SECRETS OF THE ‘HOW DO I LOVE THEE?’ POET
Two-Way Mirror: The Life Of Elizabeth Barrett Browning Fiona Sampson Profile £20
Due to the success of the 1934 biopic The Barretts Of Wimpole Street, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (right) is better known for her London address than her once famous verse-novel, Aurora Leigh. In the classic film, where she is played by Norma Shearer, Elizabeth, suffering from a mysterious and disabling illness that confines her to her bedroom, is tyrannised by her father, who has forbidden any of his children from marrying. She is rescued from her prison by the handsome poet Robert Browning and, after secretly marrying, they run away to Italy, where they live happily ever after. ‘How do I love thee?’ she wrote. ‘Let me count the ways.’
Taking a cudgel to the fairytale version of her life, Fiona Sampson’s vivid new biography gives us Elizabeth Barrett Browning as busy and ambitious rather than a swooning sleeping beauty. ‘She is a big personality,’ says Sampson, who writes throughout in the present tense, ‘crammed into the small frame of a diminutive body – and of a restricted life.’
The eldest of 12 children, Elizabeth, Sampson suggests, found freedom in her illness, which was a combination of chronic spinal pain and lung disease. Released from the drudgery of social life and domestic duties, she had time to concentrate on reading, thinking and corresponding with the key players in the literary world. Her father, meanwhile, was less a villain than a complex human being whom we should pity rather than hate. Sampson paints a lively picture of a close family in which the brothers have careers, the sisters remain at home and everyone has their own nickname (Elizabeth is Ba, her siblings are variously Stormie, Addles and Bro).
The family wealth comes from their West Indian plantations; Elizabeth is the daughter and granddaughter of slavers, and in one of her most famous poems, The Runaway Slave At Pilgrim’s Point, a female slave describes the horrors of her servitude. By the time she has run away herself, Elizabeth will have become an abolitionist.
Two-Way Mirror is divided, like Aurora Leigh, into nine parts and the book’s theme, like that of Elizabeth’s long poem, is the process by which a girl evolves into a writer. Sampson’s biography consciously mirrors her subject’s masterpiece, but then biography, she suggests, is itself a mirror that both reveals and distorts its subject.
Her previous biography, In Search Of Mary Shelley, made the same point about mirrors. Each part of Two-Way Mirror is accompanied by a ‘frame’ that further reflects on the nature of biography. ‘Is biography a kind of portrait?’ Sampson asks in the Second Frame. ‘If stories can be portraits,’ she later says, ‘we also read portraits as stories.’ These frames become a tad self-indulgent, and most readers will skip them in order to get on with the story itself, which is beautifully told. It is high time that Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Aurora Leigh were once again household names.