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

doesn’t herself quite believe this.) Still, she has to make her sacrifice explicit in order to force the issue – and this, of course, her father can’t accept:

He would not even grant me the consolation of thinking that I sacrificed what I supposed to be a good, to HIM. I told him that […] it was necessary to my self satisfaction in future years, to understand definitely that the sacrifice was exacted by him & was made to him, .. & not, thrown away blindly & by a misapprehension. And he would not answer that. I might do my own way, he said—[…] I had better do what I liked:—for his part, he washed his hands of me altogether—

It all seems so extreme. But if all the siblings have difficulty giving up their founding myth of the Barrett idyll, that’s particularly true for the three women of the family, on whom restrictions now fall hardest but who, as the eldest surviving children, were most deeply formed by the paradise years at Hope End. The brothers at least have working lives, as they manage the family estates, but in an era when an upper-class woman’s role is largely confined to wife- and motherhood (with charity work and religion the ‘spinster’ alternatives), to be denied marriage hollows out the sisters’ existences.

It’s no coincidence that this autumn sees both Henrietta and Elizabeth with serious suitors at ages that are for the times surprisingly advanced: Elizabeth is thirty-nine and Henrietta thirty-six. At the point of conventional ‘last chances’ they’ve been forced to realise that the permission they’ve been waiting for will never come. It’s as if Papa has been relying on time to dribble away their chances for marriage, too. And this, in the end, is what brings the whole emotional edifice down. In the to and fro of the Pisa negotiations, Elizabeth finally recognises that her father is opposed to his children falling in love at all; at the same stroke she suddenly stops ascribing his convictions to religion. On the contrary, he ‘is apt to take the world’s measures of the means of life’ and is refusing his offspring independence ‘for the singular reason that he never does tolerate in his family (sons or daughters) the development of one class of feelings’.

For decades Elizabeth has misused her strong will to force herself to wear blinkers about the nature of this parental contract. Now that they’re off she’s impatient to make up for lost time. She and Robert will continue to meet in Wimpole Street roughly twice a week for another sixteen months after that first May afternoon. He calls in the afternoons when her father and brothers are at work, but the household’s women – Wilson as well as Henrietta and Arabel – can’t miss how often he’s visiting. It is a headlong rush into experience. Three months after their first meeting, marriage – ‘the first subject’, Robert calls it – is once again being discussed. It’s also the final subject, although Elizabeth hasn’t yet accepted this. Still, this time she does acknowledge the proposition’s serious. As indeed it must be: Breach of Promise litigation can be brought against any man who fails to carry through on a proposal; and even if most families might eschew such socially costly action, Papa is just the sort of man to sue.

As the summer ends she responds with a series of protests. First she fears that Robert would tire of an invalid wife. He responds that he would happily marry her even without sex – which is what he thinks she means: though it’s not – ‘I would marry you now and thus—I would come when you let me, and go when you bade me—I would be no more than one of your brothers—“no more”—.’ For him this isn’t weird. The society they live in forces young people to perfect the art of sublimation; being in love customarily means both acknowledging sexual desire and being unable to act on it, at least to begin with. The taboo on sex outside marriage is compounded by the long periods couples are often forced to wait for parental consent, or because they lack the financial independence to marry.

Money is no obstacle in this case, as Robert realises six months in, once Elizabeth tells him, on 25 September, that she has independent means: ‘And if I wished to be very poor, in the world’s sense of poverty, I could not, with three or four hundred a year of which no living will can dispossess me.’ He responds, ‘When you told me lately that “you could never be poor”—all my solicitude was at an end. I had but myself to care about, and […] I can at any time amply provide for that.’ Such confidence in his own earning ability may be misplaced: after all, he’s still being supported by his father. But Elizabeth has no trouble believing him, and that belief is key to her love. Yet this in turn creates a further objection. She feels that, if they married, he would be wasted on sickroom duties instead of writing the important books that are his destiny. It would be ‘an exchange of higher work for lower work .. & of the special work you are called to, for that which is work for anybody.’

A century from now the couple’s love letters will be widely read even though they lack the sexy romance of, for example, those recently exchanged by their close contemporaries George Sand and Frédéric Chopin. But there’s a great sweetness to such passages, in which the couple reveal the quality of their love by what they’re prepared to sacrifice. Robert would leave friends and family for life in exile, and marry a woman with whom he imagines he’ll never be able to make love or have children. Elizabeth is prepared to surrender romance for the sake of retaining Robert’s friendship – ‘You must leave me—these thoughts of me, I mean .. for […] we may be