TWO-WAY MIRROR
The Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
ALSO BY FIONA SAMPSON
Come Down
Stone Moon with Alison Grant
Ilmarinen and the Fire with Louisa Amelia Albani
In Search of Mary Shelley: The girl who wrote Frankenstein
Limestone Country
Lyric Cousins: Poetry & musical form
The Catch
Coleshill
Night Fugue: Selected Poems
Beyond the Lyric: A map of contemporary British poetry
Music Lessons: The Newcastle Poetry Lectures
Rough Music
Poetry Writing
Attitudes of Prayer with Tadashi Mamada
Common Prayer
On Listening: Selected Essays
Writing: Self and Reflexivity with Celia Hunt
The Distance Between Us
Folding the Real
The Healing Word
Birthchart with Meg Campbell
AS EDITOR
Percy Bysshe Shelley
A Century of Poetry Review
Creative Writing in Health and Social Care
A Fine Line: New Poetry from Central and Eastern Europe with Jean Boase-Beier & Alexandra Buchler
The Self on the Page with Celia Hunt
TWO-WAY MIRROR
The Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
FIONA SAMPSON
First published in Great Britain in 2021 by
PROFILE BOOKS LTD
29 Cloth Fair
London EC1A 7JQ
www.profilebooks.com
Copyright © Fiona Sampson, 2021
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The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
All reasonable efforts have been made to obtain copyright permissions where required. Any omissions and errors of attribution are unintentional and will, if notified in writing to the publisher, be corrected in future printings.
The author and publisher assume no responsibility for the content of websites that are not the publisher’s own. While care has been taken to ensure that the web links in the Notes section of this book are accurate at the time of publication, the publisher cannot guarantee that these links remain viable.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 1 78816 207 4
eISBN 978 1 78283 528 8
Typeset in Garamond by MacGuru Ltd
Printed and bound in Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.
For Peter
‘… last, an amethyst.’
Contents
A note on names
Acknowledgements
List of illustrations
Frontispiece From within
Book 1 How (not) to belong
Opening Frame
Book 2 How to be ill
Second Frame
Book 3 How not to love
Third Frame
Book 4 How to manage change
Fourth Frame
Book 5 How to lose your way
Tain
Book 6 How to be dutiful
Sixth Frame
Book 7 How to desire
Seventh Frame
Book 8 How to be autonomous
Eighth Frame
Book 9 How to lose a body
Closing Frame
Notes
A note on names
Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s family called her Ba throughout her life; Robert Browning took up the habit. But for all its affection, this diminutive is redolent of the way she’s been diminished, both personally and poetically, in popular accounts. The poet signed herself EBB, and this shorthand is a godsend to researchers. But initials aren’t a name, just a slightly dehumanising, paralegal formula. So I’ve chosen the reasonable onlooker’s position and call my protagonist Elizabeth from Book 2, where she comes of age. Other family members are called by the names her own usage settled on: ‘Papa’, ‘Treppy’, ‘Uncle Sam’, ‘Stormie’; but not ‘Addles’ for Henrietta.
In refusing the premise of slavery, I won’t accept that people are ‘slaves’ or can be ‘property’. Where people in this story are enslaved, that’s how I refer to them; I use quote marks to indicate contemporary usage of ‘buying’ and ‘owning’ without accepting the terms.
Acknowledgements
I am extremely grateful to Jill Bialosky at W. W. Norton, Cecily Gayford at Profile and Markus Hoffmann at Regal Hoffmann Associates for this commission. My gratitude also goes to the Society of Authors for a Writer’s Award, and to Archipelago Publishing House, Dajana Djedović and the Museum of Language and Letters at Tršić for a residency, which enabled me to work on this book. I’d like to thank my agent Sarah Chalfant for her insightful guidance and the extraordinary fillip of her support; Susanne Hillen for her consummate copy-edit; and above all and always, my husband and first reader, Peter Salmon, for putting up with the nineteenth-century women who have taken residence with us.
I’ve benefited hugely from the generosity of the Provost and Fellows of Eton College, who have granted permission for quotation from the unpublished Browning letters as well as image reproduction rights. I would like to thank Michael Meredith, Browning scholar and College Librarian Emeritus, for his ready intellectual hospitality.
This book wouldn’t have been a realistic possibility without the mighty, exemplary and pioneering work of Philip Kelley, Browning scholar and advocate, including the monumental and still-growing corpus of The Brownings’ Correspondence, some of it co-edited with Ronald Hudson, Edward Hagan and Scott Lewis, published by Wedgestone Press. Now largely digitalised and freely available online, the Correspondence is the indispensable Browning resource, and my references follow its cataloguing system throughout: www.browningscorrespondence.com. Since 1979, the National Endowment for the Humanities, an independent United States federal agency, has supported the Brownings’ Correspondence Project with twenty-one grants totalling $3.612 million: for this visionary support everyone with any interest in the Brownings and their work must be profoundly grateful.
From the outset, Philip Kelley has been a truly generous correspondent, and I’m most grateful to him for welcoming me into the community of EBB obsessives. More, he has with extraordinary generosity read this book in manuscript, correcting errors and supplying illuminating details and connections from his wealth of knowledge: an act of exceptional support from a world-leading expert to a colleague he’s never met. Such errors as remain are all my own.
Illustrations
A shoulder of Hope End parkland. (Author’s photograph.)
Hope End House in the early nineteenth century. (Reproduced by kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Balliol College.)
Cinnamon Hill Great House, Jamaica. (By permission of Glen Carty.)
Ba aged around eight with family pet Havannah. (Reproduced by permission of the Provost and Fellows of Eton College.)
Ba aged twelve, with brothers Bro and Sam. (Reproduced by permission of the Provost and Fellows of Eton College.)
Elizabeth aged fifteen. (Reproduced by permission of the Provost and Fellows of
