And while Philosophy, in spirit, free,
Reasons, believes, yet cannot plainly see,
Poetic Rapture, to her dazzled sight,
Pourtrays the shadows of the things of light;
[…]
Thus Reason oft the aid of fancy seeks,
And strikes Pierian chords—when Irving speaks!
As she leaves her teens, in other words, Elizabeth already believes that poetry earns its keep by aiding serious thought; intuiting or imagining what logic cannot. This is conscientious as it is; but her Preface goes further still, spelling out the argument for ‘Ethical Poetry’ that her late great poems will still be making decades in the future. Although ‘it has been asserted that poetry is not a proper vehicle for abstract ideas’, she argues now, ‘Poetry is the enthusiasm of the understanding.’ And she makes her case from political poetry, predictably concentrating on the classical canon and especially on Homer who, in Edward Gibbon’s words, is ‘the law-giver, the theologian, the historian, and the philosopher of the ancients’.
Crammed as An Essay’s actual title poem is with perhaps not completely digested classical allusions, this is a young poet flexing intellectual and creative muscle. She’s searching out her own means and ends, as she turns her gaze inward and takes ‘Mind’ as her topic. In developing the idea of the poet as a thinking self, she’s discarding childish daydreams of a poetic life of chivalric action, in which she would ‘Arm herself in complete steel […] & ride on a steed, along the banks of the Danube, every where by her enchanted songs […] attracting to her side many warriors & […] destroy the Turkish empire, & deliver “Greece the glorious.’’’
Perhaps her changed circumstances have forced this shift in perception. But the result is that she’s arriving at something like the famous Enlightenment idea that the self is found in and defined by thought, René Descartes’s ‘I think, therefore I exist’. Cogito, ergo sum. This line of thought allows her to sidestep the dismaying fact that it’s increasingly difficult for women writers to publish as women. An Essay had to be submitted for Elizabeth, and is published anonymously: society, it seems, takes one look at the embodied self, and decides its limits. A woman may only do this, an invalid just that. But, veiled by the page, a former tomboy can be a poet, and a young woman an intellectual. In this, Elizabeth’s experience is no outlier: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein appeared anonymously eight years ago, the Brontë sisters’ necessarily pseudonymous annus mirabilis, 1847, is still twenty years in the future.
Elizabeth’s Essay forces the traditional big questions about literature and thought through the unfamiliar paradigm of the woman writer. For though she may be anonymous to the reader, she knows she’s a woman writing: how does this make her feel? It’s turning out to be complicated – just like growing up. The cliché is that child prodigies find the passage to adulthood hard to navigate. When Elizabeth fell ill, just as she was leaving childhood, her condition was disabling and sometimes frightening, but in a way it solved a number of problems. A fourteen-year-old can just about convince herself that she’s still a child: she hasn’t finished growing and she can still genuinely enjoy some childish things. But at fifteen this becomes a pretence. As the eldest Barrett offspring, it falls to Elizabeth to sustain the idyll of family childhood for as long as possible. Where once being old for her age pleased her father, now immaturity is required. And this isn’t just about sexual innocence. It applies to autonomy and agency too. The fierce trajectory of intellectual precocity is being abruptly braked by a freeze on emotional development so sharp that it threatens to split the teenaged self apart.
Before her illness, Elizabeth’s notes to her father had already become painfully kittenish. ‘My ever ever dearest Puppy’, she wrote at fifteen, going on five:
My heart whispers that you will not refuse, that you will not turn from me in anger! My dearest, dearest Puppy grant my request! […] Imagine yourself my age once more, how your heart would beat with joy at the prospect of an excursion to the metropolis! Have I tormented you? If I have, oh! forgive me.
It’s with such miming of childish unselfconsciousness, of course, that self-consciousness arrives. And as Elizabeth starts to act ‘in character’, she becomes more conventionally feminine. Her new physical frailty helps this along, making her appear quietened, passive. Housebound as she is, she becomes a sort of genius loci. It would be easy to mistake her, as Papa does, for Coventry Patmore’s ‘The Angel in the House’, ‘all mildness and young trust, / And ever with her chaste and noble air’.
Self-suppression and sexual denial will pass down the line of siblings as each comes of age, and slowly become the family norm. The frustration of Elizabeth’s intellectual life, on the other hand, is felt by her alone. But it’s no less damaging. Autodidacticism is ultimately limiting; Elizabeth badly needs a mentor. Yet her age and gender mean that the only way she can meet any such figure will be through her family.
Uncle
