Two-Way Mirror

by Fiona Sampson

  This is not what happens next. Instead in a visceral reflex Papa summons his own Sam, the son who is his brother’s namesake, home from Jamaica. At twenty-six the former naughty schoolboy has become one of the most gregarious, outgoing members of the Barrett clan and, sent to Cinnamon Hill in 1836, he has proved an asset in the management of family affairs. He is also a young man with an appetite for life. It’s no coincidence that, among the siblings, he has a special bond with Henrietta. Third and fourth in the surviving birth order as Ba and Bro are first and second, the pair share an analogous bond of temperament and age, relishing socialising, dancing and party-going. Characteristically, when Sam does finally return to England in November 1838, almost a year after his uncle’s death, he takes in a tour of the eastern seaboard of the US, including a visit to New York, along the way. Indeed, even back in Britain he doesn’t rush home, but goes first to old friends in Sidmouth.

  By the time he arrives in London, the family will be settled in at Wimpole Street, and they see their new home’s advantages and deficiencies through his eyes. Moving half a mile east from Gloucester Place means living in a yet more built-up area of London. Elizabeth has not been keen on the move, ‘on account of the gloominesses of that street & of that part of the street—whose walls look so much like Newgate’s turned inside out’. Wimpole Street, which runs parallel with Harley Street, isn’t an arterial thoroughfare like Gloucester Place. If a little quieter, it’s also less imposing: Sam is ‘in some measure disappointed at the width of the Street; to this however I am reconciled, for the house is delightful in every respect’. (He also notices the London cold after the warmth of Montego Bay: ‘My room as warm as I could wish it when in bed, but as cold as my bitterest enemy could desire when out.’) But number 50 itself is if anything grander than the old house. Though constructed of plain brick – apart from the stone-faced ground and lower floor – it’s triple-fronted, comprising a basement plus four storeys; five if you include the rooms in the mansard roof. A wide stone bridge leads to a front door with a magnificent peacock’s tail of statement fanlight.

  The Barrett men arrive at Wimpole Street in mid-April 1838. Elizabeth and her sisters follow after a few days because, ‘The house was so unfinished, that we were obliged & glad to accept the charities of a kind friend & go to Crawford Street until the ghost of paint had been sufficiently exorcised.’ But once there, ‘We like the house very much indeed!’ she tells Miss Mitford. ‘The doves & my books & I have a little slip of sitting room to ourselves, —& dearest Papa in his abundant kindness surprised me in it with a whole vision of majestic [plaster] heads from Brucciani’s—busts of poets and philosophers.’

  This ‘little slip of sitting room’ is a gift, an acknowledgement – and something of a gilded cage. It lays out a future that Elizabeth, of all the siblings, is expected to spend indoors, reading and writing. And her father’s ‘abundant kindness’ in making this as pleasant as he can for her does in fact create the ideal conditions for work, since it’s not entirely true that, as Virginia Woolf will put it, ‘A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write.’ The money, at least, needn’t absolutely be her own: for now, Papa’s wealth genuinely enables Elizabeth’s writing life.

  In fact Edward Barrett Moulton-Barrett will receive such a bad posthumous press from his daughter’s admirers that it’s worth reckoning up just how important he is for her emergence as a poet. Ever since she was fourteen and he paid for her debut publication, The Battle of Marathon, he has encouraged Elizabeth’s writing both practically and emotionally: his ‘admonitions have guided my youthful muse, even from her earliest infancy’, as that volume’s dedication puts it. There’s more to being born into the right family than financial comfort, access to the parental library, and decent home tutoring, essential though these are. Without Papa’s consent, An Essay on Mind would not have been published when Elizabeth was twenty; if he hadn’t urged her to submit the manuscript, Prometheus Bound wouldn’t have appeared when she was twenty-seven.

  In the first half of the nineteenth century, gifted women are dependent on fragile connectors of good fortune. It’s Elizabeth’s particular luck, for example, that her father isn’t interested in rushing his daughters into dynastic marriages: perhaps his own empire-building father-in-law put him off. In any case a strong, almost fundamentalist religiosity has now combined with what he views as his own worldly failure to make him see prayerful morality as life’s most important work. Like nothing so much as the founder of one of those Catholic religious orders of which the Nonconformist in him must disapprove, he sees a cloistered existence dedicated to study and prayer not as half-lived, but as the best of all possible lives. ‘We are dying & all are dying around us daily, eternity is hastening, be it our study to prepare for it’, as he notes in a characteristically cheery missive to George. For this Revivalist Christian, prayer is an active, even heroic, intervention in the world rather than a retreat from it. In making the virtually housebound Elizabeth a domestic repository for the Christian duty ‘to watch and pray’, he is allotting her what he sees as a pivotal role; albeit one with more than a passing resemblance to mediaeval anchoress, or village sin-eater.

  In coming years Papa will get in the habit of coming to pray with Elizabeth every night. But religiosity is just one face of her culture’s emerging obsession with the figure of an imprisoned woman. Beyond the immuring walls of the Barrett home this is becoming highly sexualised. One of Elizabeth’s emerging poetic peers, Alfred Tennyson – three years her junior – has already published two poems, ‘Mariana’ (in 1830) and ‘The Lady of Shalott’ (in 1833), fetishising walled-up women. Mariana in her ‘moated grange’, pining for lost love, is one of Shakespeare’s ‘spare’ characters from Measure for Measure; in coming decades, Tennyson’s poem will inspire famous paintings by John Everett Millais and John William Waterhouse. In a tangentially Arthurian story which generates three further Waterhouse canvases, his Lady of Shalott is locked in a tower and cursed to weave perpetually – until she falls fatally in love with Sir Lancelot:

  She left the web, she left the loom,

  She made three paces thro’ the room,

  She saw the water-lily bloom,

  She saw the helmet and the plume,

  She look’d down to Camelot.

  Thwarted sexuality suffocates these fantasy figures, and it is striking how much they resemble later stories about Elizabeth – which she herself will protest. In 1844 she will be hurt when someone who she by then thinks of as a friend, Richard Hengist Horne, presents her as a reclusive invalid in his encyclopaedic A New Spirit of the Age: their relationship will never fully recover. A year later she’ll challenge even Robert Browning, ‘Do you conjecture sometimes that I live all alone here like Mariana in the moated Grange?’ Twentieth-century popular fiction will turn the indoor years of her thirties into a thrumming Oedipal drama; or else portray her as sexually unawakened, a dammed-up force ready to burst into creativity once she’s roused with a kiss. But if the reality of authorship is much more quotidian, it’s also more self-directed. For all her father’s support, it’s Elizabeth’s own strong will that has driven her forward through her piecemeal poetic education, over the threshold of the banal and into writing of real literary merit. She is a big personality crammed into the small frame of a diminutive body – and of a restricted life.

  That personality finds the space to emerge on the page. It’s impossible to ignore the spikey intellectual charm of Elizabeth’s letters, as when she beautifully folds doubled puns, reflexivity and reflection into a thank-you note to John Kenyon:

  I have not been asleep over Landor’s [work]. It is easier to dream than to sleep over a volume of his: and perhaps very beautiful as these are in many parts, one of my dreams is, that they express coldly, & with a hard stiff stoney outline, what the Greeks were. There were living Greeks—were there not? as well as Greek statues.

  Nor can we discount the simpler, warmer tone she uses to Arabella about:

&n
bsp; flannel waistcoats up to the throat—& next the skin—& most of the most disagreeable things you can think of besides .. provided that you happen to be particularly imaginative while you think!—[…] Tell us everything about everybody—us meaning Henrietta & me. I never show your letters & so you may open your heart!

  Yet these are both ways of writing in persona. It’s not that the petite brunette at her writing desk is faking it or being manipulative when she writes as an effusive young lady. But she is trying to work out how to be herself.

  She’s afraid of turning into an intellectual woman, of the kind who ‘used to—frighten me more than any woman I ever knew. There used to be fear for me even in the pure intellect of her eye.’ In a way, what she fears is what she’s always pictured as the masculinity within her own make-up: a poetic vocation that, ever since her tomboy childhood, has been muddled up with the almost exclusively male role models, from Homer to Byron, that are available to her. Later generations of writing women will be released from similar anxieties by realising that the intellect is gender-free. Or at least by recognising that male writers are simply the historically available models, and that with more history this will change. But becoming a writer always has to do with individuation: a matter of making, or failing to make, private sense of the writing task.

  Elizabeth has always understood that developing as a writer is no accident; sharpening her technique, she treats even letters as compositions. Now this process of poetic self-invention is bearing fruit. When The Seraphim appears in June 1838, its reception makes clear that this is a real achievement. Reviews start to appear immediately, and are substantial. The Sunbeam’s coverage extends across ten pages and five issues – an honour it otherwise accords only to Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus – framing her as an important new figure. Pieces appear in The Atlas, The Examiner, The Athenaeum, Blackwood’s, The Metropolitan Magazine, The Monthly Review, The Literary Gazette, The Quarterly Review and The Monthly Chronicle. In short, The Seraphim is one of the year’s must-review books.

  This extensive critical reception will later be short-handed by scholars as ‘mixed’. In fact, reviewers speak with practically one voice, repeating the terms ‘extraordinary’ and ‘exceptional’, a consensus best summed up by The Athenaeum:

  This is an extraordinary volume—especially welcome as an evidence of female genius and accomplishment—but it is hardly less disappointing than extraordinary.

  Uneven, even controversial: but undeniably important. Some critics object to religious verse in principle, others complain that the collection’s title poem is static and conceptually weak. But, as The Atlas points out, ‘the author deprecates such criticism by declaring she has not “written a book but a suggestion”’. It does well to seize on this key line from her Preface, because The Seraphim marks Elizabeth’s shift from linear thought – philosophical argumentation or narrative – to evocation, ‘sublimity—suggested, but not developed’ as The Monthly Chronicle says. The Athenaeum assumes that this is a loss of control – ‘Miss Barrett’s genius is of a high order: active, vigorous, and versatile, but unaccompanied by discriminating taste. A thousand strange and beautiful visions flit across her mind’ – while The Monthly Review sees ‘evidence of a singularly original mind […] that […] must be carefully directed and forcibly controlled’, and Blackwood’s concludes that ‘there is an originality in the whole cast and conception of the strain that beyond all dispute proves the possession of genius. But they are all disfigured by much imperfect and some bad writing.’ In short, autodidacticism is both Elizabeth’s strength and her weakness. Its reward is to be compared to Percy Bysshe Shelley by both The Metropolitan Magazine and The Literary Gazette; its penalty, to be reminded that she is a woman: ‘Especially, when considered as the compositions of a female, [these poems] must command admiration and awaken hope.’

  Elizabeth may prefer The Athenaeum’s observation that ‘she addresses herself to sacred song with a devotional ecstacy.’ In 1838 religious poetry appears not dated but radical, even risky, because religion matters. Not for another eight years will the doctrinal unorthodoxy and radically modern technique of J. M. W. Turner’s ‘seraphim’, his visionary The Angel Standing in the Sun, combine to confound viewers. In fact ironically, now that Marsh Chapel and its stimulating theological entanglements are in the past, Elizabeth’s own faith seems to be settling down within conventional bounds. Just as it once replaced her obsession with Greek prosody, now doctrinal argument has in turn disappeared from her correspondence. Both have been stages in the accidental education from which she emerges as a poet of technical accuracy and ethical acuity; both are also responsible for slowing her literary development, at least compared to men emerging from the forcing houses of good schools and university. Forced to guide herself through the bibliographical highways – and sometimes getting stuck in byways – Elizabeth is developing on a feminine timescale.

  Future admirers will imagine that, had Elizabeth only been able to escape the parental home for happy marriage earlier, she would have survived longer and written more: the immured woman fantasy, once again. The truth is that all the most-read women of the early nineteenth century – Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, Mary Shelley (before marriage, in widowhood) – write while unmarried. Even George Eliot and George Sand both choose cohabitation, a lifestyle that allows freedom for literary work. If Elizabeth had married before she received the literary world’s imprimatur, her talents, like those of most women of the era, would have disappeared into household management, social respectability, and the repeated pregnancies by which they may well have been snuffed out, as Charlotte Brontë’s were. Only fame can ring-fence her writing time. Only late marriage will spare her already frail body the risks of numerous pregnancies.

  Mary Russell Mitford, less well-known in the twenty-first century but in her lifetime bestselling – is unmarried too. Her letters to Elizabeth are noticeably more effusive than others she writes, and it’s entirely possible that this isn’t only because she wants to encourage her shy protégée. But that she might conceivably have a crush plainly doesn’t occur to the younger woman, who’s busy being in awe – ‘Indeed it does seem to me like a vision […] that I shd. know you and be allowed to love you and write to you & think of you as my friend’ – and picturing herself as a mentee. Nor should we jump to this conclusion, for in 1838 being single or married says more about a woman’s social and financial security than it does about her sexuality. The tension that Elizabeth would have to resolve if she were free to leave home isn’t between heterosexual marriage and loving women, but between what marriage means for a woman’s life, and her own desire to live and to write freely as men do. What matters for her story is simply that Miss Mitford’s affection is discerning, deep and enduring. But at thirty-two Elizabeth has anxieties all the same. Must a literary woman be a sacred monster? With conspicuous tactlessness she tells her friend of her fear that, ‘In seeing Lady Dacre I should see a woman of the masculine gender, with her genius very prominent in eccentricity of manner & sentiment’, because, apart from Miss Mitford, ‘The only literary woman I ever knew […] was Lady Mary Shepherd whose kindness & terribleness I equally remember.’

  Elizabeth herself, of course, has proved all too feminine in her ability to fall damagingly for a male authority figure. But though she may look up to the literary friends she’s making now, unlike Boyd – or indeed her father – they don’t trap her in humiliating codependency, whatever their own feelings. It’s not inconceivable, for example, that the twice-widowed John Kenyon is attracted to his pretty and gifted protégée. At least that’s the complexion Henrietta puts on their friendship. ‘How would you like him to be your brother in law?’ she asks Sam. ‘You must know that he is in great esteem of our dearest Ba—we torment her most terribly about him.’ Kenyon, who has been alone since his wife died in 1835, is charismatic, sociable, kind – and wealthy. In short, he is a catch. But he’s also a year older than Papa and, although she frequently speculates
with Miss Mitford about his private life, Elizabeth never seems to put her own self in this romantic frame.

  Instead, ill-health is returning to claim her for a second time. By summer 1838 she’s coughing continually. Infection succeeds infection. In June, ‘I have been sometimes very unwell & sometimes better […] A cold this week threw me back a little […] The lungs are said to be affected—they did not respond as satisfactorily as heretofore to the latest application of the stethoscope.’ Struggling for breath, she’s confined to bed again, ‘& my weakness increases of course under the remedies which successive attacks render necessary’.

  But these remedies represent the very best treatment available. Papa has hired the personal physician to the young Queen Victoria. Dr Chambers is renowned for using the still very-modern stethoscope to diagnose the presence or absence of TB. He gives Elizabeth the all clear: ‘Dr Chambers—the sincerest of physicians! has told me that there seems to be no ulceration of lungs, & that he has grounds for hoping for my ultimate complete recovery.’ Yet by mid-August it’s clear that she has chronic lung disease of some kind. In this era before antibiotics it’s easy for a chest infection to become life-threatening bronchitis, pneumonia or pleurisy; especially in someone as unfit as Elizabeth. ‘Consumption’ is far from the only fatal pulmonary condition; indeed Elizabeth’s unusually isolated lifestyle makes her a less likely candidate for this contagious disease, and we know of no sufferers in her circle apart from her late Uncle Sam, who was far away in Jamaica for the last decade of his life. But by now Elizabeth is ‘a helpless being […] whose migrations have for so many months been from the bed to the sofa’. She’s coughing up some blood, thought to be the result of breaking a blood vessel in a coughing fit, and Chambers ‘has made an essential condition of my leaving this part of England for the winter […] to stay at the risk of my life wd be wilfulness & foolishness at once’.