Two-Way Mirror

by Fiona Sampson

  The dinner goes so well that Elizabeth meets the ‘great genius’ not once but twice. The social texture of Wordsworth’s life has been thinned by the recent deaths of Coleridge, Charles Lamb and James Hogg, and perhaps this is why ‘he was very kind to me, & let me hear his conversation’. Did he but know it, he is also making a valuable literary ally, who in years to come will use her own literary prestige to advocate his work.

  Right now, though, it’s no surprise that the sixty-six-year-old is taken with this personable young woman. At thirty, Elizabeth seems unaware of her own charm in a way she was not in girlhood. But we glimpse it thanks to yet another of John Kenyon’s introductions. The day before her dinner with Wordsworth, Elizabeth met bestselling writer Mary Russell Mitford. She found the prospect of this encounter nerve-wracking too, so Kenyon suggested a visit to London Zoo. On 27 May, he and Miss Mitford called for Elizabeth at Gloucester Place; the ensuing carriage outing to Regent’s Park marked the start of a firm friendship, one that will prove hugely influential for the young poet.

  At last Elizabeth finds herself close up to a woman writer who can serve as both model and guide. But possibly she hadn’t imagined her future quite like this. The talkative, bonneted forty-eight-year-old she now gets to know is living in relative poverty outside London, and writing prose. Miss Mitford’s home at Three Mile Cross near Reading has found fame in her ‘Our Village’ series, collected in five immensely popular volumes as Sketches of English Character and Scenery. No classic beauty, she nevertheless has the same round face, brown hair and large eyes that Elizabeth’s own childhood portraits captured. Also like Elizabeth, she has thick dark eyebrows and eyes that slant as if in amusement. She looks not aesthetic but questioning, shrewd, emotionally intelligent. Small wonder, perhaps. Miss Mitford is both unmarried and unsheltered. She has to support both herself and a spendthrift father by her writing – he’s worked his way through both an enormous lottery win that came her way in childhood and his late wife’s fortune. The writer she’s become as a result is highly productive, tenacious and pragmatic. When she meets Elizabeth she’s in London, therefore, on one of her periodic literary networking trips.

  As a well-known playwright herself, Miss Mitford too was at that first night party for Ion, where she met and was (as Elizabeth will later discover) signally unimpressed by Robert Browning. By contrast, the next day Kenyon introduces her to this:

  sweet young woman […] who reads Greek as I do French, and has published some translations from Æschylus, and some most striking poems. She is a delightful young creature; shy and timid and modest.

  First impressions are reinforced the following evening:

  Miss Barrett has translated the most difficult of the Greek plays […] and written most exquisite poems in almost every style. She is so sweet and gentle, and so pretty, that one looks at her as if she were some bright flower; and she says it is like a dream that she should be talking to me, whose works she knows by heart.

  This is Miss Mitford boasting to her father about her own literary reputation; but the naïve gushiness she records is unmistakably Elizabeth’s. And it’s a pleasure to see ‘Miss Barrett’ as these letters picture her. They remind us that, far from the figure of future melodramatic fantasy, there’s nothing eccentric, hysteric or gaunt about this petite, pretty thirty-year-old. Being sheltered has kept her mentally and physically young. She has a spring in her mental step, and a receptiveness to the world that’s just opening up to her.

  We can imagine Mary Russell Mitford in the brick-built Berkshire labourer’s cottage that she shares with her father, looking out over the flower garden of which she’s so proud and mulling Elizabeth’s literary prospects, as she commissions the young poet for Findens’ Tableaux, an annual she edits. When she writes in July to a friend, Lady Dacre, that Elizabeth, ‘Will I think get rid of all that is painful in her shyness, retaining the most graceful modesty, if once brought forward in the Society she is so fitted to adorn. She is very pretty, very gentle, very graceful, & with a look of extreme youth which is in itself a charm,’ Miss Mitford seems at first glance merely to be treating the London literary ‘village’ just like her own gossipy ‘small neighbourhood […] where we know every one, are known to every one, interested in every one, and authorised to hope that every one feels an interest in us.’ But in fact this is more than idle chat. She’s deftly connecting the young poet to that rare thing, a literary network that can make particular space for an emerging woman writer. For, under her former name of Barbarina Wilmot, Lady Dacre is a playwright and poet, active in a circle that includes Anna Seward, Mary Tighe, and the Ladies of Llangollen.

  She’s also nearly seventy, while Miss Mitford will turn fifty next year. These distinguished, much published women understand just how hard it is to achieve what Elizabeth wants: to be a leading writer who is a woman. (Miss Mitford herself hoped to be the country’s pre-eminent female poet when she was young.) They also recognise how difficult it’s been to achieve what Elizabeth already has. Miss Mitford declares her Preface to Prometheus Unbound ‘unmatched in modern prose […] Depend upon it,’ she goes on, ‘Her “Essay on Mind” […] contain[s] allusions to books, as if known by everybody, which Henry Cary declared to me no young man of his day at Oxford had ever looked into.’

  This is another piece of strategic advocacy, this time to the fashionable preacher William Harness, incumbent of Regent Square Chapel, Bloomsbury, a lifelong friend of Lord Byron’s, and still a well-connected littérateur. Miss Mitford certainly knows how to hustle, and there’s a sense of urgency to her advocacy. Within three months of meeting Elizabeth, she has already realised that all is not well at 74 Gloucester Place:

  Of course the poverty is only comparative—people who live in Gloucester Place are probably what I should call rich—still with ten children coming into life the change is of course great; & the mother being dead, & the father utterly dispirited, my lovely young friend has been living in the middle of gaiety in a seclusion the most absolute […] & chiefly occupied in teaching her little brothers Greek.

  Astutely, she makes the link between Edward Barrett Moulton-Barrett’s depression and the restrictive ‘seclusion’ he imposes on his family as she urges Lady Dacre to make contact:

  If events lead her to write on, & she be blest with life & health I have no doubt of her being the most remarkable woman that ever lived. — Her address is 74 Gloucester Place—but I don’t think she can be ‘got at’ without Mr Kenyon—John Kenyon Esqre 4 Harley Place—& he must be reached through Mr Harness.

  Life inside number 74 can be restrictive, even suffocating. But at least Elizabeth is writing. The poems she’s been working on since leaving Hope End will soon be collected and published as The Seraphim, which will appear from Saunders and Otley in June 1838. By then she’ll be thirty-two, but her development is accelerating. As the manuscript coheres, a step change in her achievement is becoming apparent: the book marks the emergence of her characteristic poetic voice. It is storytelling that gives this new work shape: for all her training in abstract thought, as a writer Elizabeth has an irrepressible gift for picturing how it was. Unconventional, ‘disobedient’ rhyme and metre help naturalise these new poems – among them ‘Isobel’s Child’, ‘Romance of the Ganges’, ‘The Virgin Mary to Child Jesus’ – into something that sounds, for all its mannerisms, as flexible as speech. Indeed, many of them are written in persona and narrated by a wide-ranging cast: a lover, a mother, a ‘Merry Man’, and even the Madonna.

  As she sends off The Seraphim to her publishers, Elizabeth must realise that both her inner and her outer worlds are changing. The six years since they left Hope End have been a time of transition for the family, and by shifting focus from classical studies to an imaginative world of her own creation she herself is both breaking the bounds of her confining life at Gloucester Place – and accepting them. If she’s not able to range freely in the real world, very well: she’ll do so in imagination. It’s this internal trajectory that will parado
xically open up to her the outer life of literary friendship, stimulation and reputation. She is becoming a writer.

  [Fourth Frame]

  ‘What was he doing, the great god Pan, / Down in the reeds by the river?’ Elizabeth Barrett Browning asks, in ‘A Musical Instrument’. Her much-anthologised poem is a parable about how art reduces and injures life. ‘Half a beast is the great god Pan, […]/ Making a poet out of a man.’ Metaphorical Pan cuts down the reed with which he makes his flute and so, though his music is ‘piercing sweet’:

  The true gods sigh for the cost and pain,—

  For the reed which grows nevermore again

  As a reed with the reeds in the river.

  The river running past my house in spate this February morning is most definitely not metaphorical, and I’m out taking photos of the scene. Flood water, coloured deep orange by run-off from the fields, foams and falls between the dark weeds. It’s absorbing – until P calls from the kitchen window that there’s fresh coffee on the stove, and do I want some? – No kidding! And what’s more, because I like the way he looks leaning out the window, I’ll take a picture of him too.

  What I mean by this, of course, is to prolong the moment. Instead the camera interrupts it, coming between us. Once I lift it to focus I can see P’s eyes, but he can no longer see mine: I watch this almost instantly alter and empty his expression. (I’d guess my eyes have changed too, but no one can see them.)

  Does this matter? I think it does. I suspect the absence of a returning gaze probably matters enormously. And it’s not just that the camera’s obscuring my face. I simply don’t look at my partner’s image on the camera screen the way I look at him. Actually, I even feel that this is the wrong preposition. I don’t believe we usually look at each other the way we look at a picture or a screen image. I think we look more to or with each other. This image I’ve just stored in my camera, the one that seems to show my partner looking at (to, with) me? It’s actually a fake. All it shows is him looking in my direction.

  ‘A society has a duty to ban forgeries’, the Belgian philosopher and psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray says at one point in ‘The Blind Spot of an Old Dream of Symmetry’. This essay is the opening panel – the left-hand to the double-sided mirror – of her 1974 classic, Speculum of the Other Woman. In it, she talks about how women’s writing, trying to fit itself to conventional literary models that are historically male, has to ‘fake it’, for all the world like a compliant wife. Starting with her childish fantasies about growing up to be a Byronic soldier-troubadour, Elizabeth engages with this problem quite consciously all her life. Irigaray goes on to say that ‘Woman’s special form of neurosis would be to “mimic” a work of art, to be a bad (copy of a) work of art.’ Here too Elizabeth is in the frame. At least one cause of her slowness to arrive at poetic maturity must be the years she spends trying on various literary models, classical and theological. It’s almost as if these genres were so much fancy dress – and writing were a kind of role play.

  Book Five: How to lose your way

  […] salt upon your lips.

  Elizabeth is in bed again. The cough that’s been troubling her since that first London autumn has settled on her chest. Never an early riser, now she’s under orders to lie in till lunchtime and to avoid going out in a frost that is ‘daggers for all weak chests’. No one’s exactly worried about her: Dr Chambers is convinced that her lungs are ‘without desease—but so weak, that they struggle against the cold air—which occasions the cough’. But, with ‘one cold upon another falling upon the chest & producing cough’, she hasn’t left the house in four months.

  There’s nothing gentle or genteel about such a cough; about gasping for breath. Violent spasms: the whole body forced into an upright position, because to lie down is to suffocate in the too-heavy air. Coughing without drawing breath, coughing till you retch, eyes streaming, nothing to you but the red O of your coughing mouth. And then, just when you think there might be a moment’s calm, the cough starting its obsessional, insatiable irritation over again. At night, loud in the silenced house, your self-conscious coughing keeps not only you but the person in the next bed, the next room, awake.

  Coughing and wheezing, hacking and whooping: none of this is in the least romantic. And the paraphernalia that comes with it’s not much better. Inhaling a gloop that prisms and swirls slowly in steaming water, Elizabeth has to keep moving her long hair out of the way. Besides, what to do with the gloop she herself coughs up, those slugs of yellow, grey, green mucus suddenly at the back of her throat and on her tongue? Lace handkerchiefs are wasted on this, the heavy lifting of the respiratory system, though she has a spittoon.

  Asthma meets bronchial infection in a cunning marriage. Asthma-narrowed bronchi are perfect harbours for infection and the gunk it produces: those gummed-up bronchioles in turn create the irritation that increases asthmatic inflammation. Untreated childhood asthma prevents the lungs developing fully, thus ensuring itself a future in the body. So Elizabeth coughs. Altogether she’s finding it hard to keep her spirits up. Her third-floor back-bedroom window offers an austere view of parapets, ‘high star-raking chimneys’ and a slice of winter sky; indoors, the chick hatched by her Barbary doves has died after protracted ailing ‘one cold night’, and the parent birds are so ‘spiritless, songless’ that she’s brought the pair into her own bedroom to warm them up. As she pets them, it’s almost as if she’s picturing herself as still the girl who fed the Hope End chickens by hand. She ‘should name it as a grief […] to lose either of them’, but caged birds are a poor substitute for country air and childhood freedoms.

  Once again paper friendships keep Elizabeth occupied. But now instead of daydreaming about the ancient Greeks, or admiring writers from afar, she has actual literary correspondents. John Kenyon, who’s been unwell himself, sends her a manuscript. Poems: For the Most Part Occasional includes ‘Destiny’, which takes lines from her own version of Prometheus Bound as its epigraph; she responds with a series of detailed critiques. Meanwhile, Mary Russell Mitford is thinking of applying for a raise in her civil list pension, and asks Elizabeth to mobilise a cousin-in-law’s support.

  Miss Mitford’s tone is particularly warm. ‘My dear Love,’ she opens on 1 February 1838, ‘I have got to think your obscurity of style, my love, merely the far-reaching and far-seeing of a spirit more elevated than ours.’ If this doesn’t embarrass the younger poet, it must boost her self-esteem. Sure enough, she’s soon asking Kenyon about possibilities for publishing The Seraphim. Within a month publication is underway, and with new-found confidence Elizabeth is able to decline Mr Boyd’s offer to go through her proofs: ‘My dear friend, I do hope that you may not be very angry, —but Papa thinks and indeed I think that as I have already had two proof sheets of forty eight pages, and the printers have gone on to the rest of the poem, it would not be very welcome to them if we were to ask then to retrace their steps.’

  Dragons are being slain all round. ‘Do you know that Mr Valpy is giving up business?’ she gossips, with not a little schadenfreude. She’s yet to forgive her former publisher for how he handled her Prometheus Unbound – perhaps it’s a useful distraction from the book’s critical failure – and has vowed ‘to put no more mss to be changed to print, in Mr Valpy’s hands’. She writes about her new collection to Miss Mitford with relaxed certainty, punningly invoking Lord Byron’s famous take on sexual regret: ‘So now, there is room for only “the late remorse of fear”.’ One reason for this changing tone may be developing social maturity, but Elizabeth also knows that these poems are good. With Papa, she believes the book’s long title poem, ‘rather a dramatic lyric than a lyrical drama’, is the best thing she’s written. And she has a strong vision for the volume as a whole. Like her previous books, it will start with the long piece, ‘Then, would come the Poets’ vow, & Margret, & several poems of a length almost equal to them, & some shorter ones at the end.’

  As she writes these letters in her warm room, keeping one eye on the chill
world outdoors, Elizabeth can take comfort from the fact that it’s no longer just family who believe in her talent. She’s joining a literary world. But by March 1838 even this busy life of the mind can’t disguise the fact that she hasn’t been out of the house for six months, and is ‘incapable of any occupation which should not rather be called an imitation of idleness’. She’s acutely aware how this gets in the way of writing, ‘For altho’ ambition is a grand angelic sin […] I have at any rate a long futurity of coughing [to] abstract me from it.’

  Beyond her bedroom door, though, the household mood has been lightened in recent months by the promise of a permanent London address. Months of wrangling over the lease of this potential home at 50 Wimpole Street have left the family on tenterhooks lest ‘those lawyers […] are going to rob us of it’. By spring 1838 the move seems increasingly certain. But then bad news arrives at Gloucester Place: ‘How the waves of pleasure & mournfulness chase each other over the sand of life!’ In February, the Barretts discover that Uncle Sam is dead. The shock affects Elizabeth, as all bad news does, psychosomatically: ‘My strength flags a good deal, and the cough very little.’ Uncle Sam, the family learn, died at Kingston on 23 December 1837 while trying to get home from Spanish Town to Cinnamon Hill. The cause of death was ‘pulmonary consumption’, or TB: so though the family back in London had no idea of it, he must have guessed that he was dying.

  Possibly this is why, the previous August, he had gifted Elizabeth his one-eighth share in the David Lyon, a working vessel once used as a convict ship, together with its latest annual profit. Uncle Sam is survived by no legitimate children, and his gift marks the special relationship the two had enjoyed since he, ‘Was […] Uncle brother friend & nurse when I lay in the long weary sickness at Gloucester’. When news of this generosity arrived, his ‘kindness melted our dear Ba to tears, for she had thought from his long continued silence, that she must be forgotten.’ In fact he was probably too ill for letter-writing. But she doesn’t yet seem to realise the significance of the money itself. Invested, it will produce an annual income of around £200, equivalent to a little under three years’ pay for a skilled labourer. Combined with around £4,000 inherited from Grandmama, also invested for her, it means that, unusually for a woman at this time, Elizabeth could afford to live independently.