Two-Way Mirror

by Fiona Sampson

  By the 1970s – when Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and John Updike crowd the book charts – the roaring boys of North American literary criticism will go a stage further, maligning Elizabeth Barrett Browning as relevant to the history of literature only through marriage or, worse, as hindering that real writer, her husband. In 1973’s Oxford Anthology of English Literature, handsome paired volumes designed as an authoritative student resource, Lionel Trilling and Harold Bloom pronounce:

  Miss Barrett became an invalid (for still mysterious reasons) from 1838 to 1846 when […] she eloped with the best poet of the age. Her long poem Aurora Leigh (1856) was much admired, even by Ruskin, but is very bad. Quite bad too are the famous Sonnets from the Portuguese […] Though the Brownings’ married life was reasonably happy, Mrs Browning’s enthusiasms […] gave her husband much grief.

  But perhaps the tendentiousness of this is unsurprising. The Anthology’s editors print just one minor poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning; but then the only other writing by women to feature in its more than four and a half thousand pages comprises one minor poem each by Edith Sitwell and Stevie Smith, two by Emily Brontë, and passages from Dorothy Wordsworth’s private journals: in total, fewer than two dozen pages, or around 0.5 per cent of their ‘canon’. Literary revisionism on this scale is strenuous stuff. Excluding all of the Brontë novels, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf can be neither innocent nor accidental; and it illustrates vividly how literary canons are not born, but made.

  Within the continual process of reputation-making and remaking that is literary history, Elizabeth Barrett Browning remains a bellwether for the rising and sinking stock of women writers. It’s probably no coincidence that the melodramatic exploitation of her life story comes to an end in the 1980s as women’s writing becomes more widely read, rediscovered, taught. Half a century earlier, when The Barretts of Wimpole Street was already a cultural phenomenon, Virginia Woolf (who went to see Besier’s play) summed up the poet’s then standing:

  Passionate lovers, in curls and side-whiskers, oppressed, defiant, eloping—in this guise thousands of people must know and love the Brownings who have never read a line of their poetry. […] But fate has not been kind to Mrs. Browning as a writer. Nobody reads her, nobody discusses her, nobody troubles to put her in her place.

  Yet Woolf was herself complicit. Her comments date from the year she published Flush: A Biography, her own version of the famous costume drama – written from the point of view of Elizabeth’s pet spaniel.

  Today, we can’t ignore how central the construction of identity is to Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s story; and how this holds as true for her life itself as for the myth-making that surrounds it. Hers is a story about how a writer becomes – and that’s what this book tries to mirror. Elizabeth dramatises the two-way creation of every writing self, from without and from within. That the life of the body both enables and limits the life of the mind is the paradox of the thinking self. John Keats’s early death, or the seventeen-year-old poet-suicide in Henry Wallis’s ‘The Death of Chatterton’, are moving because they remind us that a dead poet falls silent. But life imposes its own limits on the writer. For every Lord Byron or Malcolm Lowry, seizing the day in ways that their work celebrates, there is a John Clare or a Primo Levi trying to write experience away.

  Writers’ bodies create resistances, forcing interplay between self and world. Elizabeth Barrett Browning turned twelve in 1818, the year that Frankenstein’s creature first found out how deeply the wearer of a body can be changed by what happens to it. And perhaps it’s no accident that he is the creation of another woman writer. There are so many reasons why women may find that their bodies define their lives to a greater extent than do men’s that it’s surely no surprise if they chose to write about embodiment.

  It used to be a feminist truism that René Descartes had it wrong, and there is no separation between mind and body. Yet bodies do disguise, shield, and isolate minds. A woman being whistled at by scaffolders may be mulling her dystopian novel, the mother in the labour suite may have done pioneering work on biodiversity, that figure wearing the Marigolds may be a leading human rights lawyer. More: to spend any time with someone whose body is failing is to understand that recognising the unimpaired selfhood ‘within’ it is both human and humane. So are we ghosts in a curvaceous machine, to borrow from the twentieth-century British language philosopher Gilbert Ryle’s formulation? Or do we inhabit the body in ways that are inseparable from how we think and feel? Or, again, do many Western philosophy courses start with the thought experiment that goes, How do you know you’re not a brain being stimulated in a vat? because, in a way, that’s what we dream of? A virtual life, in which we experience ourselves as pure will, without the resistances of the concrete world?

  Today, the screen world seems to offer us this ideal existence. And if we turn back two centuries, we find Elizabeth Barrett Browning, too, used the written word in ‘virtual’ ways to take part in the wider world while remaining bodily at home on her daybed. For she does see herself as a ghost in a machine; her strong-willed thinking self as set within an often frustrating body. It isn’t only that illness and contemporary ideas of femininity exclude her from much that she longs to do and be. Living in the shadow of mortality from young womanhood onward, she wants urgently to continue to exist after bodily death, and for her loved ones to continue to exist too; as both Nonconformist Christianity and the spiritualism she explores assure her they will. This separation of mind – whether as ‘soul’ or ‘ghost’ – from body is unfashionable in the twenty-first-century West, but to dismiss it is to fail to understand how Elizabeth and her contemporaries experience embodiment. In the event, the thinking self who speaks in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s work has triumphantly outlived her bodily existence. But how telling it is that the fictionalised character of ‘Elizabeth’ that’s replaced her in the popular imagination – someone passive and poorly, bullied and rescued, barely even a poet – is almost entirely bodily, scarcely a mind at all.

  Yet there’s another turn in the story. This often triumphant life is also the mirror and beneficiary of its brutal times. Jamaican and Madeiran ancestry make Elizabeth question her own ethnicity. A sensibility that will change the course of literary history is built on a shifting, uncertain self-image. But if we think that the shadowy self she imagines in the mirror is truly black, or that she’s haunted by the figure of another self denied the leisure and literacy that have made her a poet, we should think again. Elizabeth Barrett Browning is the daughter and granddaughter of slavers: it’s their prodigious sugar fortunes that have allowed her extraordinary talents to develop. Even her elopement is financed by this money, despite the fact that by the time she runs away both she and her husband are abolitionists.

  The self jars against circumstance. When Elizabeth emerges from this mercantile and firmly unliterary background as a child prodigy, and declares not only that she will be a poet, but that she already is one, it should be a reach too far. In 1806, the year of her birth, women can neither vote nor, in England at least, own property once married. Even the wealthiest receive relatively little formal education and are barred from all but the oldest ‘profession’. On marriage, they pass from their father’s control to their husband’s without becoming citizens in their own right. So it’s not surprising that, at the start of the nineteenth century, women writers tend to emerge in the company of literary men who have brought them along too; whether by accident or design. The exceptional talents of Maria Edgeworth (1768–1849), Mary Shelley (1797–1851) and the Brontë sisters (born between 1816 and 1820) were all first recognised by educated, intellectual fathers.

  Elizabeth’s father, though no littérateur, also encourages his young daughter; perhaps she owes her remarkable confidence to him. ‘Literature was the star which in prospect illuminated my future days [;] it was the spur which prompted me .. the aim .. the very soul of my being’, she asserts at fourteen. Born nine years after Mary Shelley an
d ten before Charlotte Brontë, she starts writing as a child of six, by her own reckoning, and doesn’t stop until five weeks before she dies. Her first surviving poem, ‘On the Cruelty of Forcement to Man’, is written in the Herefordshire country house of her childhood; her last, ‘The North and the South’, almost four decades later in Rome in May 1861, the month before her death.

  The eponymous narrator of Aurora Leigh, the masterpiece Elizabeth publishes at fifty, is transfixed by a similar passion:

  I may love my art.

  You’ll grant that even a woman may love art,

  Seeing that to waste true love on anything

  Is womanly, past question.

  The rhetoric sounds like an own goal. In fact it’s strategic. Lacking both social agency and an education in the classical arts of logic and rhetoric that father, brothers, husband have received, a woman born at the start of the nineteenth century is unlikely to win arguments by reasoning about who or what she is. She must learn instead to be stubborn; irrational. To claim that she too is a poet, she must arm herself with her own weakness, which is to say her enthusiasm:

  I lived, those days,

  And wrote because I lived—unlicensed else;

  My heart beat in my brain.

  My heart beat in my brain: it sounds like fury or madness. But the pulse is metrical, not manic. Elizabeth’s success will be indubitable, the kind poets dream of and rarely achieve. Aurora Leigh, with which she crowns that success, will be an instant bestseller, its first edition selling out within a fortnight, and it will go on to be one of the best-read literary works of the second half of the nineteenth century. This verse Künstlerroman – the story specifically of a maker’s development, or Bildungsroman – will influence generations of poets and writers. Among the many women for whom it is immediately formative are George Eliot, Charlotte Mew, the writing duo who make up ‘Michael Field’, and Emily Dickinson – who hangs the Rossetti portrait of Elizabeth in her room. But its success isn’t limited by gender. Leading male writers, among them Rudyard Kipling, John Ruskin, Algernon Swinburne and Oscar Wilde, will celebrate the work for decades to come.

  Aurora Leigh is a work of fiction, not memoir. Its nine books map only indirectly onto the nine ‘books’ of its author’s own life. If it is any kind of ‘How to’ vade mecum, it’s less a guide to practical professional steps than to thinking of oneself as a woman writer. Elizabeth’s own life story works in similar ways, that is, not so much guide as inspiration. But in portraying the development of a woman poet, Aurora Leigh does give us clues as to how its author herself managed to emerge.

  On her twentieth birthday the verse novel’s protagonist, orphaned Aurora, refuses a marriage both loving and advantageous in order to dedicate herself to writing. Just before she does so, she crowns herself with a poet’s wreath:

  What, therefore, if I crown myself to-day

  In sport, not pride, to learn the feel of it.

  Not pride, but to learn the feel of it: there’s a crucial distinction. If she delayed until she, or the world, felt confident that she deserved poetic laurels, how long would Aurora, or Elizabeth, wait?

  In fact, laurel wreaths will crown Barrett Browning’s coffin: what use are they to her by then? But practising, learning the feel of the ‘the tender pricking’ of literary laurels, of how to ‘tie … rhymes’, is a way of doing without having to look at what you’re daring to do. Modest and incremental, it’s like the domestic arts Aurora Leigh already knows. This is how the young woman slips past the gatekeepers of the feminine self and starts to write.

  Then I sate and teased

  The patient needle till it split the thread,

  Which oozed off from it in meandering lace

  From hour to hour.

  I like that oozing thread, which just doesn’t want to lie down. As it slips out of the needle, between the fingers that try to knot it tight, it’s a little metaphor for creative disobedience.

  Practice makes perfect, as many a sampler instructed the girl who was embroidering it. But Elizabeth hasn’t always been patient. At thirteen, in the Preface to her first printed work, The Battle of Marathon, she’s all innocent insouciance:

  Happily it is not now, as it was in the days of POPE […]. Now, even the female may drive her Pegasus through the realms of Parnassus, without being saluted with the most equivocal of all appellations, a learned lady; without being celebrated by her friends as a SAPPHO, or traduced by her enemies as a pedant; without being abused in the Review, or criticised in society.

  Unfortunately, the reception of her adult work will show that this isn’t always true. And two centuries later, we need to catch on if we find ourselves thinking, ‘Happily it is not now, as it was in the days of ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING.’ For while Elizabeth is very much a creature of her own times, she also fits our own: as a woman working on the problem of how to be herself. And despite the years of practice to come, this early teenager has her eye on the prize. Already she ‘never can be satisfied with […] the comparative respect / Which means the absolute scorn’. What matters to her isn’t producing tolerable verse but being a true poet, judged by the highest standards. Her heart beats in her brain.

  Still, the question remains hanging: what if women can’t produce real art?

  Among our female authors we make room

  For this fair writer, and congratulate

  The country that produces in these times

  Such women, competent to … spell.

  In this biting parody of a kind of reviewing she has actually experienced, the poet comes close to revealing herself. But Elizabeth Barrett Browning is not ‘Aurora Leigh’. Real life differs from fiction, partly because the verse novel’s author has ‘money and a room of her own’, in the famous phrase Virginia Woolf will coin seventy years from now, in A Room of One’s Own.

  Yet critical reception is a kind of mirror, even a distorting one, in which writers check their progress however much they intend not to. Reading is another. Everyone needs a companion in their sentimental education. And for a writer developing in provincial isolation, books take the place of a peer group. As a young woman, Elizabeth has plenty of accounts of the writer’s struggle to keep her company. Influential, form-expanding Romantic biographies and memoirs like Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions (1782) and William Godwin’s Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798) have long been in print. In the year she turns eighteen, ‘Lives of the Poets, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Southey’s Life of Nelson, Lockhart’s Life of Burns, Moore’s Life of Sheridan, Moore’s Life of Byron, Wolfe’s Remains’, can be read even in remote Yorkshire vicarages – as we learn when Charlotte Brontë recommends them to a friend. They are certainly available to a wealthy family like the Barretts.

  Of course, these are all books by men. What would the sentimental education of a woman look like? It is Elizabeth herself who will, eventually, provide an answer. Aurora Leigh is fiction, not biography. But literary biography is always a Bildungsroman, the story of how a thinking, feeling self emerges. And in this, intimate respect, the story Elizabeth Barrett Browning tells in Aurora Leigh is also the one her life story tells us, for:

  poets […] understand

  That life develops from within.

  Book One: How (not) to belong

  And ankle-deep in English grass I leaped

  And clapped my hands, and called all very fair.

  Sun beats down on a shoulder of parkland, parched grass crackles underfoot, blowflies and mosquitoes hover among odours of meadowsweet and wild hop. The steep hillside is covered with drying hay that catches the ankles, but at the crest you feel on top of the world. Turn north and almost at your feet is a steep cut running east towards the Malvern Hills. Turn south and a dramatic natural amphitheatre commands the Hereford plain. Two strikingly different worlds fit together here along a single geological seam. In one direction stylish villas, a sign of Malvern’s emerging fashionability, dot the wooded slopes of Colwall. In the othe
r, a rural hinterland reaches south and west to the border of Wales.

  What are the very first things we remember? Bursts of light and colour perhaps, with the luminous quality of glass. Moments that remain as images, if not complete stories. For a four-year-old called Ba, this is her first summer in the dazzlingly fertile Herefordshire countryside; her previous homes, in County Durham and then near London, can already be little more than trace impressions. Here everything is hyperreal. Footpaths disappear into thickets; nettles taller than a man spill across fields. Even the hot, stormy weather is exceptional. Later this summer a ‘very remarkable water-spout’, with ‘two branches bent nearly, or perfectly, at right angles to each other’ will be observed off the Kent coast at Rams-gate; one of the largest tornadoes ever recorded in Britain will flatten a trail at Fernhill Heath, just the other side of the Malverns.

  It’s even headier down in the closed-off valleys known locally as Hopes. Ba’s family have recently settled in one of these ‘ripples of land’, where the outside world disappears. But from Oyster Hill, this high point of their estate, ‘Commanding the romantic scenery of the Malvern and the adjoining hills, with views […] highly interesting and of great extent’, everything in the vicinity can be surveyed – just as it is designed to be. In 1810 British wealth still broadly correlates with landowning. If anything, landed gentry have tightened hold on their estates in recent decades, as the paralegal process of enclosure abolishes the common land on which tenants used to support themselves. The old subsistence farming strips are being replaced by money made visible as ornamental parks and newly managed fields ‘tied up fast with hedges, nosegay-like’: the Agricultural Revolution has transformed land, for those who own it, from a reliable but rather unexciting asset into a fashionable, and briskly profitable, gentleman’s hobby.