Two-Way Mirror

by Fiona Sampson

  George & Stormy are cleaning the walks, A. scuffling up Henttas walk to the Cottage & Henry helping Emma to spread out the Nursery tea on the grass—a busy but very quiet school day we have had—[Arabella] gave us a gay cottage breakfast on her birth day, under Minnys directing taste […] Seppy is sneezing with a little cold—[…] & is as sentimentally melancholy […] as the strawberries will permit.

  However, Elizabeth’s invalid status has shifted a double burden of daughterly responsibility onto thirteen-year-old Henrietta, effectively forcing her, since Bro and Sam are away at school, into the role of eldest child at home. Entering adolescence just as her big sister returns from Gloucester, Henrietta is in many ways what Elizabeth might have been: an artistic child growing up into a conventional young woman. She writes verse and, like her mother, also sketches; the family appreciate her poems and pictures. But they don’t view her as gifted, and for her – as for Arabella – there’s to be no dispensation from daughterly duties.

  Perhaps this is partly an accident of birth order. Firstborn children fascinate their parents, initiating what later siblings more or less repeat; as a third child and second daughter, ‘Addles’ is unenviably ‘also-ran’. On the other hand, talent undeniably exists – and she lacks it, for all the upbringing she shares with Elizabeth. This spring she writes her mother a birthday ode so bad it’s almost good:

  Oh say what love I bear

  To whom? except my mère

  For whom this day I offer up my prayer

  And may it very soon be granted

  For virtue in her is indeed strongly planted.

  Does Henrietta herself know how terrible this verse is? And does she recognise how much Elizabeth’s continuing closeness to Bro keeps her at a distance? The two eldest siblings are still a pair. Writing from school, Bro nags his sister about exercise:

  So my dear Miss Bazy you need not fret yourself into the Lumbago, nor keep your ‘well leg’ in bed a bit the more for it nor need it prevent the other from following it a bit the more tardily.

  He launches into the geeky discussions of classical metre he knows she loves:

  M is also cut off as ‘Sepulchrum horrificum’ i.e. sepulchr’ horrificum, if a vowel precedes two consonants it is long and you may not have a word of more than three syllables at the end of a line.

  More surprisingly, he sometimes has to push her to write back. ‘I have no idea of writing every other day to you as I hitherto have done without having some return […] Dab it but your a cool hand by Jove!!’ he announces from Grandmama’s in Marylebone, where the boys spend school breaks that are too short to make the long trip home to Herefordshire. But he writes again the next day anyway, because the support works both ways. Sam, naughtier as well as younger, is proving more of a responsibility than a confidant. In this era, when fathers don’t want to be troubled with details of their sons’ lives, and mothers don’t understand educational experiences they’ve never had, a sister who can follow at least part of what Bro is doing – even though she refuses to acknowledge the discomfort and violence of school – is a huge emotional support.

  In turn he understands how important it is that she keep working:

  But those hundred lines […] when I came away you had A HUNDRED LINES to complete the poem, and though you have most certainly, got on most surprisingly, you are still in the same place, with a HUNDRED LINES before you.

  He doesn’t need to worry. ‘Miss Bazy’ is taking months over her new poem precisely because she’s working hard on it. Not for her ‘effusions’ scribbled down in haste: she’ll never be a Romantic, even though this is the era of the Romantic second generation, and George Gordon Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley are poetry’s rising stars. She admires these figures not as peers but across the gulf that lies between writers and readers, although she’s only fourteen years Shelley’s junior. But her own tastes also hark back to what came before literary Romanticism, immersing her in the ancient Greek and Latin canon and guiding her towards poets, like Alexander Pope, who have already brought classical metres into English prosody.

  Elizabeth wants to be an accomplished classicist as well as a poet, and she reconciles these twin ambitions through the belief that classical Greek scansion is the ideal form for English verse. The influence of this bifocalism will be enduring. For slowly, in the teenager’s bedroom with its country views, the famous future poet is being formed. Classical poetry feels authoritative and timeless to her. Both Pope’s straight-talking clarity and the plain speech of translation, which the classical tradition is in English, will find their way into her mature work. And, within this same tradition, extended narrative form passes from Homer, Virgil, Ovid and even Julius Caesar on its way to eighteenth-century pastiche in Pope’s The Dunciad and The Rape of the Lock, on through Byron’s Don Juan, which is being written and published even as Elizabeth sits here, and will eventually make space for the verse novel that is to be arguably her own most influential work.

  All the same, in the high room at Hope End, she does also read Shelley, who drowned so shockingly this summer. His Adonais, on the death of John Keats, appeared last July while she was seriously ill in Gloucester, and must trigger intimate feelings of identification. It’s not surprising she describes it as an ‘exquisition’:

  Within the twilight chamber spreads apace

  The shadow of white Death, and at the door

  Invisible Corruption waits.

  For all her steely insistence on technique, she has a literary crush on Byron, too. Before she fell ill, she believed she would be ‘Very much in love when she was fifteen,—[…] Her lover was to be a poet in any case—and [she] was inclined to believe that he wd. be Ld. Byron.’

  Only Bro seems to understand the deep division in her character that this marks. The intrinsically disobedient creativity of that wild girl, his boisterous sister Ba, hasn’t disappeared in the self-disciplined intellectual, the apparently obedient daughter, of their late teens. Elizabeth is both strong-willed and obedient, hot and cold, Dionysian and Apollonian. For her nineteenth birthday her favourite brother gives her ‘a very beautiful silver remember medal of Lord Byron’. ‘I was at a loss to discover which it most resembled Ld Byron, or myself’, he tells her, and while siblings may joke around, it’s a piece of striking self-identification by the blond, seventeen-year-old youth with the smouldering, infamous – and dead – peer; one which suggests an unspoken, intense intimacy.

  And it is unusual for a teenaged boy to have his sister as best friend. But in these first years back at Hope End, Elizabeth, working through layers of loss – of health, independence, a chance at education – seems oblivious that Bro adores her, as she does of the possibility he jokingly suggests that ‘your friend Tommy’ Cooke, the Gloucester medic, has feelings for her. Poets are much safer targets for a crush than flesh-and-blood young men. Confined to the pages of books, Byron and Shelley can fill her imagination as pure visionaries, activists and role models. One of her first publishing successes, when she’s eighteen, is the appearance of her ‘Stanzas on the Death of Lord Byron’ in The Globe and Traveller:

  He was, and is not! Graecia’s trembling shore,

  Sighing through all her palmy groves, shall tell

  That Harold’s pilgrimage at last is o’er—

  It’s a virtuoso technical homage written in Spenserian stanzas, the exact form of Byron’s famous Bildungsroman, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage – though, at only four stanzas to the original’s 555 pages, very much shorter. Such detail probably escapes her proud family. Elizabeth is visiting Cheltenham with Grandmama and Treppy when the poem appears, so Mamma reports:

  Taking the paper, with a becoming carelessness of air, I asked [Papa] what he thought of those lines, he said, ‘They are very beautiful indeed the only I have seen at all worthy the subject.’ I cannot help thinking, replied I, that we know something of the Author. ‘They cannot be Ba’s’ said he, taking the paper from me to read them again, [‘]tho’ certainly when I first read them, the
y reminded me greatly of her style—had you any idea they are hers?[‘] ‘I have a conviction of it,’ said the conceited Mother, pouring out the tea with an air that threatened to overflow the tea tray.

  As she grows stronger, Elizabeth will enjoy such stays away. A year after her return from Gloucester, the family decamped to the Normandy resort of Boulogne for seven months. Only eight years after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, Boulogne was already a popular bathing resort, though its prosperity still depended on herring. Eighteen months later in July 1825, and back across the Channel, Elizabeth and Henrietta go to live with Grandmama for almost a year in newly fashionable Hastings. These eighteen months at the seaside take Elizabeth away from her concentrated life at Hope End, but stamp her imagination. She’s at the lovely, responsive age when anything can change the way in which the self forms, and the ‘glorious sea! from side to side / Swinging the grandeur of his foamy strength’ will appear almost too frequently in the poems she goes on to write in her twenties.

  But these are in the future. It’s while she’s at Hastings that Elizabeth’s second volume appears, three weeks after her twentieth birthday. An Essay on Mind, its philosophical title poem running to 1,462 lines and accompanied by fourteen ‘Miscellaneous Poems’, is published by a reputable London firm, James Duncan, on 25 March 1826, and underwritten by Treppy. This kind of arrangement isn’t unusual, and when the edition runs to a second impression the sponsor presumably gets her money back. Still, it’s fairly hard won: Uncle Sam first submitted the manuscript (to a much more fashionable publisher) a year ago. Duncan’s list, though, includes the Dispensationalist periodical The Jewish Expositor and Friend of Israel, and the Barretts are in sympathy with Dispensationalist theologians, who justify an interest in Judaica by viewing biblical history as a series of dispensations: first the Jewish, then the Christian religions, and next the Second Coming. The family particularly admire a Dispensationalist lay preacher called Edward Irving; indeed Elizabeth praises him in her title poem, in a passage that stands as her adolescent ars poetica:

  And while Philosophy, in spirit, free,

  Reasons, believes, yet cannot plainly see,

  Poetic Rapture, to her dazzled sight,

  Pourtrays the shadows of the things of light;

  […]

  Thus Reason oft the aid of fancy seeks,

  And strikes Pierian chords—when Irving speaks!

  As she leaves her teens, in other words, Elizabeth already believes that poetry earns its keep by aiding serious thought; intuiting or imagining what logic cannot. This is conscientious as it is; but her Preface goes further still, spelling out the argument for ‘Ethical Poetry’ that her late great poems will still be making decades in the future. Although ‘it has been asserted that poetry is not a proper vehicle for abstract ideas’, she argues now, ‘Poetry is the enthusiasm of the understanding.’ And she makes her case from political poetry, predictably concentrating on the classical canon and especially on Homer who, in Edward Gibbon’s words, is ‘the law-giver, the theologian, the historian, and the philosopher of the ancients’.

  Crammed as An Essay’s actual title poem is with perhaps not completely digested classical allusions, this is a young poet flexing intellectual and creative muscle. She’s searching out her own means and ends, as she turns her gaze inward and takes ‘Mind’ as her topic. In developing the idea of the poet as a thinking self, she’s discarding childish daydreams of a poetic life of chivalric action, in which she would ‘Arm herself in complete steel […] & ride on a steed, along the banks of the Danube, every where by her enchanted songs […] attracting to her side many warriors & […] destroy the Turkish empire, & deliver “Greece the glorious.’’’

  Perhaps her changed circumstances have forced this shift in perception. But the result is that she’s arriving at something like the famous Enlightenment idea that the self is found in and defined by thought, René Descartes’s ‘I think, therefore I exist’. Cogito, ergo sum. This line of thought allows her to sidestep the dismaying fact that it’s increasingly difficult for women writers to publish as women. An Essay had to be submitted for Elizabeth, and is published anonymously: society, it seems, takes one look at the embodied self, and decides its limits. A woman may only do this, an invalid just that. But, veiled by the page, a former tomboy can be a poet, and a young woman an intellectual. In this, Elizabeth’s experience is no outlier: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein appeared anonymously eight years ago, the Brontë sisters’ necessarily pseudonymous annus mirabilis, 1847, is still twenty years in the future.

  Elizabeth’s Essay forces the traditional big questions about literature and thought through the unfamiliar paradigm of the woman writer. For though she may be anonymous to the reader, she knows she’s a woman writing: how does this make her feel? It’s turning out to be complicated – just like growing up. The cliché is that child prodigies find the passage to adulthood hard to navigate. When Elizabeth fell ill, just as she was leaving childhood, her condition was disabling and sometimes frightening, but in a way it solved a number of problems. A fourteen-year-old can just about convince herself that she’s still a child: she hasn’t finished growing and she can still genuinely enjoy some childish things. But at fifteen this becomes a pretence. As the eldest Barrett offspring, it falls to Elizabeth to sustain the idyll of family childhood for as long as possible. Where once being old for her age pleased her father, now immaturity is required. And this isn’t just about sexual innocence. It applies to autonomy and agency too. The fierce trajectory of intellectual precocity is being abruptly braked by a freeze on emotional development so sharp that it threatens to split the teenaged self apart.

  Before her illness, Elizabeth’s notes to her father had already become painfully kittenish. ‘My ever ever dearest Puppy’, she wrote at fifteen, going on five:

  My heart whispers that you will not refuse, that you will not turn from me in anger! My dearest, dearest Puppy grant my request! […] Imagine yourself my age once more, how your heart would beat with joy at the prospect of an excursion to the metropolis! Have I tormented you? If I have, oh! forgive me.

  It’s with such miming of childish unselfconsciousness, of course, that self-consciousness arrives. And as Elizabeth starts to act ‘in character’, she becomes more conventionally feminine. Her new physical frailty helps this along, making her appear quietened, passive. Housebound as she is, she becomes a sort of genius loci. It would be easy to mistake her, as Papa does, for Coventry Patmore’s ‘The Angel in the House’, ‘all mildness and young trust, / And ever with her chaste and noble air’.

  Self-suppression and sexual denial will pass down the line of siblings as each comes of age, and slowly become the family norm. The frustration of Elizabeth’s intellectual life, on the other hand, is felt by her alone. But it’s no less damaging. Autodidacticism is ultimately limiting; Elizabeth badly needs a mentor. Yet her age and gender mean that the only way she can meet any such figure will be through her family.

  Uncle Sam is the obvious candidate. For years, she’s crammed letters to him with puns, and notes on her precocious reading. As a kind of father substitute, or supplement, he’s a safe audience for her peacock displays. An altogether less suitable possibility is Daniel McSwiney, the siblings’ former tutor, who dashes off an unmistakably flirtatious postscript to one of Bro’s letters, calling her ‘Miss Sauce-box’. This well-educated, good-looking thirty-year-old – a dandy, as even the Barrett boys notice – comes from old Irish Catholic farming gentry; and he has form with the ladies. Youthful party-going has recently been succeeded by stormy courtship of one ‘Miss Edwards’. As a fellow foreigner, McSwiney may feel it’s not inconceivable that he could marry up into Barrett money; indeed, he’ll go on to wed the daughter of his next employer. For Elizabeth, though, he’s romantically invisible. Not only does he like a drink; much worse, he’s a mediocre poet. So she carries on squeezing quotes and allusions into letters to Uncle Sam. We get the sense of a hectic, almost desperate, desire to hold on to
the brilliance that has defined her. After all, childhood talent is easily recognised: it’s just a matter of being developmentally ahead of the game. But adult brilliance is defined by content – what to do with those unusual gifts? – and is altogether more in the eye of the beholder.

  The publication of An Essay on Mind helps resolve all this. It’s a palpable achievement, and in just a few months it sets off three correspondences that lift Elizabeth out of intellectual loneliness, transform her daily reality, and have a lasting effect on her life. The most affectionate, and ultimately longest lasting, of these exchanges is with a distant cousin. John Kenyon shares a great-grandfather with Papa, with whom he was at Cambridge, having followed the same route from Jamaica to England for his education. When his interest in Elizabeth begins, Kenyon is a hugely sociable forty-two-year-old of independent means. The best-known portrait, a lithograph after John Collingham Moore, shows him at seventy with quizzical, warm eyes, the high-coloured cheeks that suggest a life dedicated to sociability, and the girth of an epicure.

  A sometime poet and a generous patron of writers, it’s only natural that when he visits Hope End in July 1826, he scrounges a copy of Elizabeth’s newly published Essay. We can guess the light-heartedness with which he does so from the apology he writes after reading the book, when he suddenly realises that this is serious work:

  Fame, I hope if you should persevere seeking her, will not turn out to you what you have so poetically described her, and what in truth she has turned out to so many—