OUTSIDE the academic world, Elizabeth Barrett Browning is still associated with a sick-room in Wimpole Street, a romantic “elopement” with Robert Browning, and a handful of beautiful love poems. The advent of feminist literary studies in universities has led to much research into the life of “EBB”, as she signed herself, and to a careful revaluation of the first woman poet to be proposed for the laureateship.
The prizewinning poet and author Fiona Sampson, an Emeritus Professor at the University of Roehampton, has written a lively and accessible biography, the first for more than 30 years, which should help to bridge the gap between academic and general readerships.
The biography’s title is explained at the end. During the Brownings’ years at Casa Guidi in Florence, Elizabeth saw her own face daily in a tall mirror, which visitors can still admire today. “Perhaps some even fantasise that they glimpse Elizabeth there too,” Sampson muses. “But we don’t need to visit Florence or to believe in ghosts to encounter her. To read Elizabeth Barrett Browning is to witness how, unaware that she’s being observed, she reflects herself in her poetry. Which, with its innovative brilliance, makes a fabulously ornate two-way mirror.”
This passage comes from the “Closing Frame”. A short framing piece by the author prefaces each of the nine “books” in Two-Way Mirror, nine in homage to the structure of EBB’s most important work, the verse novel Aurora Leigh, published in 1856, in which a female poet tells her own story. Sampson believes that “a biographer’s own self always frames her own subject,” and she is always present, offering fresh literary and cultural insights.
AlamyEliabeth Barrett Browning in her 1858 portrait by Michele Gordigiani (1835-1909)
In fact, this book is very “now”, with its chatty Americanisms (Flush, EBB’s spaniel, is in “poor shape”; a Rome apartment is “checked out”) and its handling of the Barrett Moulton-Barrett family fortune, which came from sugar plantations worked by slaves, a term that Sampson refuses to use. But she has a welcome breadth of sympathy, as in her treatment of EBB’s often demonised father. Writing about this troubled and difficult man’s midlife crisis, at the age of 47, she admires his willpower when leaving Hope End, and adds: “And while it’s hard for us to feel sympathy for someone who continues to profit from slavery, for the man himself a strongly religious sense of obligation ratchets up the stress of feeling responsible for supporting a large number of family and servants.”
Sampson has recently written an article for The Tablet in which she argues that EBB was also driven by moral convictions that were fundamentally religious, and yet this is touched upon only lightly in the book. When living at Casa Guidi, EBB enjoyed the sound of the organ and hymn-singing emanating from the adjacent church of San Felice. One day, she was “kneeling on a fauteuil to pray”, we are told, and fell on to the apartment floor, making her nose and forehead bleed. I wanted to hear more about her prayers and church-going.
The “Closing Frame” foregrounds Sampson’s central argument, that EBB “makes a brilliant case study in writerly self-invention”. She certainly does.
Dr Wheeler is a Visiting Professor of English at the University of Southampton and author of The Athenaeum: “More than just another London club” (Yale, 2020).
Two-Way Mirror: The life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Fiona Sampson
Profile Books £20
(978-1-78816-207-4)
Church Times Bookshop £18