Two-Way Mirror

by Fiona Sampson

  Yet she writes persuasively to her siblings about what, if true, could hugely ameliorate the family’s painful losses. She both believes, and does not, in table-rapping. Communicating with the dead is tantamount to heresy. But if this were not pseudo-religion but simply an undiscovered, biomechanical fact about the status of the thinking self after bodily death, it would be enormously reassuring, especially for the bereaved and those at particular risk of dying prematurely. Elizabeth is both these things. Perhaps, too, a life of struggle with a bodily ‘machine’ that keeps letting her down makes it intuitively easier for her to accept the mind as separate from the body. Illness can make Cartesians of us all. She’s eager for Robert to share spiritualism’s message of hope. But, though thrilled by the uncanny theatricality of séances, he struggles to reconcile this last gasp of gothic Romanticism with his sense of himself as a man of the modern world.

  In fact it’s Elizabeth who is once again attuned to the zeitgeist, caught up by a vogue that, in the coming decade, will gain huge traction as it comforts the bereaved of the American Civil War (not to mention President Abraham Lincoln and his wife), and intrigues British public figures including Charles Dickens, the social reformer Robert Owen, and another of the Brownings’ younger friends, the diplomat and writer Robert Bulwer-Lytton. It’s easy to dismiss this craze as morbid; but the Victorians are in some ways condemned to morbidity. For the upper and rapidly expanding middle classes, modernity means increased leisure to ponder the big questions; yet life can still be cut short at any moment. Medical knowledge remains quasi-mediaeval, as Elizabeth’s own experience testifies. Spiritualism addresses both death’s ubiquity and the desire for radical advances in understanding. With its public demonstrations and do-it-yourself ‘experiments’ mimicking the rise of empirical science earlier in the century, it appeals strongly to the Brownings’ community of Nonconformists and outliers. ‘The subject deepens & deepens with us all’, Elizabeth tells Miss Mitford, and, ‘Everybody is apt to be “mad” who gets beyond the conventions’.

  It’s with fellow enthusiasts Bulwer-Lytton and the Storys that Robert and Elizabeth take a day trip to the hamlet of Prato Fiorito a few days after their wedding anniversary. Among the surrounding hills they come across a ruined chapel, which Robert shortly recreates in ‘By the Fireside’, a poem that’s quite remarkably elegiac, not to mention ghostly, especially for an anniversary. It pictures a wife ‘Reading by fire-light, that great brow / And the spirit-small hand propping it’; among the shadows, her ‘dark hair’ and ‘dark grey eyes’ match the ‘Blackish-grey’ stone ruins. Ostensibly a celebration of how constancy deepens love, ‘By the Fireside’ couldn’t be blunter about the end of the honeymoon, and of youth itself, ‘A turn, and we stand in the heart of things […] Youth, flowery all the way, there stops—’.

  Not quite an itch; but it’s certainly a seven-year reckoning. The honeymoon years, with their sense of steadily opening possibilities – the excitements of discovering Italy and choosing where to live, Elizabeth’s continually developing work and reputation, her greatly improved health taking shape above all with Pen’s arrival, even the gradual mending of many Barrett family bridges – are over. Now comes the tristesse of having arrived where the couple had hoped to arrive; of being at the top of the hill and seeing over the other side. Elizabeth is only forty-seven; but she’s disproportionately aged by repeated grave illness. There are clearly going to be no more children. These will be the years when her looks fade in conventional terms, and when illness grows more risky still for her.

  Yet work remains exciting. By the time they return to Casa Guidi on 10 October, Elizabeth is able to tell her brother George that her new long poem ‘is growing heavy on my hands, .. & will be considerably longer than [Tennyson’s] the “Princess” when finished. I mean it to be, beyond all question, my best work—’ She’s ambitious for it, and ‘For the sake of this poem I should prefer staying at Florence this winter’, but ‘to see Rome is a necessity’. And this too is exciting. A month later they leave for the city, where on 22 November – after calling at Perugia, Assisi and its Basilica, and Terni, famous for waterfalls – they settle in to the third floor of 43 Via Bocca di Leone, an apartment reserved for them by their new friends the Storys.

  Elizabeth’s letters home claim that living high above this narrow mediaeval street is healthier than being at ground level. In fact the reservations she expresses to Emelyn Story – ‘remember unless by miraculous interposition something better (that is lower) shall offer itself we accept thankfully your third piano’ – reveal that Rome is both expensive and full-up. This small-windowed upper floor is the only affordable way to live in the fashionable English quarter ‘which is considered especially healthy’. Just round the corner from the famous Caffè Greco, once frequented by Byron and the Shelleys, this new residence is also midway between the famous shopping parades of the Corso and the Spanish Steps – opposite which the Storys are already installed at 93 Piazza di Spagna.

  But what should be a happy continuation of the summer suddenly becomes the opposite. As soon as the Browning household – Elizabeth, Robert, Pen, Wilson, Ferdinando the cook, and of course Flush – arrive, the couple themselves head straight round to the Storys’. The women go for coffee, while the men check out the new apartment. Emelyn Story tells Elizabeth that her six-year-old, Joe, has gone to bed early with a slight cold; she arranges a playdate with Pen for next day. But in the morning before breakfast the Story’s nine-year-old daughter Edith arrives suddenly and dramatically at Via Bocca di Leone. She’s been sent over for safe-keeping because her little brother is seriously ill.

  Robert & I, leaving Edith with Wilson & Penini, set out instantly of course to see what the evil was. Oh—Arabel, it was death’s own evil! The child had a succession of convulsions .. never recovered consciousness, & before the night had set in, was dead […] A boy six years old, & beloved by its mother above all her loves—[…] I shall not forget the destraction in which she threw herself down, beside the empty little chair.

  The diagnosis is gastric flu, which the doctor assures everyone is noncontagious. But by now both the Storys’ nursemaid and, back in Via Bocca di Leone, Edith are also gravely ill. The doctor now claims that all three caught cold in a fierce tramontana two days earlier. By nightfall, the little girl is too sick to be taken home and so is carried down the stairs to the second-floor apartment that the Storys’ other friends, American artist William Page and his family, are renting:

  “She may not live till morning” was the medical apprehension. So the poor mother & father quitted their own house, with the still unburied little body of their boy in it, and came here to wait & tremble before the possibility of another blow.

  Though Edith does recover, much has been made since of Elizabeth’s fear, at this juncture, for her own child. ‘I look at him with a tremble at the heart! These treasures,—which at once are ours, & not ours!!’ Of course. The doctor is clearly a charlatan. Elizabeth is a loving mother, and exposing Pen to infection won’t help Edith, or her grieving parents, in any way. Yet the reason she gives for moving the feverish little girl, that ‘we had no night-room to give her’, is probably not entirely an excuse. The Brownings had camped the first night in their new home, where the furniture is all ‘just as I had pushed [it], when interrupted, in the middle of the floor’ and it’s ill-equipped and comfortless for a very sick child.

  But when Elizabeth refuses to have anything to do with Joe’s dead body, this isn’t logic but visceral recoil. Unlike most of her generation, she has no experience of laying out the dead: by coincidence all her loved ones have been buried without her seeing them: her mother died away from home in Cheltenham, Sam and Uncle Sam in distant Jamaica, and Bro’s body was too far gone when it was retrieved. Her horrified exclamation now to Arabel, ‘This dust is not my beloved. I recoil from this paddling with clay’, is the other face of her spiritualist search; the same fierce need to believe that personhood can outlast the vulnerable mortal body.


  Death, though it remains at one remove, has come to join Elizabeth in Italy. Yet it cedes the foreground to a number of friends soon enough. December and January see William Makepeace Thackeray make several visits, accompanied by the two daughters of whom he’s had care since his wife succumbed to postpartum psychosis. The elder girl, future writer Anne, keeps a journal that lets us glimpse the Brownings as physically tiny but effervescing with warmth. Robert appears as ‘a dark, short man, slightly, but nervously built, with […] a large mouth which opens widely when he speaks, white teeth, a dark beard and a loud voice with a slight lisp, and the best and kindest heart in the world.’ Elizabeth is:

  the greatest woman I ever knew in my life. She is very very small, not more than four feet eight inches I should think. She is brown, with dark eyes and dead brown hair, and she has white teeth and a low harsh voice, her eyes are bright and full of life, she has a manner full of charm and kindness. She rarely laughs, but is always cheerful and smiling.

  The couple’s ‘charm and kindness’ draws them into the social whirl. In February they join the Prince of Prussia at a musical soirée run by the Secretary to the German Archaeological Institute. Robert goes out and about with Frederic Leighton, Bulwer-Lytton, Scottish writer John Gibson Lockhart, and the power couple of landowner and future MP Edward John Sartoris and his wife Adelaide, a well-known opera singer until her marriage. By April the weather is mild enough for concerts and picnics in the Roman Campagna, the famous local countryside that’s become an indispensable stop on the Grand Tour. Both Adelaide’s sister, the actress Fanny Kemble, and Elizabeth herself join in these entertainments, where ‘the talk was almost too brilliant for the sentiment of the scenery, but it harmonized entirely with the mayonnaise & champagne.’

  Yet sadness haunts the Brownings’ six months in Rome. The poems Robert is writing return to themes of unachievable or misplaced love. His ‘Two in the Campagna’, while it echoes the plethora of landscape paintings that have made the area famous, records not parties but the fleeting nature of intimacy:

  […] I yearn upward, touch you close,

  Then stand away. I kiss your cheek,

  Catch your soul’s warmth,—[…]

  Then the good minute goes.

  It almost sounds like an accusation:

  I would that you were all to me,

  You that are just so much, no more.

  […]

  Where does the fault lie? What the core

  O’ the wound, since wound must be?

  The dramatic monologues and persona poems that will soon contribute so much to his reputation are the work of someone still in love with theatre, and they are fiction. But it’s striking that so many of these personae have ambivalent relationships with women. Of course probably the most famous among them, the murderous narrator of ‘My Last Duchess’, appeared in print three years before Robert had even met Elizabeth, in 1842’s Dramatic Lyrics. And it would be simplistic to reduce the unhappy speakers of Men and Women, or indeed of any poems, to sublimated wish fulfilment: writing doesn’t work like that. But they must certainly cast, as much as capture, a psychic shadow in the Via Bocca di Leone. What is Robert’s mood as he works on them – and what does Elizabeth feel when she reads them?

  Whatever the mood in the apartment, outside it the Roman climate is casting a real shadow – over the children’s health. In March 1854 Edith Story falls gravely ill once more – though she again survives – and by May Pen has become ‘a delicate, pale little creature’. And even the couple’s writing lives aren’t going particularly smoothly. Two Poems by Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, which Chapman and Hall publish at the couple’s expense this spring in aid of Arabella’s work with the Ragged Schools, doesn’t sell well; and a hundred copies of Casa Guidi Windows remain unsold, meaning that there are no earnings to speak of. Altogether, when they leave for home on 28 May Elizabeth is relieved: ‘I have’nt taken to [Rome] as a poet should […] the associations of the place have not been personally favorable to me.’

  Yet things don’t improve greatly back in Florence, where they’ll spend the next twelve months, unable even to escape the summer heat, due to lack of funds. This year Elizabeth receives no annual bonus from the David Lyon; while John Kenyon, who has generously given the couple £50 every six months since Pen was born, but who’s ageing – he’s now seventy-one – forgets to send his cheque. Flush has been getting old too, and three weeks after their return, on 16 June 1854, he dies. He was thirteen, and had been in poor shape for a while:

  He died quite quietly […] He was old you know—though dogs of his kind have lived much longer—and the climate acted unfavorably upon him. He had scarcely a hair on his back—everyone thought it was the mange, and the smell made his presence in the drawingroom a difficult thing. In spite of all however, it has been quite a shock to me & a sadness—A dear dog he was.

  Elizabeth’s reasoned reaction seems very far indeed from her earlier passionate affection for the little creature. But what makes Flush’s going bearable is probably not only the passage of time, but unspeakable relief that it isn’t Pen they have lost; for ‘our own child became affected by the climate a week or two before we left [Rome], and frightened us considerably’, as Robert tells William Story.

  But as August turns into September Elizabeth becomes frantic with fresh worry. Her father has been run over in Wimpole Street. His leg is broken, and by mid-September George is reporting that ‘permanent lameness’ with ‘one leg shorter than the other’ is ‘probable’. Elizabeth, entertaining the fantasy that the accident ‘may bring him closer to his children […] & more cognizant of their attachment & tenderness’, sends a note. The gesture’s rebuffed, even though she adopts the precautionary disguise of having Penini address the envelope: at five, the boy already has handsome handwriting. Still, the ‘beautiful and singularly intelligent little boy who promises to prove worthy of his parents’ can always raise the mood at Casa Guidi. Indeed he has already received his own first press notice from the Italian correspondent of The Critic, who now, in a precursor to twenty-first-century celebrity magazine spreads, visits the Brownings ‘at home in that Casa Guidi which has become classic in English poetry’. A further fillip comes when the David Lyon at last yields a dividend, and it proves the largest in five years.

  But at the start of 1855 life closes in again. That dear friend and onetime close confidant Mary Russell Mitford dies on 10 January, and over the winter Elizabeth suffers ‘the worst attack on the chest I ever suffered from in Italy’, which she blames on ‘more frost & a bitterer wind than are common to us’:

  The cough was very wearing, & the night-fever most depressing .. & by the time there was a possibility of sleep for either me or poor Robert (who passed his nights in keeping up the fire & warming the coffee) of course I had become very weak & thin.

  Meanwhile, back in London it’s not only Papa who needs nursing. Treppy, by now eighty-six, won’t die for another two years. But she’s becoming paranoid, perhaps actually suffering from dementia. Arabella, who undertakes the family visiting duties, is one of the few people she usually tolerates. But the old lady:

  constantly supposes that people mean to poison her […] and now she has begun to distrust Arabel! […] What Arabel has to go through you may suppose. Only she has a nature great enough in its affections […] however at the cost of many & bitter tears—

  Arabella’s life may indeed be feeling bitter. At forty-two she’s still just young enough to escape Wimpole Street, as her sisters have at similar ages, for marriage, children and a home of her own. But unlike them she has no one waiting in the wings. She has become one of those convenient women with no life of their own, ceaselessly available in the nineteenth century to hold upper-class families – and wider society – together. Rather like Bummy, in fact. Her famous sister is among many who takes this free labour for granted, viewing care work as ‘not […] the best use to which we can put a gifted & accomplished woman’.

  Even before
her current high-profile work in the military hospitals of the Crimean War, Florence Nightingale has been professionalising and dignifying nursing. Elizabeth has met and liked the younger, Florence-born woman but, despite admiring her work, believes encouraging women into caring roles is ‘retrograde—a revival of old virtues!’ as she tells Anna Jameson:

  Since the siege of Troy & earlier, we have had princesses binding wounds with their hands—it’s strictly the woman’s part .. & men understand it so […]. Every man is on his knees before ladies carrying lint,—calling them ‘angelical she’s,’ .. whereas, if they stir an inch as thinkers or artists from the beaten line, [….] the very same men would curse the impudence of the very same women & stop there!—

  As this swift return to her own preoccupations reveals, Elizabeth is never quite able to face what her sister’s life must be. Later, when Arabella announces plans to adopt a foundling, she’ll comment with excruciating tactlessness that having one’s ‘own’ child is much better. But it’s no coincidence that Elizabeth is reflecting on women’s roles. She’s now deeply involved in writing her exploration of how women are shaped by what they’re allowed to do – Aurora Leigh. In January:

  Robert & I do work every day—[…] I have some four thousand five hundred lines towards [the book]. I am afraid that six thousand lines will not finish it. I shall be ready, at any rate—for I work on regularly.

  But by early March summer publication is looking much more likely for Robert’s ‘large volume of short poems’ than for her verse novel:

  here are between five & six thousand lines in blots .. not one copied out .. & I am not nearly at an end of the composition even—

  In fact she won’t complete Aurora Leigh until the following summer. By the time she does so, in June 1856 in Paris, it will have sprouted into nine books and more than eleven thousand lines.

  That draft in blots takes her to about the halfway mark, and the brilliantly metafictional 570 lines, or roughly a twentieth of the entire work, that constitutes one long ars poetica. It’s in this relentless first half of Book Five that the poem’s narrator, who so closely resembles Elizabeth in her dedication to becoming a woman poet, agonises over the work of poetry that could and will be – inside Elizabeth’s own tour de force – her masterpiece. Long before postmodernism, Aurora Leigh’s first readers must have had an especially vertiginous sense of falling into the poem they were reading: even today, the effect is of a curious lip-synching or feedback as Elizabeth and Aurora, author and character, chorus their lines.