Two-Way Mirror

by Fiona Sampson

  Gradually, her lover is replacing her father as her advisor. On 24 September, still grappling with what to do about Pisa, she asks Robert to ‘Think for me. […] Do think for me’. It’s an acknowledgement of dependency very different from the apparent emotional assurance of her early letters. Yet she writes it on the very same day that, desperate to regain her belief in and intimacy with Papa, she has promised that she won’t go to Italy against his wishes. Since staying in London is assumed by everyone around her to be life-threatening she’s offering, in effect, to die for him. (Though she mentions ‘future years’, suggesting that she doesn’t herself quite believe this.) Still, she has to make her sacrifice explicit in order to force the issue – and this, of course, her father can’t accept:

  He would not even grant me the consolation of thinking that I sacrificed what I supposed to be a good, to HIM. I told him that […] it was necessary to my self satisfaction in future years, to understand definitely that the sacrifice was exacted by him & was made to him, .. & not, thrown away blindly & by a misapprehension. And he would not answer that. I might do my own way, he said—[…] I had better do what I liked:—for his part, he washed his hands of me altogether—

  It all seems so extreme. But if all the siblings have difficulty giving up their founding myth of the Barrett idyll, that’s particularly true for the three women of the family, on whom restrictions now fall hardest but who, as the eldest surviving children, were most deeply formed by the paradise years at Hope End. The brothers at least have working lives, as they manage the family estates, but in an era when an upper-class woman’s role is largely confined to wife- and motherhood (with charity work and religion the ‘spinster’ alternatives), to be denied marriage hollows out the sisters’ existences.

  It’s no coincidence that this autumn sees both Henrietta and Elizabeth with serious suitors at ages that are for the times surprisingly advanced: Elizabeth is thirty-nine and Henrietta thirty-six. At the point of conventional ‘last chances’ they’ve been forced to realise that the permission they’ve been waiting for will never come. It’s as if Papa has been relying on time to dribble away their chances for marriage, too. And this, in the end, is what brings the whole emotional edifice down. In the to and fro of the Pisa negotiations, Elizabeth finally recognises that her father is opposed to his children falling in love at all; at the same stroke she suddenly stops ascribing his convictions to religion. On the contrary, he ‘is apt to take the world’s measures of the means of life’ and is refusing his offspring independence ‘for the singular reason that he never does tolerate in his family (sons or daughters) the development of one class of feelings’.

  For decades Elizabeth has misused her strong will to force herself to wear blinkers about the nature of this parental contract. Now that they’re off she’s impatient to make up for lost time. She and Robert will continue to meet in Wimpole Street roughly twice a week for another sixteen months after that first May afternoon. He calls in the afternoons when her father and brothers are at work, but the household’s women – Wilson as well as Henrietta and Arabel – can’t miss how often he’s visiting. It is a headlong rush into experience. Three months after their first meeting, marriage – ‘the first subject’, Robert calls it – is once again being discussed. It’s also the final subject, although Elizabeth hasn’t yet accepted this. Still, this time she does acknowledge the proposition’s serious. As indeed it must be: Breach of Promise litigation can be brought against any man who fails to carry through on a proposal; and even if most families might eschew such socially costly action, Papa is just the sort of man to sue.

  As the summer ends she responds with a series of protests. First she fears that Robert would tire of an invalid wife. He responds that he would happily marry her even without sex – which is what he thinks she means: though it’s not – ‘I would marry you now and thus—I would come when you let me, and go when you bade me—I would be no more than one of your brothers—“no more”—.’ For him this isn’t weird. The society they live in forces young people to perfect the art of sublimation; being in love customarily means both acknowledging sexual desire and being unable to act on it, at least to begin with. The taboo on sex outside marriage is compounded by the long periods couples are often forced to wait for parental consent, or because they lack the financial independence to marry.

  Money is no obstacle in this case, as Robert realises six months in, once Elizabeth tells him, on 25 September, that she has independent means: ‘And if I wished to be very poor, in the world’s sense of poverty, I could not, with three or four hundred a year of which no living will can dispossess me.’ He responds, ‘When you told me lately that “you could never be poor”—all my solicitude was at an end. I had but myself to care about, and […] I can at any time amply provide for that.’ Such confidence in his own earning ability may be misplaced: after all, he’s still being supported by his father. But Elizabeth has no trouble believing him, and that belief is key to her love. Yet this in turn creates a further objection. She feels that, if they married, he would be wasted on sickroom duties instead of writing the important books that are his destiny. It would be ‘an exchange of higher work for lower work .. & of the special work you are called to, for that which is work for anybody.’

  A century from now the couple’s love letters will be widely read even though they lack the sexy romance of, for example, those recently exchanged by their close contemporaries George Sand and Frédéric Chopin. But there’s a great sweetness to such passages, in which the couple reveal the quality of their love by what they’re prepared to sacrifice. Robert would leave friends and family for life in exile, and marry a woman with whom he imagines he’ll never be able to make love or have children. Elizabeth is prepared to surrender romance for the sake of retaining Robert’s friendship – ‘You must leave me—these thoughts of me, I mean .. for […] we may be friends always’ – and ultimately even his company if he needs to move abroad for his own health.

  For none of these is her fundamental reason for viewing their romance as ultimately impossible. As far as disability goes, she’s simply worried that frequent illness makes her a liability. Of course she knows her own sexuality is functioning just fine. She also knows that she’s not actually bedbound – she’s no paraplegic, ‘suffering from an incurable injury on the spine, which would prevent my ever standing up’ – but simply resting up against the return of dangerous chest infections. Her fear is more profound, and profoundly superstitious; it survives even her new lessons in the beneficial effects of love. She fears letting Robert love and dedicate his life to her because of what happened the last time that someone did so. Bro’s death is the palimpsest upon which this new love appears. ‘And once he held my hand, .. how I remember! & said that he “loved me better than them all & that he would not leave me .. till I was well,” he said!—how I remember that! And ten days from that day the boat had left the shore which never returned.’

  Elizabeth finds this loss so hard to address that she writes to Robert about it only once. Yet buried experiences can be the most motivating. A thunderstorm on 11 July, the fifth anniversary of Bro’s death, recalls to her a tree struck by lightning when she was a child:

  The whole trunk of that tree was bare & peeled—& up that new whiteness of it, ran the finger-mark of the lightning in a bright beautiful rose-colour […] the fever-sign of the certain death […] And, in that same storm, two young women belonging to a festive party were killed on the Malvern hills—each, sealed to death in a moment.

  These images of death and transfiguration are at one level a simple confession that the well-known thirty-nine-year-old author remains terrified of thunder. But they’re also a dispatch from the morbid territory of complex grief.

  It’s not that Elizabeth consciously conflates Robert with Bro, who was in so many ways the partner of her early life. But her brother did prefigure her lover in a number of ways. Like Robert, he was younger than her: admittedly by just over a year to Robert’s six, b
ut this difference would still have felt substantial during their shared childhood; especially as Bro was not only junior but less precocious. She believed in her brother’s relatively unproven talents, too, and has learnt from that first intimacy how simultaneously to frame a younger man as her soulmate and leave room for lesser actual achievement. It’s a difficult trick made the more challenging now that she’s a leading writer. Still, with imaginative ingenuity Elizabeth manages to turn Robert into the more ‘successful’ partner by emphasising his busy literary social life. Indeed, like many clever women, she spends a great deal of energy keeping herself tamped down:

  I never had […] a will in the common things of life […] in one’s mere pleasures & fantasies, one wd rather be crossed & vexed a little than vex a person one loves .. & it is possible to get used to the harness & run easily in it at last—& there is a side-world to hide one’s thoughts in […] ‘literature’ […] while in things not exactly overt, I & all of us are apt to act sometimes up to the limit of our means of acting, with shut doors & windows & no waiting for cognizance or permission.

  Disingenuousness has its uses, in other words. And so it is that 1845’s Italian plan appeals disingenuously: both because it doesn’t commit her to marrying Robert and because she’s able to convince herself that he’s equally in need of a curative stay in the south.

  Like her father, Elizabeth has internalised a Christianity that makes it hard for her to ask for what she wants. But there the resemblance ends. She is far from being controlling. On the contrary, she’s turning Robert into her next male authority figure:

  there is a natural inferiority of mind in women—of the intellect […] the history of Art & of genius testifies to this fact openly. […] I believe women .. all of us in a mass .. to have minds of quicker movement, but less power & depth .. & that we are under your feet, because we cant stand upon our own.

  Which is so evidently untrue, especially in her own case, that it’s embarrassing. But maybe this is how, in the nineteenth century, a conservative heterosexuality works: Elizabeth needs to frame Robert as exceeding her in order to desire him. At the same time though, she undermines this very paradigm by the mere fact of falling for a younger, less established man. It’s a muddle, a kind of mauvaise foi; Elizabeth isn’t lying to herself, but she has been conditioned into inauthenticity. Besides, a sheltered existence means that her ideas about masculinity are largely second-hand. Recent friendships with writing men have been largely epistolary, and there’s only so much you can learn from younger brothers.

  Yet this apparent contradiction at the heart of her love affair is the turning point of her psychic life. The later twentieth century will invent the trope of the suffering woman poet, either choosing to ‘flay’ herself into authenticity, as critics like Germaine Greer in Slip-Shod Sibyls have it, or else unable to escape from repeatedly going over her psychic wounds instead of repairing them, as psychoanalytic literary critic Susan Kavaler-Adler insists in The Compulsion to Create. Elizabeth certainly pushes herself hard – in her writing, in her physical survival – and in the past she’s ‘kissed the rod’, internalising her adored father’s authoritarianism as love, and abasing herself before Boyd’s cruelty. But she’s outstripped these early love-objects. Perhaps it’s her good luck that they were, each in their own way, second-rate. Had she met a great, established male artist when she was younger, would she ever have brought herself to sever that bond? Yet now she breaks absolutely with the old paternalistic pattern. Everything that makes Robert an unconventional choice – his youth and comparative lack of distinction, his feminine side, his explicit anti-authoritarianism, even the way he will play the junior financial role in their partnership – is what makes him the essential counter to the authority figure of her father. Little as she may realise this, it’s an enormously psychically healthy choice.

  Just how narrowly Elizabeth understands even men she thinks she knows will be brought home the following June when Benjamin Haydon, desperate for money and exhausted by the struggle to sustain his artistic reputation, commits suicide. The old friends have fallen out of regular touch since her romance with Robert began, but Haydon will send her three notes just the week before he dies; to which, absorbed by her new life, she’ll pay scant attention. His death will fill her with regret: ‘I have been told again & again […] that to give money there, was to drop it into a hole of the ground. But if to have dropped it so, dust to dust, would have saved a living man—’

  In general though, thinking through the consequences for others is Elizabeth’s modus vivendi. When she finally abandons the Pisa plan in October 1845, it’s partly because it risked having her father disown Arabel and George, who, like all the siblings except herself, are his financial dependents, ‘Constrained bodily into submission .. apparent submission at least .. by that worst & most dishonoring of necessities, the necessity of living .. everyone of them all, except myself, being dependent in money-matters on the inflexible will.’ Finally she acknowledges that ‘The bitterest fact of all is, that I had believed Papa to have loved me more than he obviously does,’ and tells Robert, ‘I am—your own.’ The long transition from daughter to partner and peer is complete.

  Luckily for Papa’s bluff – luckily for literature – the winter of 1845–46 turns out to be so exceptionally mild that still, two decades into the over-heating twenty-first century, it’s one of the dozen mildest since records began. Elizabeth survives it with ease. Indeed, she continues to get stronger. It helps that the summer which follows is also exceptionally warm. In July 1845 she was beginning to enjoy carriage rides to Regent’s Park; in May 1846 she takes her first stroll there:

  Arabel & Flush & I were in the carriage—& the sun was shining with that green light through the trees […] .. & I wished so much to walk through a half open gate along a shaded path, that we stopped the carriage & got out & walked, & I put both my feet on the grass, .. which was the strangest feeling! .. […] Dearest, we shall walk together under the trees some day!

  The intensity of this desire comes so recognisably from her country childhood that it’s like a flashback to the flickering heat and green of a Hope End summer. Returning health, the love affair, and ‘sun […] shining with that green light through the trees’ all belong to a psychical hinterland that she tells Robert is ‘That Dreamland which is your especial dominion’, where every element strengthens the others: ‘How strong you make me, you who make me happy!’

  By the next month she’s even well enough to go visiting. It’s like stepping back into life. In June alone she visits Mary Trepsack, John Kenyon and Hugh Stuart Boyd, the last of whom she hasn’t seen for seven years. Kenyon takes her to see the Great Western Railway’s new steam engine in action; she delights in the unfamiliar ‘rush of the people & the earth-thunder of the engine’. She goes driving with the distinguished art historian Anna Jameson, a new friend who is also a friend of Robert’s. Together they visit one of the great private art collections of London, belonging to Samuel Rogers, where Elizabeth sees a first edition of Paradise Lost, Michelangelo and Raphael cartoons, Rubens, Titian, Tintoretto and a late Rembrandt self-portrait, ‘which if his landscapes, as they say, were “dug out of nature”, looks as if it were dug out of humanity.’ After years within the four walls of her own room, seeing these old masters first hand and close up is giddy-making, and Elizabeth has an artistically overwhelmed moment of Stendhal syndrome: ‘Almost I could have run my head against the wall, I felt, with bewilderment.’

  Something else is adding to the freshness of these experiences. In October 1845 she was still ‘taking forty drops of laudanum a day’ for her ‘absolutely shattered’ ‘nervous system’. But by February 1846, ‘And that you should care so much about the opium—! Then I must care, & get to do with less .. at least—[…] But slowly & gradually something may be done—’ For as she becomes stronger, so does Robert. He steps up to the plate, asking her to give up her opiate habit, urging marriage, and announcing that he will support them both and she ca
n settle all her inheritance on her siblings. Elizabeth sensibly pooh-poohs this last impracticality – ‘I shall refuse steadily […] to put away from me God’s gifts .. given perhaps in order to this very end’ – while stepping up in turn. She cuts down the morphine, and tries gently to concentrate her lover’s mind on how he could actually earn in Italy. A contract to write for a periodical would be good; or could they house-sit for one of his aristocratic friends? She also points out that her inheritance is useful but not limitless: ‘Nearly two hundred a year of ship shares I never touch—Then there is the interest of six thousand pounds (not less at any rate) in the funds—& I referred to the principal of that, when I said yesterday, that when we had ceased to need it, it might return to my family […] if you chose.’

  Perhaps every elopement needs a rehearsal. This summer a new Italian plan develops: the couple will run away together. They no longer pretend to each other that this trip would be primarily for health reasons, but, ironically, offers to act as travelling companion now arrive from friends anxious to rescue Elizabeth from another London winter. Fanny Dow-glass, an Irish friend of almost Elizabeth’s age and experienced in travelling for her own health, is put off with a fluent untruth: ‘I cannot count on my courage—I have nerves like so many threads.’ Anna Jameson, who is a highly experienced traveller, discusses routes through France while making her own plans. But when might the lovers leave? And where will they go? Elizabeth fancies Cava de’ Tirreni, north of Salerno, whose Romanesque Benedictine abbey is an ancient seat of learning.