochondria. But is Ba a hypochondriac? This first illness is the start of the mythologising of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Future pop psychology will decide that she is the very type of a Victorian invalid: suffering from psychosomatic or even hysterical symptoms in protest at her restrictive family life, or faking illness in order to free herself from the conventional roles played by young women of her time, or anorexic, or definitively suffering from one or another specific complaint. Imaginative diagnoses of her deepest psyche crowd around her bedside, as if biographers and dramatists weren’t voyeurs but counted along with her doctors and family.
We don’t. But we do have the benefit of hindsight. We know that Ba will recover from this crisis – if not completely – and live another forty, highly productive years. We also know that she’ll suffer continued ill health. What we can’t be certain about is whether she’s being irrevocably damaged by the treatment she’s receiving now. Months confined to bed on a regime of opium would be enough to stop the healthiest teenager being able to take more than a few steps at a time, and the sling’s orthopaedic interference can only exacerbate this weakness. So it’s not surprising that, by the time Ba gives up hope of a complete cure and returns to Hope End in May 1822, she’s scarcely able to walk.
But there’s more to it than this. Ba has contracted something. Viewed from the twenty-first century, her symptoms suggest nothing so much as viral infection followed b
y post-viral syndrome. Today, debate tries to bring her symptoms, formulated in nineteenth-century terms, into the brightly lit modern consulting room. In 1989, D. A. B. Young started a discussion in the British Medical Journal by arguing that Ba had initially fallen ill with what was ‘certainly an encephalomyelitis of one kind or another’. He suggests that this could have been measles encephalitis, or that the ‘measles’ she and Henrietta caught was actually misdiagnosed poliomyelitis. Polio would certainly explain her later difficulties with exertion and even breathing, which Young startlingly, and fascinatingly, associates with possible deformity of the spine caused by polio-related scoliosis. The excruciating spasms Ba suffers aren’t dissimilar to those experienced by anyone with a major spinal prolapse. The slow onset of ‘paralytic scoliosis with thoracic involvement’ – up to two years after infection – would also explain why doctors examining Ba specifically for spinal disease in the weeks immediately after she became ill could find nothing wrong. Young also follows the trail of Pen Browning’s loyal belief that his mother suffered a spinal injury associated with riding, or preparing to ride, her pony. This would be a palatably romantic version of continuing spinal problems. More recently, looking in another direction, Anne Buchanan and Ellen Buchanan Weiss have noticed the similarity between the triggers Ba reports and those for the rare muscle-weakening disorder, hypokalemic periodic paralysis.
Equally possible is that the agonising spasms that Ba experiences at the peak of her illness are tardive dystonia, caused by specific substances acting on the dopamine receptors in her brain. Her full body spasms that centre on a particular point, and difficulties with walking that includes ‘sciatic’ cramping, are a close match. In twenty-first-century Britain, tardive dystonia occurs as a side effect of drugs prescribed for psychosis. But dopamine receptor inhibition is also a side effect of magnolia, a remedy widely prescribed in nineteenth-century England for a range of illnesses, and just as likely as elm to have been the main ingredient in Carden’s bark decoction. (Wouldn’t it be in keeping with Ba’s passionate impatience to overdose in order to try to speed up a cure?)
Each of these competing theories is plausible. The trouble with posthumous speculation is that clinical diagnosis relies on a kind of habeas corpus – actual examination to contemporary clinical standards – and Ba simply isn’t here for even the most distinguished clinician to examine. To understand her ill health, the best we can do is not to conjecture, but to understand it in the way she and those around her did: as the symptoms she experienced. To know what Ba’s life was like, we have to know what it was like for her to suffer as she did, without the ‘voice-over’ of a posteriori knowledge. We have to try to step out of our comfortable positions as onlookers in order to feel as Ba herself does. Framed by apparatus in her Gloucester bedroom, all she knows is that:
The suffering is agony, and the paroxysms continue from a quarter of an hour to an hour and upwards […] The attack seems gradually to approach its acme, and then suddenly ceases—during its progress the mind is for the most part conscious of surrounding objects but towards its close, there is generally some, and occasionally, very considerable confusion produced by it.
[Second Frame]
Is a biography a kind of portrait? This book started by looking at Elizabeth in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s 1858 engraving. Picture it like this – picture a portrait as something actually ‘painted on the wall’ – and you’re almost certainly imagining a face.
But why should faces matter so much? The twentieth-century philosopher Emmanuel Levinas says they are where we encounter each other. Faced with someone else, we realise that we must take them into account in our understanding of the world, that ‘My freedom does not have the last word; I am not alone.’ What flows from this recognition, in other words, is everything that makes us human: love and morality, society and intimacy. The human face is the ‘source from which all meaning appears’.
Levinas was born in Kaunas in what’s now Lithuania in 1906 and, like his compatriot the poet Czesław Miłosz (who was born just 40 miles north and five years later), lived through most of the twentieth century; he died on Christmas Day 1995. Miłosz wrote that, ‘My generation was lost. Cities too. And nations.’ But Levinas was Jewish, and so the century he lived through was darker still, although he survived the Second World War by being interned as a French prisoner of war.
In the 1920s he had studied at the University of Freiburg. His professors there were two great innovators of our understanding that you must include the human having the experience inside your philosophical frame, otherwise you’re noodling in ideal space: father of phenomenology Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger, that dreamer of human Being. Both philosophers may at this point have appeared close to the heart of the culture and traditions Elizabeth Barrett Browning had believed in so deeply. Yet Heidegger’s ideas were soon to fail the test: he became an active Nazi collaborator, and was complicit in the professional destruction of his Jewish mentor, Husserl.
So there’s a profundity to Levinas’s ideas about personhood. ‘To begin with the face as a source from which all meaning appears, the face in its absolute nudity’, he says in 1961 in Totality and Infinity, ‘is to affirm that being is enacted in the relationship between men’ (that’s to say, people). Our human duty is to sustain that other face: to keep alive the other self who is recognised and created in this encounter – and in so doing to become human ourselves.
For without selfhood no set of features has any especial meaning. They could just be shapes ‘painted on the wall’. The phrase comes from Robert Browning’s poem, ‘My Last Duchess’. In that famous fable of coercive control, a jealous Duke has his wife murdered and replaced by her portrait – which, unlike the living woman, is absolutely compliant. The face in the frame, Browning’s poem reminds us, cannot meet our gaze. It is no longer a self.
Book Three: How not to love
What
He doubts is, whether we can do the thing
With decent grace we’ve not yet done at all.
In 1822, turning sixteen brings no particular privileges. British women don’t come of age in any civic sense: it will be nearly a hundred years before any get the vote. For the well-off, girlhood merges into maturity in a procession of pretty, high-waisted dresses, with no stronger demarcation than the putting up of long hair. Meanwhile, the technical age of consent is still, shockingly, twelve.
So Elizabeth’s birthday this March has no special significance. All the same, it’s no fun spending it at the Gloucester Spa Hotel. The usual anniversary poems arrive by post but are no replacement for a proper family party. Henrietta inadvertently rubs salt in the wound: ‘We had famous toasts after dinner […] the first that […] this time next year [you] may be here enjoying both health and happiness [,] the second for your nurses.’ To make the patient feel still more left out, another baby brother, Septimus, has just been born.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, two months later she’s home. But it’s a difficult transition, because she hasn’t yet been cured. The carriage journey across half of Gloucestershire is painful and jolting for a body grown accustomed to nothing but a spinal sling; when she arrives, her family are shocked to see that she can only walk a few steps. Immediately, as she’s helped to the room that will be her world in the coming months, she replaces little Arabella as the invalid sibling.
Yet there are compensations to this removal from the quotidian hurly-burly. Elizabeth takes after Papa in flourishing with seclusion. She loves ‘silence & quietness & a sight of the green trees & fields out of the window’. She also shares her father’s single-pointed determination; and now, in her own sanctum, she’s free to read and write to her heart’s content. The apprentice writer finds herself, at sixteen, released from boring ‘accomplishments’ and domestic, daughterly duties. Even formal study is no longer compulsory. Instead, shawled and wearing an invalid’s lacy mob cap, she reclines among cushions like royalty at a levée. The role of invalid is semi-public, part of the world if set
apart, and Elizabeth’s room is a public as well as a private space, one designed equally for night and day, sleeping and waking.
When Henrietta sketches Hope End, we see how snugly the house fits among wide lawns, where the brothers play cricket between the trees as shadows lengthen first one way, then the other. Elizabeth is confined to an upper floor, but the mansion sits down low in its valley, and from her window she can see the elaborate, Picturesque-style lake and shrubbery below her, and, further away, the estate orchards, hop yards and woods. She even glimpses the bare tops of the Malvern Hills. But what dominate her view are trees:
First, the lime,
[…] past the lime, the lawn,
Which, after sweeping broadly round the house,
Went trickling through the shrubberies in a stream
Of tender turf, and wore and lost itself
Among the acacias, over which you saw
The irregular line of elms by the deep lane
Which […] dammed the overflow
Of arbutus and laurel. […] Behind the elms,
And through their tops, you saw the folded hills
[…] the woodlands.
This is a Hope End of the mind, transformed by memory three decades from now into the childhood home of Aurora Leigh’s eponymous heroine. In 1822, the halls and stairwells of the actual house below Elizabeth echo with the continuing chaos of childhood. The schoolroom where she and Bro ‘conversed, read, studied—together […] fagged at the grammar, wept over the torn dictionary—triumphed over classical difficulties’, has been handed on to younger siblings. Alfred and Septimus are still infants in the nursery, but Henrietta, Arabella, Charles, George and Henry are all now aged between four and thirteen, ‘my gardeners and scufflers’, as their mother calls them:
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