Two-Way Mirror

by Fiona Sampson

  The exception is often viewed as an imposter, and the Barrett family disease is imposter syndrome. Ba’s father was only briefly exposed to the hurly-burly of school. Sent to Harrow at twelve, he left abruptly within a year. In the family version that will be passed down by Robert Browning, he was humiliatingly bullied by an older pupil for whom he was supposed to fag (that is, act as servant). Such bullying is endemic, indeed structural, to famous boys’ schools of the time; condoned as a way to ‘knock the corners off’ spoiled youngsters, teach discipline, and help them internalise the potency of hierarchy.

  Papa certainly has faith in hierarchy. And, a decade on from Ba’s idyllic first Herefordshire summer, he sends his own eldest two sons to Charterhouse. But he himself did not cope at school: with what, exactly? Was he, for example, flogged – like a ‘slave’, as he may have experienced it? He is said to be dark complexioned, like Ba. Was there racism in the abuse? Or, more complex, might his family have feared an element of racism? In the family version the older boy who ‘punished’ the teenager, allegedly for burning his toast, was expelled: how hard did Harrow try to soothe a pushy colonial family?

  Whatever happened, both brothers were withdrawn from school and, although Edward Barrett Moulton-Barrett went up to Trinity Hall Cambridge at sixteen, his corners clearly never were knocked off. By the time he got to university, he may also have had a stiffening sense of his fatherless family as dysfunctional. Unlike his brother Sam, Papa will never return to Jamaica, the place where their own father scandalously separated from or possibly even deserted them and their mother. For Ba’s paternal grandfather Charles Moulton left soon after his third son had been conceived, and later his brother Robert Moulton defrauded Papa, the eldest of these sons, of up to £30,000, asserting that Charles had given him power of attorney, and laying claim to manage Edward’s estates while he was still a minor.

  Despite all this, Charles has maintained some contact. By the time Ba turns seven he is living in England. Land tax records for 1812–13 show him residing at Epsom, Surrey, in a house belonging to the Barretts. But Ba never meets this missing grandparent. The begging letter he sends her father at this period elicits a brusque rebuttal. Still, his trickster figure resurfaces periodically. In The History of Parliament, where he earns a mention when his second son, Uncle Sam, serves as MP for Richmond, Yorkshire, he has become a ‘merchant, of Hammersmith, Mdx. and New York’. In fact he seems to hail from the island of Madeira, nearly 700 kilometres off the coast of Morocco, whose population at the time of his birth comprised primarily the descendants of early Portuguese settlers, and slaves from Guinea, Algeria and the Canary Islands.

  How aware of this is Ba? Many years in the future she’ll fall in love with a man whose terms of endearment for this brown-eyed, dark-haired woman include ‘the little Portuguese’, a pet name eventually to be immortalised in the title of her Sonnets from the Portuguese. But her feelings about this part of her family history are mixed. From childhood, Elizabeth Barrett Moulton-Barrett signs herself ‘EBB’, omitting the initial M because, ‘I fell into the habit […] of forgetting that I was a Moulton, altogether.’ She’ll publish her breakthrough book, Poems (1844), as ‘Elizabeth Barrett Barrett’.

  If Ba’s internalised racism whispers that her ancestry constitutes a ‘taint’, there’s just the faintest hint of another ‘taint’ too; one she may not even be aware of. Perhaps it’s not surprising that, with the not-disinterested John Graham-Clarke increasingly replacing other mentors, Edward Barrett Moulton-Barrett rushed into early marriage. But there’s an additional whiff of haste about this wedding, which took place on 14 May 1805, a fortnight shy of his twentieth birthday, and was announced only retrospectively. When Ba was born as early as decently possible just forty-two weeks later, on 6 March 1806, her father was still a couple of months short of his own legal majority. Her first brother, Bro, followed her with remarkable speed the following June, and such reproductive assiduity reminds us just how young a father Edward is.

  But there is another possibility. Mary and Edward married – in style, despite the haste – at the newly consecrated, fashionable St Nicholas’s Church, Gosforth. Given this, and the local standing of Mary’s family, it’s somewhat surprising that, when baby Ba arrives, she’s christened privately at just three days old, on 9 March 1806. No evidence survives to suggest that she’s particularly frail. Noticeably, this firstborn isn’t celebrated with a holiday on the family’s plantations, though first son Bro will be. And when he’s christened, on 10 February 1808, the two-year-old Ba is rechristened in public alongside him.

  It’s almost as if she’s been smuggled into the world. Her private christening is conducted by a good friend who just happens to be visiting the new parents that week. William Lewis Rham, a Cambridge friend of Edward’s, is on his way to becoming a leading agriculturalist; he’s also the rector of a parish far out of sight and mind in Wiltshire. He’s doubtless delighted to inspect the agricultural potential of the estate his friend has recently rented, Coxhoe Hall in County Durham. But it must be odd and embarrassing for the young, unmarried priest to coincide with, if not an actual birth, then the lying-in that followed it. On the other hand, with his relatively little experience of infants, Rham would be the perfect choice for officiant if one had anything questionable to cover up: such as, say, a baby who appears less a newborn than three or four months old. Which raises the question: could the consistently precocious Ba in fact have been born a little earlier than her recorded birth date, so perilously soon after her parents’ hasty marriage, and so close, at less than sixteen months, to Bro’s arrival?

  Whatever the case, for all his wealth, by July 1810 Ba’s twenty-five-year-old Papa has plenty of reasons to feel insecure. A broken home, immigration, anxieties about ethnicity and class, compromised wealth, early marriage and possibly accidental fatherhood, manipulation by an absent father, his father’s brother and his father-in-law: with so little to rely on, the psyche needs compensatory structures. Small wonder he’s throwing so much money and energy into creating his ideal home.

  Hope End house, finished the year he turns thirty-two, is a young man’s indulgence. The Barrett circle are more interested in extracting merchandise and money from Jamaica than in the kind of magpie cultural orientalism that Queen Victoria’s imperial reign will soon popularise, yet this great statement is built in the very newest, orientalist style. With its minarets, ogee drop-shaped windows and second-floor roundels, it has more than a little in common with the fashionable Picturesque, that newest cultural trend for strikingly ornamented, even whimsical forms of planting and building, for which Herefordshire friends and neighbours will turn out to be the intellectual powerhouse. Edward Barrett Moulton-Barrett doesn’t employ an architect, simply turning to landscape architect J. C. Loudon, who is redesigning the grounds, for occasional advice. The result is a fabulously expensive piece of outsider art.

  The house being built in 1810 below Ba’s parkland viewpoint looks like the folly it is – yet it has a disconcerting, Gaudi-like sense of fluidity. The building pushes and pulls old Palladian proportions to create a flowing modernist structure that’s a whole century ahead of its time. But, as it amplifies the original gesture of relegating the old, Georgian mansion that so resembled Cinnamon Hill to a stable block, some deeply personal, Freudian logic seems to be trumping economic and aesthetic sense.

  Perhaps unsurprisingly, in 1873 a subsequent owner will pull everything down and start again. But for the space of Ba’s childhood the house that Papa built represents everything that’s prodigious, expansive and progressive – and everything defensive and compromised – about the Barretts. Risk-taking, pioneering, fundamentally domestic and not a little vulgar, Hope End may be a monument to invention as survival strategy – and the precursor to the adult Ba’s own sui generis creativity.

  [Opening Frame]

  That great twentieth-century Italian, the novelist Italo Calvino, says that:

  Both in art and in literature, the functi
on of the frame is fundamental. It is the frame that marks the boundary between the picture and what is outside. It allows the picture to exist, isolating it from the rest; but at the same time, it recalls – and somehow stands for – everything that remains out of the picture.

  Calvino is a hugely sensual, visual writer, an artist of the coloured world. So perhaps it’s not surprising that he pictures storytelling this way. But this is much more than a nice literary metaphor; it’s an idea about how stories work. As Calvino points out, a frame isolates, identifies, and so shows up what it contains. It especially highlights what’s hard to see. In his own most famous novel, 1979’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller, a framing structure challenges us to think about both what’s true, and how we can know that it is.

  Calvino’s frame is his book’s ‘outer’ narrative about ‘you’ the reader. This kind of literary device is nothing new, though most introduce characters who then narrate the work’s ‘inner’ stories. The world’s oldest literary text, Gilgamesh, a survivor from the second millennium BCE, starts by imagining the discovery of (in turn more) ancient tablets recording the story it goes on to tell. In the middle ages, the Scheherazade stories collected in the Islamic Golden Age as One Thousand and One Nights, and Giovanni Boccaccio’s fourteenth-century The Decameron, offer us parables about storytelling as survival. Scheherazade needs to enchant her husband the Sultan so that he won’t execute her; the ten young people who narrate the Decameron are self-isolating from plague.

  We know from her 1842 essay, ‘The Book of the Poets’, how highly Elizabeth Barrett Browning values Geoffrey Chaucer’s framed compendium of The Canterbury Tales: ‘And he sent us a train of pilgrims, each with a distinct individuality apart from the pilgrimage, all the way from Southwark and the Tabard Inn, to Canterbury and Beckett’s shrine: and their laughter never comes to an end, and their talk goes on with the stars.’ Two of the English canon’s most famous frame novels, Mary Shelley’s three-ply Frankenstein – in which Walton the Arctic explorer frames Frankenstein’s own storytelling, which frames his creature’s – and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, narrated by the housekeeper, are written by women who are Elizabeth’s contemporaries; of those published in the century before her birth, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy could be described as all frame.

  So it’s not surprising that when she comes to write the full-length fiction that is also her ars poetica, she plays with interlocking frames. In Aurora Leigh her eponymous protagonist’s own story periodically frames others. Letters tell their own stories; so, at greater length and in person, do the heroine’s beloved cousin Romney, her nemesis Lady Waldemar, and her protégée Marion. And positioned at the heart of this verse novel is a story we don’t get to read: the entirely fictional, semi-autobiographical poetic masterpiece with which Aurora justifies her life choices and proves her identity as a poet. This imaginary book, the volume we can never open, is in a sense Aurora Leigh’s Aurora Leigh. But because we don’t get to read it, it exists as pure symbol, representing poetry itself: everything the writer of the real book within which it appears believes about her own life’s purpose and has spent it doing. Which is how Elizabeth contrives to frame her own self – her own life, love, beliefs and art – within the story of Aurora Leigh.

  Elizabeth’s life usually comes to us as a story ready-framed by cliché: the love story, the history of nervous invalidism, or the Victorian family melodrama. That’s especially ironic because her actual life was as a woman who revolutionised poetry, and she inspired generations of other readers and writers, particularly women. It’s also just plain wrong. Elizabeth is not a character. She has none of the plasticity of fiction. She was a real person – which means that writing about her has certain obligations and limits. Of course, rather like those other arts where faithfulness is taken for granted – translation, documentary – biography grapples with its own interpretive nature. But struggling with something is not the same as cheating.

  Aurora Leigh frames this book. I’ve even borrowed its nine-book structure and the frontispiece of early editions. This isn’t to claim that the verse novel is ‘really’ an autobiography, a memoir, or even a roman-à-clef: it’s not. The course of its heroine’s life does not follow its author’s. But the work is Elizabeth’s great account of a literary development that in one absolutely central way does resemble her own: it’s the story of someone who becomes herself through becoming a poet. This is the story I believe Elizabeth would have wanted to have told about herself; the frame she deserves.

  Book Two: How to be ill

  I did not write, nor read, nor even think,

  But sate absorbed amid the quickening glooms […]

  Dissolving slowly, slowly, until lost.

  Summer once again; but now it’s 1821 and Ba is fifteen. The sash window throws a double lozenge of pale West Country light onto a wall; it scarcely seems to move as hours pass. In a panel of sky, gulls wheel and tumble above the River Severn. There’s little for the eye to catch on and less to do: though the bedroom’s spacious enough and comfortable, it lacks personal clutter. ‘I am as happy as possible and have delightful fun’, Ba claims bravely in a letter to her sister Henrietta. But this is simply not true.

  She’s confined to the newly built, no-frills Gloucester Spa Hotel. Just over the road stands a utilitarian, single-storey Pump Room where iodine-rich spring water is dispensed. It’s all a world away from nearby Cheltenham, the holiday town famous for its palatial neoclassical Pump Rooms, public gardens and private spas. But Ba is in Gloucester for her health, not a holiday, and the spa is medically endorsed by a local celebrity. Driven, influential and polymathic, Dr John Baron is also physician at Gloucester General Infirmary, has a large private practice, is publishing research into TB, and is advocating the vaccinations introduced by his friend, the pioneering Edward Jenner – and when Gloucester County Lunatic Asylum opens a couple of years from now, he’ll serve as a consultant there, too.

  In a portrait painted just a year ago, Baron sports a cravat and silk waistcoat, turns up his velvet collar lapels and generally looks like what he is: a man unused to being crossed. But Ba, the indulged first child of a highly privileged family, and what’s more a teenager, is strong-willed too. She and Henrietta call Baron ‘Dr BARREN’ (which may be how the Scot pronounces his own name), and she grumbles that ‘he seems to have a penchant for the pillow’.

  She grumbles equally about getting up:

  I was out in my chair the day before yesterday but was certainly the worse for it. Yesterday the bath was tried but no sooner had the hot water touched my back than I was in agony. I could not remain in, an instant.

  But a little inconsistency is par for the teenage course. Besides, by the summer of 1821 she’s been ill for some months, and her diagnosis continues to elude the doctors. This is enormously frightening at a time when almost anything, from a common cold to an infected splinter, could be fatal. Ba’s next surviving letters are dictated to her brother as if she hadn’t the strength to write herself.

  One reason she’s here is that both a London doctor, Dr George Ricketts Nuttall of Dean Street, Soho, and Dr William Cother from Worcester – a second opinion the family has called in – are at a loss as to the nature of her ‘interesting case’. Cother’s diagnostic letter, based on the patient’s own account, is the most detailed version we have of the symptoms of this adolescent illness which will determine the course of her life. According to this, it starts with periodic headaches. After seven weeks, pain moves to:

  the right side, that is about the center of the angle formed by the greatest projection of the ribs, the umbilicus, and the anterior superior spinous process of the os ilium. The pain commences here is carried to the corresponding region of the back, up the side to the point of the right shoulder, and down the arm […] the paroxysms [are] accompanied by convulsive twitches of the muscles, in which the diaphragm is particularly concerned.

  The narrative diagnosis invites the reader to join in the detect
ive work of medicine. Reading these letters two centuries later, it’s striking how much dialogue there is between the patient, the doctors, and their client her father. At the end of May, when Ba is still at home, Dr Nuttall – well-known as a lecturer, author of medical books and Physician to the Westminster General Dispensary – holds to his opinion that she’s suffering from indigestion. He writes from London with a series of intimate questions about flatulence and bowel movements: ‘You have too much good sense, my dear Elizabeth, not to be candid with me, on a point, of so much moment to yourself […] In matters of this kind, false delicacy might, & have, often, led to the most ruinous consequences.’ Patient confidentiality, or the march of time, mean that, perhaps happily, we have no record of Ba’s reply as to whether she’s been passing, in the doctor’s colourful words, ‘clay-coloured, or greenish, or blackish, or frothy, or mucous, or yeasty motions’, or suffered ‘much distension from wind, & does it escape?’

  Instead, we watch as Nuttall, Cother and others gradually eliminate the most likely causes of her symptoms. ‘Your active turn of mind, & inactive state of body, together with your age &c incline you, as well as other young bodies under similar circumstances, to dyspeptic complaints’, Nuttall suggests. But his warning seems arbitrary. The high-spirited Ba is no indoor geek, even though she’s made the transition from childish bodily freedom to the inhibitions of adolescence: gentility expects a girl her age to muffle her body elaborately and adopt a sedentary lifestyle – just as her newly arriving menstrual cycle may make her feel, especially at first, that her body is busy with its own secret affairs.