Two-Way Mirror Fiona Sampson (best romance ebooks .txt) 📖

– since his father was a Hope End tenant farmer – and who’s risen from stable boy to head of the household servants. ‘Quite above all aspersion’, and ‘honest, & good in the common way,’ he’s also ‘a handsome young man, as perhaps you have observed,’ Elizabeth comments, perhaps tartly, to Miss Mitford. But servants are expected to be unmarried and Elizabeth Treherne, as she now is, wed in secret at the end of 1843. More, she was already three months pregnant on her wedding day. Now the wedding is confessed – but not the pregnancy – and Treherne leaves immediately upon this announcement to set up a bakery, which the Barretts promise to patronise, at a new home in Camden Town. Meanwhile ‘Crow’, as Elizabeth can’t stop calling her, works out a protracted leave. She’s already six months pregnant. In May, entering her eighth month, and on top of working the early hours of a bakery shift, she continues to walk the miles between Camden and Wimpole Street as part of a very gradual handover.

Which may in part express her own ambivalence. It’s a shock to have to leave home and an absorbing, secure job just because you’ve married, especially as this was a shotgun wedding which left no time to prepare emotionally. Besides, pregnancy hormones keep the young mother-to-be emotional. She weeps copiously. Hers has been a demanding role. Elizabeth is always at home, has few other companions, and is never far from being bedbound. But nursing her successfully through a series of crises has made the two women’s relationship unusually human. It has the intensity of absolute dependency on Elizabeth’s side, while for Crow, a bright, opinionated woman, it has been an opportunity to access ideas and the books that Elizabeth lends or reads aloud to her – although this is probably less flattering than it seems, since Elizabeth also reads aloud to Flush and even tries to teach him to read.

To prevent her mistress getting worked up, Crow’s final day passes unannounced, and 25 April 1844 is full of glorious chaos anyway, as Miss Mitford at last brings Flush senior to visit Elizabeth and Flush junior. But Elizabeth is upset all the same. She picks at the secrecy surrounding Crow’s marriage, even though she must understand perfectly well that it’s essential for people in service to get arrangements in place before they’re dismissed into the world with no means of support. But if Crow ever had contemplated confiding in her, witnessing what happened when Miss Mitford’s maid and groom got into a similar scrape at the start of this year would have put her off. Elizabeth’s overreaction is the cri de coeur of someone who desperately wants those she has most to do with to love her:

of the want of chastity,—I say nothing at all. I even can conceive of the chastest of women sacrificing her reputation to the love of one man. […] But the train of deception […] is a different matter—& the more I think of the heart, which could […] so plot on, plot on, .. the wedding ring on the finger & the lover behind the door.

After the wedding ring is on Elizabeth Crow’s finger, her successor, a fellow northerner, is chosen. Elizabeth Wilson has arrived from Northumberland in service to Susanna Maria, a Barrett cousin by marriage who’s staying at Wimpole Street because her husband, Samuel Goodin Barrett, is in danger of arrest over another contested will. Henrietta, seeing someone ‘gentle-voiced, & of a bright & kind countenance’, responds to the emergency of Crow’s departure by poaching Wilson on her sister’s behalf. Elizabeth herself is a little less fulsome, though her reservations will prove unfounded: ‘Very willing, very anxious, .. almost too anxious! very gentle, .. almost too gentle! a little failing in the vivacity & cheerfulness I like about me. I am afraid I shall never like her as well as Crow.’

At which juncture we must pause to accuse one of these young women – Crow? Or Wilson? – over the development of Elizabeth’s signature hairdo. In the 1840s barley curls, long vertical ringlets hanging over the ears, move from the nursery to the heads of grown women. So half of Elizabeth’s hair is massed in a chignon low down at the nape of her neck, while the rest hangs in thick, dark curls either side of her face. It’s a tumbling, girlish look, flattering to a woman in her late thirties who wishes to hide somewhat behind her coiffure. Its cheek-hugging also echoes the lacy side panels of invalid bonnets: perhaps Elizabeth finds the familiar feeling comforting. Unfortunately, though, while fashions continue to change, her hairstyle will not. By the time she’s in her fifties it will long have ceased to be flattering, and will have come to look, if anything, like a homage to Flush.

In 1844 however, barley curls are fashionable. And so is Elizabeth herself, as a new collection of her work enjoys literary success. Edward Moxon publishes Poems on 13 August 1844, and this time the reviews are still more numerous and enthusiastic. She receives substantial coverage in sixteen British periodicals. Moxon’s offprints are published simultaneously in New York by Henry G. Langley, who gives the book the title of its long opening poem, ‘A Drama of Exile’. The young country is sensitive enough about its relationship with Britain for The United States Magazine and Democratic Review to quote from Elizabeth’s dedication:

‘My love and admiration have belonged to the great American people,’ these are memorable words on the lips of Elizabeth Barrett […] America is not marble nor stone that she should be insensible to a good will so earnest and true!

Other American reviews appear in The Atlas, The Knickerbocker, and Godey’s Lady’s Book – and in the 7 December issue of Evening Mirror, where a short piece thought to have been written by Edgar Allan Poe concludes: ‘We do not believe that there is a poetical soul embodied in this world that […] sees