Two-Way Mirror

by Fiona Sampson

  Elizabeth starts by rehearsing the usual put-downs women writers internalise: our writing can’t achieve artistic greatness because we don’t care enough about it, being preoccupied by masculine approbation and our private lives, which trap us in confessional mode. It’s tediously familiar stuff, to poets at least, even in the twenty-first century:

  Too light a book for a grave man’s reading!

  […]

  We women […] strain our natures at doing something great,

  Far less because it’s something great to do,

  Than haply that we, so, commend ourselves

  […]

  To some one friend. […]

  We miss the abstract when we comprehend.

  We miss it most when we aspire,—and fail.

  Yet, so, I will not.—This vile woman’s way

  Of trailing garments, shall not trip me up:

  I’ll have no traffic with the personal thought

  In art’s pure temple. Must I work in vain,

  Without the approbation of a man?

  It cannot be; it shall not. Fame itself

  […]

  Presents a poor end […] Art for art

  […]

  Although our woman-hands should shake and fail;

  And if we fail.. But must we?—

  Shall I fail?

  In 1855, when most leading British women writers conceal themselves with anonymity (‘A Lady’, ‘the author of Frankenstein’) or a masculine pseudonym (‘George Eliot’, the ‘Bells’), it seems daring for Elizabeth to address this problem so directly under her own name – or Aurora’s. But she’s better placed than most to make the case with some impunity. Unusually for a woman, she has emerged from the same literary training as her male peers – an education in translating classical verse – so her project makes sense to them. Besides, she’s insulated from the usual social and familial pressures to conform by financial independence, and by living abroad.

  All the same, as Elizabeth makes light work of hurts that must still be fresh from the reception of Casa Guidi Windows and Poems (1850), twenty-first-century readers can find themselves asking whom this passage addresses. Does it matter how a woman becomes a poet? Who exactly is Aurora Leigh for? But in the mid-nineteenth century poetry is culturally central, poets are cultural superstars who make attractive fictional protagonists, and what they feel and do is of real popular interest. Indeed, as The Critic’s feature writer has shown, there is popular appetite for details of Elizabeth’s own life. And so it’s neither a surprise, nor cheating, when scenes from her own experience are woven through her novel, whose protagonist Aurora, born in Elizabeth’s beloved Italy, is orphaned and sent to live with an aunt in a rural setting remarkably similar to Hope End.

  This paternal relative turns out to be (it is somewhat schematic) a cold disciplinarian; nevertheless the teenager develops into a poet. Her cousin and neighbour Romney falls in love with her and proposes. He’s wealthy and loving, but he doesn’t see the point of Aurora’s newly discovered vocation: so she refuses to marry him. Romney goes on to a sublimated life of good works on which he spends his fortune, despite never managing entirely to turn the social tide, only (as we learn eventually) to lose everything and be blinded in a fire. Aurora moves to London and writes successful verse but is blocked when it comes to Real Art: she can never quite produce her masterpiece. One day a wealthy socialite, Lady Waldemar, turns up to enlist her help in dislodging Marian Erle, one of Romney’s charity cases to whom he’s become engaged in an overflow of feeling. Lady Waldemar wants to secure him for herself. Though Aurora and Romney now meet again they still don’t understand each other’s life choices; it’s the titled lady herself who manages to dislodge Marian Erle (‘Marry an Earl’!) by having her abducted to Paris and sold into prostitution.

  Marian is living there in destitution with the child who is the result of this rape when by shameless authorial contrivance Aurora – travelling south in search of poetic inspiration – chances to encounter the pair and takes them in. In another tangle with reality, the fictional ménage travel on to Elizabeth’s own home city, Florence, where they settle and where Aurora learns that the semi-autobiographical poetry manuscript she sold to fund her travel has been published and has achieved huge artistic success. Back in England, Romney reads it with admiration and understands her at last. Believing that Marian jilted him at the altar, he has become engaged to Lady Waldemar; but this relationship sours when a letter from Aurora forces her to admit all. Eventually Romney comes to Florence in search of his first fiancée, by whom he plans to do the right thing, but, luckily for the gradually converging protagonists, Marian wishes to devote herself to the joys of motherhood, and anyway realises that her own love was just hero worship. After 11,000 lines, Romney and Aurora are able to unite their social and poetic vocations: in the concluding symbolism of their story, ‘last, an amethyst’.

  None of this is quite as whistle-stop as it sounds: Aurora Leigh comprises a lengthy nine books. But it does manage to be simultaneously a page-turner and a radical read. After publication Elizabeth will admit that she ‘expected to be put in the stocks & pelted with the eggs of the last twenty years’ singing birds, as a disorderly woman & free thinking poet’. Instead, ‘People have been so kind, that […] I really come to modify my opinions somewhat upon their conventionality, .. to see the progress made in freedom of thought—Think of quite decent women taking the part of the book.’

  This wider readership from ‘decent’ society will make the book a bestseller whose first edition sells out in a fortnight. But Elizabeth’s Ideal Reader remains her alter ego. There’s a sense in many passages that she’s trying to pass on a baton to an as yet unknown, perhaps even greater, woman poet. Did she but know it, this is exactly what she’s managed. Among the many women readers Aurora Leigh will influence around the world and who subsequently become poets, from ‘Michael Field’ to Charlotte Mew, is Emily Dickinson, who will write her a number of memorial praise poems:

  Silver – perished – with her Tongue –

  Not on Record – bubbled other,

  Flute – or Woman –

  So divine –

  All this, though, is in the future. In 1855, Elizabeth is working away steadily at her epic Künstlerroman. That brilliant riff on ways to dismiss women’s poetry comes immediately after a passage (in Book Four) in which one particular man, future partner Romney, dismisses Aurora’s own poetry in particular. Aurora Leigh will become a highly influential book, and here it tells us that there is an asymmetry at the heart of heterosexuality:

  I held him in respect.

  I comprehended what he was […] but he

  Supposed me a thing too small, to deign to know:

  He blew me, plainly, from the crucible

  As some intruding, interrupting fly,

  Not worth the pains of his analysis.

  A man treating the woman he loves like an insect makes an arresting, even disgusting, image; this is going much further than simple enquiry into women’s writing. Once again, we should beware assuming that a poet is being autobiographical, especially because women poets are so readily assumed to be confessional in that ‘vile woman’s way / Of trailing […] the personal thought’. But nor should we assume that either Browning is incapable of dramatising ambivalences within their own life as fiction. As Elizabeth completes Aurora Leigh things are changing, at any rate beneath the surface, in the apparently happy Browning household.

  By consorting with one of Britain’s leading poets, Robert has gained social entry into her literary and poetic league: at which point it would be easy to forget, as many a muse has done, that he isn’t there in his own right. Now he increasingly replaces his wife at literary events. Back in January 1855, while she was ill, ‘Mr Frederick Tennyson gave “punch” on the twelfth night to those whom Mr Lytton designates as “the brethren” .. viz Robert, Mr Norton, & Isa Blagden’: only Elizabeth’s name is missing from the list. And her growing isolation takes severa
l forms. Though she knows other women writers – whether good friends like Anna Jameson or esteemed acquaintances like George Sand – Elizabeth has no other serious women poets in her life. Florentine acquaintances include ladies like Mrs Kinney, whose amateur verse is everything that Elizabeth (and Aurora Leigh) reject. Still, she throws herself into inspiring and encouraging younger women who will become serious writers: Anne Thackeray, or Isa Blagden, ‘a single lady, with black hair, black eyes, yet somehow not pretty, who does literature, leads a London life among the “litterateurs” when she is in England’. And not only writers: last spring the Brownings made ‘a great pet’ of ‘a perfectly “emancipated female”’, sculptor Harriet Hosmer, a young American who ‘lives here all alone […] dines & breakfasts at the caffés precisely as a young man would,—works from six oclock in the morning till night, as a great artist must’. This could be an exciting new role for the woman who remained a tyro herself for so long. But it’s being performed against the perhaps similar background of mothering little Penini – as well as of the Italian machismo that infects even him:

  he feels his advantage of belonging to the male sex, to a degree that quite startles me—there’s a sort of instinct in it—I suppose. One morning […] Ferdinando spoke of some tradesman in Florence who would only employ men. Penini broke out suddenly with .. “Benissimo! Tutte le donne sono cattive, eccetto mia mamma—Mamma solamente e buona.” [‘Very good! All ladies are wicked except my mama – only Mama is good.’]

  ‘Ferdinando’ is Ferdinando Romagnoli, the Brownings’ cook, who is making his presence felt in more ways than one. It’s not only Penini who adores him. On 12 June 1855, the day before the ménage leaves for Paris and London, he marries Wilson – now clearly recovered from her chagrin at the disappearance of the prosperous Signor Righi – at the British Embassy. As this simplifies the household to two married couples with just the six-year-old Pen to look after, many things including travel should now be easier than in previous years. Yet the party manage to miss the boat at Livorno, and have to set out all over again a week later – when accidental delay turns into happy accident. Travelling via Corsica, at Marseille they bump into Elizabeth’s brother Daisy, in France ‘On His Majesty’s Business’.

  On 24 June they arrive in Paris for three weeks at 138 Avenue des Champs-Élysées with Sarianna and Robert Senior, whose disgrace causes no embarrassment here. This is a happy visit; one highlight a party where Elizabeth and Robert meet Prosper Mérimée, François-Auguste Mignet, the leading tragedienne Adelaide Ristori, and philosopher Victor Cousin. On 10 July Elizabeth Wilson becomes Mrs Romagnoli according to the Catholic rite as well as the Anglican one. Now legal under Tuscan as well as British law, the Romagnolis set out next day with their employers for three London months at 13 Dorset Street, less than half a mile from Wimpole Street.

  Right from the off it’s a sociable stay. Adelaide Sartoris calls on the day they arrive; two days later, breakfasting with John Kenyon, the Brownings meet ‘half America & a quarter of London’. They may be visitors, but they’re at the heart of the artistic and intellectual establishment. They spend time with John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle, Frederic Leighton, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Alfred Tennyson. It’s a summer of artistic collegiality among distinguished peers, the personal and the artistic integrating not only within the poetry that both Brownings are writing, but in their joint outer life. When, one late September evening, Robert joins Tennyson in reading aloud to friends – though Elizabeth does not – the circle gathered to listen includes the painters Ford Madox Brown and William Holman Hunt.

  But privately things are more complicated. In Wimpole Street, Papa’s strength is beginning to decline. He turned seventy in May, and is now having daily healing sessions with a ‘mesmerizer’. Still, he’s no spent force. In August he catches Pen playing with his uncle George at Wimpole Street and, though he doesn’t quite order the child out, demands, ‘And what is he doing here, pray?’ before freezing the topic shut and, later in the month, moving his household out of reach to Eastbourne on the excuse of another Wimpole Street redecoration. The Brownings’ own household is changing shape too. By late August it’s apparent that Wilson is pregnant, and she’s planning to go home to Lincolnshire to have the baby.

  Elizabeth experiences again the separation anxiety she felt when Crow left to start a family; and indeed the circumstances are similar. Orestes Wilson Romagnoli will be born on 13 October 1855, so Wilson must have fallen pregnant early in the year. Apparently, like Crow, she felt unable to admit to her mistress that both summer ceremonies were shotgun weddings; also like Crow, she had her reasons. After all, it’s only four years since the Brownings dismissed their Parisian cook because of her ‘reputation’.

  Or perhaps Elizabeth knows – or at least guesses – the truth all along, and is covering for a loved and trusted intimate. Her own five pregnancies mean she’s no longer innocent about the physical symptoms, and as the Casa Guidi apartment isn’t huge she may well have an inkling of sleeping arrangements. She and Robert fight, with real protective urgency, to get the marriage correctly solemnised in Paris (although Ferdinando is clearly not contemplating abandonment: he even offers to convert to Protestantism) and, writing to Arabella on the Romagnolis’ second wedding day, Elizabeth seems to imply that she knows more than she can for respectability’s sake admit to: ‘She has shed tears enough, as it is […] I will tell you all.’ As this is July, Wilson is by now six months pregnant and must show, but everyone has their fig leaf. She’s married, and her mistress can claim ignorance.

  Wilson (as Elizabeth continues to call her: Pen calls her Lily) will return to work the following July. Meanwhile, the Brownings return south four days after baby Orestes’s safe arrival. There’s cholera in Florence, so they will over-winter in Paris. A Left Bank apartment found for them by friends is too small, though it may be the one Anne Thackeray will remember as a ‘little warm, sunny, shabby, happy apartment, with a wood fire always burning, and a big sofa, where [Elizabeth] sat and wrote her books out of a tiny inkstand, in her beautiful delicate handwriting’. In fact it’s not for a further two months, until they move back to the neighbourhood of the Champs-Élysées at 3 rue du Colisée, that Elizabeth is able to resume work on Aurora Leigh. Now Paris, itself, whose ‘old charm […] has siezed [sic] on me—nothing in the world (except Venice) is so beautiful as a city’ enters her story:

  the terraced streets,

  The glittering boulevards, the white colonnades

  Of fair fantastic Paris who wears trees

  Like plumes, as if man made them, spire and tower

  As if they had grown by nature, tossing up

  Her fountains in the sunshine of the squares.

  And in the real-life city in which these lines are being written, the opening three months of 1856 are spent fair-copying the verse novel’s first six books, Robert reading them as she goes.

  His own Men and Women has just been published, to widespread but mixed reception. The Literary Gazette finds ‘all that complication of crudeness, obscurity, and disorder, by which the mystical and spasmodic school of poetry is marked’; Blackwood’s follows remarks on Elizabeth by noting that ‘Robert Browning is the wild boy of the household—the boisterous noisy shouting voice which the elder people shake their heads to hear’; The Athenaeum laments, ‘Who will not grieve over energy wasted and power misspent,—over fancies […] so overhung by the “seven veils” of obscurity, […] there is an amount of extravagant licence’. Elizabeth’s protective instincts are aroused. Understandably perhaps, she feels that this time it’s personal: three years ago several of these same publications panned Robert’s ill-fated edition of forged Shelley letters, issued by Moxon to the ‘unseemly merriment’ of critics. But now their influential friends, including Carlyle, Rossetti – who comes to Paris and visits the Louvre with Robert – and Ruskin (in the magisterial prose of Modern Painters volume 4) come to the rescue with positive reviews and good company. Throughout the spring, as Elizabeth w
orks through the last third of Aurora Leigh and proofs her Poems (1856), Robert’s social life continues to blossom. He goes to the theatre with Charles Dickens and the actor William Macready and dines with Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, the modernising prime minister of Piedmont-Sardinia known everywhere as Cavour.

  At the end of June 1856 the Brownings return to London, this time to John Kenyon’s home at 39 Devonshire Place. Each of these family summers costs Elizabeth: last time she told Henrietta, ‘There’s always a weight on my heart when I arrive. The land-sickness is worse than the sea’s.’ This year she feels additionally overpowered by the sustained effort of writing Aurora Leigh, which she had finally delivered to the publishers by the first week of August. And Devonshire Place is unusually gloomy. The couple’s old mentor isn’t there with them, but is seriously ill at his house on the Isle of Wight. Papa, as usual dispatching his household to the south coast for the weeks when Elizabeth is in England, has this year by coincidence picked Ventnor, on the island’s dramatic, leafy, south-east coast. It feels only sensible for the Brownings to follow them here for a fortnight, before spending a further two weeks with Kenyon in his home on the Solent shore at 3 the Parade, West Cowes.

  The Wight’s mild, countrified climate and sea air can only do Elizabeth good. She relaxes. Proofs follow her across the Solent in batches, and Arabella and George join Robert in reading her revisions as she goes. But this interval is bittersweet. Kenyon has in many ways been the father figure that Papa ceased to be once Elizabeth grew up, and that her younger husband can never be. It’s his support, financial as well as emotional, that has made her mature achievement possible; indeed it will continue posthumously in the form of a generous bequest totalling £10,500, which, invested, gives the couple a secure income for life. Back in London at the start of October, she will dedicate Aurora Leigh, this story of a cousin’s love, to him: