Two-Way Mirror

by Fiona Sampson

  When Death’s pale hand o’er Baby spread,

  The pillow raised her little head,

  Her face was white, her pulse beat low,

  From every eye sad tears did flow.

  If this seems a little morbid, that’s perhaps not surprising. Papa’s accolade came just five weeks after little Mary’s death, and these first family poems are written through the ensuing period of mourning at Hope End and during the family’s trip north.

  However seriously Ba takes her own poems, occasional verse is in fact another of the family’s ‘things’. Her grandmother Graham-Clarke writes accomplished poetry, and over the years Ba’s siblings and Mamma will try their hand at it too. Like the family nicknames, these rhymes play with language as something shared, a kind of insider speak, and the domestic magic of using words to build a shared understanding is something Ba will never quite shake off. Years from now, a distinctively Victorian alignment with the people at home will remain close to the heart of her adult work.

  Meanwhile, when she gets to fourteen Ba looks back at how this eight-year-old self:

  first found real delight in poetry […] too young to feel the loveliness of simple beauty, I required something dazzling to strike my mind—The brilliant imagery the fine metaphors and the flowing numbers […]

  At nine I felt much pleasure from effusions of my imagination in the adorned drapery of versification […] At this age works of imagination only afforded me gratification […]

  At ten my poetry was entirely formed by the style of written authors and I read that I might write.

  These memories come from ‘Glimpses into My Own Life and Literary Character’, one of three notebook self-portraits Ba composes in a burst of adolescent self-consciousness between the ages of twelve and fifteen. Perhaps naïvely, she cites John Locke’s foundational 1689 work of philosophical empiricism, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, to argue that she’s not being vain: self-examination can ‘bring us great advantage in directing our thoughts in the search of other things’. Precocious or not, her self-scrutiny is typical for a teenaged girl in veering towards the excessively self-critical. ‘My Character and Bro’s Compared’ is peppered with judgements like ‘ardent’, ‘enthusiastic’, ‘impatient’ and ‘not content till I excel’, which a disinterested observer might recognise as signs of an unusual intelligence struggling with being forced to go at trotting pace.

  Still, this fourteen-year-old is guided more by emotional intuition than rational proposition – ‘I feel uncontroulable contempt for any littleness of mind, or meanness of soul […] & prejudice I detest’ – professes a ‘patriotism enthusiastic & sincere’, and claims to ‘understand little of Theology’, although at twelve she passed through a phase of ‘enthusiastic visions’, since regretted. She’s also capable of touchingly straightforward adolescent angst: ‘In society I am pretty much the same as other people only much more awkward much more wild & much more mad!!’

  But behind all this there’s a nagging sense of talent being wasted: of a mind consuming itself. Idyllic though life at Hope End is, far from being stretched Ba is being held back a year by sharing lessons with Bro, her younger brother who, ‘tho by no means difficient has no chance in competition with her’, as William Artaud puts it. Youthful intelligence must find its own way, and it does so chiefly through reading. ‘At eleven I wished to be considered an authoress. Novels were thrown aside. Poetry and Essays were my studies & I felt the most ardent desire to understand the learned languages.’

  Ba starts Latin, her first ‘learned language’, in 1816, having begun French a few months earlier. The following summer she takes up Greek – with the Classics tutor who was officially brought in for Bro – finding, ‘I like this language a lot, because […] I will be able to read Plato, and all the great authors of Greece.’ And not just read: within a couple of years she’ll be composing her first Greek ode. For now, though, it’s with still childish tactlessness that she admonishes her Uncle Sam, ‘I’m astonished that you don’t want to travel to Greece, where can one take more instruction, or more pleasure, than from the broken monuments which are the tombs of the greatest people in the universe?’ But after all, she is only eleven. And what’s more, she’s writing in French – under the tutelage of a Madame Gordin, who comes in twice a day and sets correspondence as homework.

  It would be difficult to make such an arrangement in rural Herefordshire, but the family are spending summer 1817 at newly fashionable Ramsgate. Much to Ba’s irritation this Kent seaside resort has also produced a dancing master: ‘I don’t like dancing at all.’ Her mind is on Higher Things. She’s already composing French and Latin verse,

  sitting in ‘my house under the sideboard,’ in the dining room, concocting one of the soliloquies beginning:

  ‘Qui suis je? autrefois un general Romain:

  Maintenant esclave de Carthage je souffre en vain’

  as she’ll recall decades from now in a vignette of her ten-year-old self, still playing house under the furniture of the adult world at the same time as she plunges determinedly out of her depth.

  This is touching, funny – and priggish. Talent is Ba’s privilege and her Achilles heel. At fourteen, when Bro goes away to school, she becomes doubly anguished by the loss of her closest companion and her own exclusion from education. Perhaps triply so, as sexless tomboy freedom is exchanged for the young woman’s body that will handicap so many of her pleasures:

  Through the whole course of my childhood, I had a steady indignation against Nature who made me a woman, & a determinate resolution to dress up in men’s clothes as soon as ever I was free of the nursery, & go into the world ‘to seek my fortune’.

  ‘Poor Beth,’ she’ll write later, slipping discreetly into third person:

  had one great misfortune. She was born a woman. Now she despised nearly all the women in the world […]—She could not abide their littlenesses called delicacies, their pretty headaches, & soft mincing voices, their nerves and affectations. […] One word Beth hated in her soul … & the word was ‘feminine’.

  Ba is articulating here the frustration of generations of women who hate, not their bodies and their own selves, but the constrictions of gender roles. There are pleasures and there are pinch points, and we should be careful about reducing such resistances to aspects of ‘femineity’ to the single-pointed essentialism of gender dysphoria: that ‘real’ women couldn’t possibly feel like this is the claim made by centuries of misogynists.

  Ba is growing up in an era when even the daughters of the wealthy must rely on paternal goodwill – and culture – to patch together an education beyond the feminine accomplishments she’s bored by: ‘I hate needlework & drawing because I never feel occupied whilst I work or draw—’. Her father keeps a country gentleman’s library: a cosmopolitan affair, as British education at the start of the nineteenth century is, well stocked with the classics, key Enlightenment belles-lettres, and some of the Romantics. With her mother’s guidance, by her early teens she has read the American revolutionary thinker Thomas Paine, Locke’s fellow British empiricist David Hume, the great French secularist Voltaire, a translation from the German of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, arguably the most influential Bildungsroman in European history, and that Genevan-born Romantic with a more political take on the nature of the self, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. She’s such ‘A great admirer at thirteen’ of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman that two years later her mother is worrying ‘Mrs Wolstonecrafts system’ will turn her into ‘an old maid’ with ‘singleness of will &c.’

  Yet it’s Mamma herself who gave Ba permission to read Wollstonecraft at this formative age. The surrendered wife imagined by future biographers is nothing like this real-life woman, viewed by her contemporaries as ‘Mary and her little coterie of independent females’. Ambitious for her children’s development, it’s she who keeps them at their lessons when Papa is away on business, and who commissions and collects much
of Ba’s juvenile creativity, including a fragmentary ‘Essay on Woman’, written at sixteen in response to Alexander Pope’s ‘Essay on Man’:

  Are vases only prised because they break?

  Then why must woman to be loved be weak?

  But it’s not just ‘femineity’ that’s engaging Ba’s emerging political awareness. Turn back once more to 1817, and we find the eleven-year-old drafting a furious letter to Lord Somers, owner of nearby Eastnor Castle, who to neighbourhood chagrin is about to be made Lord Lieutenant of Herefordshire, and will shortly gain an Earldom. He’s among House of Lords supporters of the government’s suspension of habeas corpus – the right to be tried in one’s own presence, and therefore fairly – on the grounds that there are too many political subversives around. Moreover, his pamphlet A Defence of the Constitution of Great Britain, published this same year, argues that the right to vote should be curtailed; parliament doesn’t need to sit every year. Ba’s fiery letter denouncing his attacks on ‘liberty’ can’t have done neighbourly relations much good, if it was ever actually sent, but she doesn’t seem to notice the paradox inherent in arguing for legal and democratic rights as the daughter and granddaughter of slave ‘owners’. She’s not alone in this. Her slaver father and Uncle Sam are both at the same time politically progressive Whigs.

  Is youthful idealism in particular always separated by a few degrees from daily life? Ever since her very first poem, ‘On the Cruelty of Forcement to Man’, protested press-ganging, liberty has been a recurring theme for Ba. The high point of her early seriousness is The Battle of Marathon, a 1,500-line retelling, in the heroic couplets she’s coming to favour, of a key moment in the Greco-Persian wars. Her Preface frames this story not as adventure but as a moral parable about ‘one little city rising undaunted, and daring her innumerable enemies, in defence of her freedom’; and it’s surely better to hold such ethical ideals than not. How then do we judge a young person who develops a social conscience before she knows all the facts, or has the economic and social agency to act?

  It’s unclear how well-informed Ba is about the sources of her family’s wealth as she enters her teens. But The Battle of Marathon has cost her too much effort and emotion to be a game. Started in the summer she was eleven, it takes her over two years to complete. Her father, the dedicatee, has it printed in a private edition of fifty copies for her fourteenth birthday. Though this is vanity publishing, it is her first book, and some of its strongest passages show a precociously adult, assured ear, as when Ba brings Athena to Athens to give false council:

  Doubt clouds the Goddess’ breast—she calls her car,

  And lightly sweeps the liquid fields of air.

  When sable night midst silent nature springs,

  And o’er Athena shakes her drowsy wings,

  The Paphian Goddess from Olympus flies,

  And leaves the starry senate of the skies.

  Still, even the most austerely intellectual young girl enjoys high days and holidays. The plays Ba puts on with her siblings are undeniably literary achievements – that first French tragedy is succeeded by Socrates, of the Laurel of Athens when she’s eleven, and The Tragedy of Laodice when she’s thirteen – but organising the straggle of little siblings to perform must be chaotic fun too. There are trips to join Grandmama and Treppy at the smart new spa town of Cheltenham, just twenty-five miles away. And when Ba was nine, she managed to invite herself along on her parents’ expedition to France simply by dint of jumping into the carriage with them.

  Yet this turned out to be the most intellectually formative of treats. Travelling by way of Calais, Boulogne, Abbeville and Amiens, the family followed a trail of ecclesiastical architecture to Paris, where they spent three weeks at the Hôtel de Rivoli ‘with French windows opening upon the Thuillerie Gardens, & Palace’. Ba and her mother frequented the nearby Louvre, ‘the most magnificent thing in the world I am sure’, and the Jardin des Plantes. They were joined by Uncle Sam, and went with him to the Théâtre Français and the Opéra Comique before returning to England via Rouen, where they viewed another cathedral and the spot where Joan of Arc was burned at the stake. It was the start of Ba’s lifelong fascination with Europe, and fuelled her desire to learn languages. It also differed markedly from the longueurs of life back home:

  Hope End in spite of the romantic prospects which environ it in spite of the beauty of beholding Nature wrapt in her bridal robe which we have at present IS dull and IS lonely [;] the sun rolls over our heads—no Papa is here to greet us.

  This is a fascinating glimpse of how important her father’s charisma is to the creation of this happy home. For every idyll is part fantasy, and Hope End in particular is being built with blood money. For, to an even greater extent than Graham-Clarke’s, Barrett wealth comes from sugar plantations. Ba’s father was born Edward Barrett Moulton at Cinnamon Hill in St James, Jamaica, in May 1785, and spent his first seven years in the elegant eighteenth-century Great House overlooking Montego Bay. It’s a beautiful spot, among aromatic cinnamon trees, that by the 1970s will be seductive enough for country and western star Johnny Cash to move in. The estate that surrounded young Edward, though, was one of several sugar plantations owned by his maternal grandfather Edward Barrett and worked by enslaved people.

  Edward’s mother was a Barrett, his father a Moulton, and when he was thirteen and living in England, he and his brother added a second ‘Barrett’ to their names in order to inherit from their maternal grandfather, who by then had neither surviving sons nor other legitimate grandchildren. As it had with the Clarke estate, money wanted to follow the family name. Once again, this required a complex process involving a Royal Warrant. That John Graham-Clarke was on hand to guide the youths through this suggests that he might even have proposed the idea. (Was he already planning a dynastic marriage?) When, later that same year, the teenaged Edward’s grandfather died, he left some 84,000 acres of sugar plantation where around 2,000 people were enslaved: a substantial legacy indeed.

  The Barretts seem to believe themselves to be of mixed heritage. Hercie Barrett, Ba’s four times great-grandfather, arrived in Jamaica in 1655, an officer in the army that captured it from Spain. As a reward, in 1663 King Charles II granted him land: a colonist, then, but not yet a slave owner. Subsequent generations, however, changed this, and the intervening century and a half has been plenty long enough for the kinds of consensual and non-consensual relationships across ethnic divides, both acknowledged and otherwise, that produce mixed-heritage populations in long-colonised societies. When she’s nearly forty, Ba will write to her lover that she herself has ‘the blood of a slave’:

  I would give ten towns in Norfolk (if I had them) to own some purer lineage than that of the blood of the slave!—Cursed are we from generation to generation!—I seem to hear the ‘Commination service’.

  This letter has been much quoted, including by commentators who believe that it displays not anxiety about heritage but right-minded abolitionist guilt. But the (racist) phrasing is clear. ‘Some purer lineage than that of the blood’ addresses ethnicity, not the blood on the family’s hands; and that Commination Service, already almost obsolete in Elizabeth’s lifetime, tries to ward off divine punishment not so much for any particular sin as for the ‘original sin’ of being born.

  Internalised racism is a baroque falsehood. Shame is a complex, unreasonable emotion, and shame and anxiety about something understood as one’s very identity is both profoundly unreasonable – no one can help how they’re born – and particularly complex because it concerns what is inescapable. From a twenty-first-century perspective, though, Barrett mixed heritage would be brilliant news. How exciting if the cultural game changer that Elizabeth Barrett Browning will become proves to have broken open not only the male canon but the canon of white writing too.

  Which is why it’s important to be careful with the actual recorded facts. Disappointingly, Ba’s closest relatives whose mixed heritage is certain aren’t people she’s actually descended fro
m but are lateral kin: second cousins who are the children of Grandmama’s profligate brother George Goodin Barrett. Three years after Papa and his siblings arrived in Britain, this second, illegitimate set of Edward Barrett’s grandchildren made the same Atlantic crossing. Their mother Elissa Peters was of mixed heritage. She had been enslaved until the death of her late ‘owner’, to whom she was ‘given’ by his father. When George Goodin died she was freed, and sent with her six children by him to John Graham-Clarke, to be settled in Newcastle under the terms of their father’s will, that they ‘not fix their abode in Jamaica but do settle and reside in such countries where those distinctions respecting colour are not maintained’. This optimistic construction of race relations in early nineteenth-century Tyneside all too conveniently tidies the children away from their late father’s property.

  The roots of Barrett privilege are in shallow soil. The family are paradoxically placed as beneficiaries of the very racism that causes them such anxiety. The customary behaviour of the Jamaican plantocracy does indeed make mixed heritage somewhere in the branching tree of their ancestors a reasonable hunch, but hunches aren’t history. Nevertheless, if race is at least partly a social construct – not a set of essentialist, eugenical capacities – shouldn’t we count it a kind of victory for nineteenth-century black writing that a woman who with relatively good reason believes herself to be of mixed heritage achieves literary superstardom before 1850? For Elizabeth is certainly not doing what later generations will call ‘blacking up’ in that posthumously much-quoted, but in fact very private, letter to her lover: on the contrary, she’s confessing a secret.

  If Ba has already encountered difficulty in imagining herself into the role of woman poet, imagining herself as black woman poet must be, for her time and class, almost unthinkable. The only precursor the forty-year-old who’ll write this letter might have heard of is Phillis Wheatley, the African-born poet who was raised as a slave in Boston, Massachusetts and created a sensation in 1773, when she moved to London and published a poetry collection, Poems on Various Subjects Religious and Moral, under the patronage of the Countess of Huntingdon. She is in a way Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s alter ego, the kind of outlier, impossibly-best-case chance Elizabeth might have had if she’d been born enslaved. Later admired for her classicism, in her own time much of Wheatley’s celebrity was based precisely on the perceived anomaly of her gifts: ‘These poems display no astonishing works of genius, but when we consider them as the productions of a young, untutored African, who wrote them after six months careful study of the English language, we cannot but express our admiration.’