Fiona Sampson - Two-Way Mirror

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

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 publishers 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.

Elizabeth Barrett Brownings 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 shes been diminished, both personally and poetically, in popular accounts. The poet signed herself EBB, and this shorthand is a godsend to researchers. But initials arent a name, just a slightly dehumanising, paralegal formula. So Ive chosen the reasonable onlookers position and call my protagonist Elizabeth from , 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 wont accept that people are slaves or can be property. Where people in this story are enslaved, thats how I refer to them; I use quote marks to indicate contemporary usage of buying and owning without accepting the terms.

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 Writers Award, and to Archipelago Publishing House, Dajana Djedovi and the Museum of Language and Letters at Tri for a residency, which enabled me to work on this book. Id 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.

Ive 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 wouldnt 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 Im 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 hes never met. Such errors as remain are all my own.

A shoulder of Hope End parkland. (Authors 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 Eton College.)

Elizabeth with Flush at Wimpole Street in the mid-1840s. (Reproduced by permission of the Provost and Fellows of Eton College.)

Outside view of Casa Guidi today. (Authors photograph.)

The interior of Casa Guidi. (Authors photograph.)

Elizabeth and Robert in 1853; matching portraits by Thomas Buchanan Read. (Armstrong Browning Library, Baylor University, Waco, Texas.)

Outside view of the Brownings apartment building in Via de Bocca di Leone, Rome. (Authors photograph.)