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

location of classical antiquity, which to Elizabeth has long represented the source of poetry: those allusions to the Pierian Spring in her youthful An Essay on Mind weren’t entirely rhetorical. Historic Pisa, with its classical and Renaissance treasures and established English community, stands for both Italian culture and personal liberty. So it’s not entirely surprising that last summer Elizabeth used her returning strength to fight for the chance to come to this city where, a quarter century ago, both Byron and Shelley spent substantial periods.

It has rapidly become apparent that Robert Browning is the love of her life, but Elizabeth knows from the off that her father would forbid their romance. In Pisa though, away from parental scrutiny and the dangers of gossip, she could do more or less as she pleases without having to, in effect, choose between the two men she loves best. She also has a more pressing reason to get to Italy. In September 1845 Dr Chambers counsels strongly that she needs to go south for the winter if she is to survive. ‘I was examined with that dreadful stethoscope, & received his command to go without fail to Pisa by sea. He said […] that there was nothing for me but warm air .. no other possible remedy.’ The stakes are high; and so explicit that Elizabeth’s family actually explore a number of ways to make such a move. The patient could afford to run an independent household, as at Torquay, and her need to be chaperoned and supported seems to offer one or more of her siblings a chance of their own to escape the parental roof.

So the scheme she proposes later this month involves Arabel and George (who becomes her co-advocate) as travelling companions. Papa’s reaction is, perhaps predictably, fury. It embarrasses him that the distinguished doctor he himself directed Elizabeth to consult has prescribed this trip as life-saving. It forces his moral hand and, like all weak men, Papa hates to have his hand forced. He can’t refuse his ailing daughter permission to travel, so instead he punishes her emotionally: ‘I was treated this morning as an undutiful daughter because I tried to put on my gloves.’

But Elizabeth can’t quite yet accept that her beloved father is being selfish. She has trusted the family’s difficult transitions as necessities, decisions much prayed over by a conscientious and loving parent; and has internalised her father’s harsher judgements, alongside his encouragement and special attention, as corrective facts. The sternly Nonconformist Christianity he now practises aligns the head of the family with a God-the-Father whose infallible judgements must be obeyed. If her father proves pettier than this, then everything about family life must be reassessed: Sam’s death in Jamaica and the pressure on Bro to return there, the curtailing of Henrietta’s youthful fun, the uncompromising moves into smoggy central London, the truth or falsity of Papa’s position over the contested will in the legal battle that lost him Hope End, even slave-owning itself. To throw all this in doubt would be overwhelming. It’s no surprise that all the siblings – except that outlier Henry – resist losing faith in their father until long after the tipping point of evidence.

But while these emotional recalibrations are taking place, autumn marches on. The latest that Elizabeth could safely sail for Italy is early October; as the weeks tick by, discussion turns ‘from steam-packet reasons’ to departing for Malta on 3 October. Her father must realise that if uncertainty can be protracted past this date he won’t have to shoulder the responsibility of directly refusing permission to travel. With a fortnight to go, the invalid tells Miss Mitford that she’s ‘very much in anxiety & tribulation about Pisa—It is all uncertain whether I shall go or not—& in the meantime I am vexed out of patience.’ This uncharacteristic indiscretion reveals just how far her attitude is shifting. A month ago, she was still explaining her father to Robert in the old terms:

what you cannot see, is the deep tender affection behind & below all those patriarchal ideas of governing grownup children ‘in the way they must go!’—and there never was (under the strata) a truer affection in a father’s heart […]—he takes it to be his duty to rule like the Kings of Christendom, by divine right.

It’s Robert himself, of course, who is producing this shift. However great Elizabeth’s reluctance to see through her father, her ‘first disobedience’ – which, just as in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, is falling in love – has made a crack in the edifice of paternal authority. And one crack quickly leads to another. For Robert offers a new model of love, a generosity learnt from his own family: ‘I know as certainly as I know anything that if I could bring myself to ask them to give up everything in the world, they would do it and cheerfully’, as he explains. If such generous, undestructive love is possible, Papa’s is not the only way. Not every parent has to be like the Greek god Cronos, consuming his own children; not every love is fundamentally selfish. ‘Yet each man kills the thing he loves’, Oscar Wilde will write half a century from now, in The Ballad of Reading Gaol, his great poem of violence and betrayal. But this is the very lesson Elizabeth is now unlearning.

Gradually, her lover is replacing her father as her advisor. On 24 September, still grappling with what to do about Pisa, she asks Robert to ‘Think for me. […] Do think for me’. It’s an acknowledgement of dependency very different from the apparent emotional assurance of her early letters. Yet she writes it on the very same day that, desperate to regain her belief in and intimacy with Papa, she has promised that she won’t go to Italy against his wishes. Since staying in London is assumed by everyone around her to be life-threatening she’s offering, in effect, to die for him. (Though she mentions ‘future years’, suggesting that she