Kindness at last for the poet EBB

traumatised. It sounds gloomy, but while the women’s stories are bleak, Roy infuses this book with wit, spirit, and compassion. Recounted from a wholly original perspective, it drives home the double jeopardy in which black Britons have often lived: “Mother Country: Funny phrase that. Britain gives the kind of mothering that would fetch the social workers in.”

Mike Phillips is another well-known name and his thriller, The Dancing Face, is even more topical today than on publication in 1997. The story of the theft of an iconic Benin mask, stolen by the marauding British in late Victorian times, it is a cry of rage about cultural loss and appropriation, and the imbalance of power between Britain and its former colonies that continues to blight the lives of modern black Britons. Phillips’s style is fast-paced, the plot eventful, but it is marred by a preacherly tone.

By contrast, SI Martin’s punchy historical novel, Incomparable World, pitches you into the stews of 18th-century London, and the scenes and characters do all the talking. Set among black soldiers who have returned from America’s war of independence to find themselves abandoned by the state and reduced to penury, it crackles with attitude and atmosphere.

Evaristo introduces each book individually. Her passion for highlighting these novels is not in doubt, but her style can be tutelary, as when saying that Roy’s novel “breaks with the heteronormative convention of black British writing”. Nicola Williams’s crime novel, Without Prejudice (1997), is about the English justice system as seen by a black female barrister: “[it] offers us a version of black female achievement that is essential to attaining and inspiring a more meritocratic nation.”

That cannot be disputed, but when she claims that “Val McDermid was one of the first crime writers to put women in the driving seat”, you can feel the shades of Agatha Christie, Josephine Tey, Dorothy L Sayers, Sara Paretsky – to name only a few – taking to the barricades.

Completing the series is Bernard and the Cloth Monkey, Judith Bryan’s painful account of two London sisters confronting their unhappy past. Its opening scene, in which the narrator’s father dies, is unforgettable: her mother shoves his false teeth into his mouth before he has taken his last breath, so that he will look the part as a corpse.

Evaristo describes this book as “a rebellion against silence”. That could stand as the credo for this series which, one hopes, continues to grow.

TWO-WAY MIRROR: THE LIFE OF ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING by Fiona Sampson

Profile, £18.99

REVIEW BY BRIAN MORTON

VIRGINIA Woolf said: “Fate has not been kind to Mrs Browning as a writer. Nobody reads her, nobody discusses her, nobody troubles to put her in her place.” One might argue that Mrs Woolf wasn’t very kind to her, either; when she turned her mind to Elizabeth Barrett Browning it was to write a biography of her dog Flush, and one wonders what, exactly, she means by “her place”.

But the better part of a century later, her basic point is beyond argument. No-one reads EBB now; no-one reads poetry, whose public gamut starts with Armitage and ends with Zephaniah. Perhaps now and again, some young swain hoicks “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways” out of an online dictionary of quotations for Valentine’s Day, but that’s it.

No-one else was much kinder to her. Two of the big beasts of modern criticism (both male, obviously) almost entirely excluded her from the Oxford Anthology of English Literature. EBB – as she liked to be called – comes down to us as a round-faced hypochondriac and selfwilled invalid, stuck at home with unfulfillable ambitions, who eloped with one of the big beasts of Victorian poetry, Robert Browning, and then lived in his shadow for the rest of her life. Those same critics, Lionel Trilling And Harold Bloom murmur sniffily that “Mrs Browning’s enthusiasms … gave her husband much grief”. An embarrassment, then.

It takes a biographer of Fiona Sampson’s lateral brilliance to re-argue EBB’s importance and to put her verse novel Aurora Leigh (a kind of poetic autobiography) back where it belongs among the great works of the period. She does by very carefully framing not just the life, which is far more vivid and complex than usually supposed, or than the awful The Barretts of Wimpole Street (you probably watched it, half asleep, after Sunday lunch once, when the world was black and white) made out.

Virginia Woolf said that what a woman writer needed was “a room of her own”. Elizabeth Barrett had one, which sounds ideal until you discover that she was confined in it and to a crippling harness that was supposed to correct a spinal problem that may well have been something viral.

It could even be that EBB’s muchderided vapours were the result of something like long Covid, not hypochondria. So the health issues were real and Sampson is superb on how much EBB’s work is, in that overworked but valid feminist trope, “written on the body”.

Woolf actually said that if a woman were to write, she would also need money. The MoultonBarretts had plenty of that, most of the time, but unfortunately, it came tainted with slavery. The family had returned from Jamaica, leaving EBB with the disturbing illusion – and it was an illusion – that she was of mixed race. Browning called her his “Portuguese”, hence in part the title Sonnets From The Portuguese. The health and even the colour of the body she was writing with would have been problematic to Elizabeth.

And then, from what sounds like a rural idyll, she was taken to London and a new set of gilded cages. Having spent her emerging years in strange, flirtatious communication with older men (all of them somehow modelled but different from her melancholy father), pompously correcting their Greek scansion, offering up her own early attempts for approval, she fell into a literary circle that allowed her to believe that she, too, could be a writer. She had admirers and detractors, supporters and gaolers, and they tended to be the same people.

It takes a certain effort of will now to pick up Aurora Leigh, but armed with Sampson’s complex portrait, with its multiple frames and mirror effects, it’s possible not just to read Elizabeth Barrett Browning again, but, more important, to let her read us. She has come suddenly up to date.

PHOTOGRAPH: PENGUIN BOOKS