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

friends always’ – and ultimately even his company if he needs to move abroad for his own health.

For none of these is her fundamental reason for viewing their romance as ultimately impossible. As far as disability goes, she’s simply worried that frequent illness makes her a liability. Of course she knows her own sexuality is functioning just fine. She also knows that she’s not actually bedbound – she’s no paraplegic, ‘suffering from an incurable injury on the spine, which would prevent my ever standing up’ – but simply resting up against the return of dangerous chest infections. Her fear is more profound, and profoundly superstitious; it survives even her new lessons in the beneficial effects of love. She fears letting Robert love and dedicate his life to her because of what happened the last time that someone did so. Bro’s death is the palimpsest upon which this new love appears. ‘And once he held my hand, .. how I remember! & said that he “loved me better than them all & that he would not leave me .. till I was well,” he said!—how I remember that! And ten days from that day the boat had left the shore which never returned.’

Elizabeth finds this loss so hard to address that she writes to Robert about it only once. Yet buried experiences can be the most motivating. A thunderstorm on 11 July, the fifth anniversary of Bro’s death, recalls to her a tree struck by lightning when she was a child:

The whole trunk of that tree was bare & peeled—& up that new whiteness of it, ran the finger-mark of the lightning in a bright beautiful rose-colour […] the fever-sign of the certain death […] And, in that same storm, two young women belonging to a festive party were killed on the Malvern hills—each, sealed to death in a moment.

These images of death and transfiguration are at one level a simple confession that the well-known thirty-nine-year-old author remains terrified of thunder. But they’re also a dispatch from the morbid territory of complex grief.

It’s not that Elizabeth consciously conflates Robert with Bro, who was in so many ways the partner of her early life. But her brother did prefigure her lover in a number of ways. Like Robert, he was younger than her: admittedly by just over a year to Robert’s six, but this difference would still have felt substantial during their shared childhood; especially as Bro was not only junior but less precocious. She believed in her brother’s relatively unproven talents, too, and has learnt from that first intimacy how simultaneously to frame a younger man as her soulmate and leave room for lesser actual achievement. It’s a difficult trick made the more challenging now that she’s a leading writer. Still, with imaginative ingenuity Elizabeth manages to turn Robert into the more ‘successful’ partner by emphasising his busy literary social life. Indeed, like many clever women, she spends a great deal of energy keeping herself tamped down:

I never had […] a will in the common things of life […] in one’s mere pleasures & fantasies, one wd rather be crossed & vexed a little than vex a person one loves .. & it is possible to get used to the harness & run easily in it at last—& there is a side-world to hide one’s thoughts in […] ‘literature’ […] while in things not exactly overt, I & all of us are apt to act sometimes up to the limit of our means of acting, with shut doors & windows & no waiting for cognizance or permission.

Disingenuousness has its uses, in other words. And so it is that 1845’s Italian plan appeals disingenuously: both because it doesn’t commit her to marrying Robert and because she’s able to convince herself that he’s equally in need of a curative stay in the south.

Like her father, Elizabeth has internalised a Christianity that makes it hard for her to ask for what she wants. But there the resemblance ends. She is far from being controlling. On the contrary, she’s turning Robert into her next male authority figure:

there is a natural inferiority of mind in women—of the intellect […] the history of Art & of genius testifies to this fact openly. […] I believe women .. all of us in a mass .. to have minds of quicker movement, but less power & depth .. & that we are under your feet, because we cant stand upon our own.

Which is so evidently untrue, especially in her own case, that it’s embarrassing. But maybe this is how, in the nineteenth century, a conservative heterosexuality works: Elizabeth needs to frame Robert as exceeding her in order to desire him. At the same time though, she undermines this very paradigm by the mere fact of falling for a younger, less established man. It’s a muddle, a kind of mauvaise foi; Elizabeth isn’t lying to herself, but she has been conditioned into inauthenticity. Besides, a sheltered existence means that her ideas about masculinity are largely second-hand. Recent friendships with writing men have been largely epistolary, and there’s only so much you can learn from younger brothers.

Yet this apparent contradiction at the heart of her love affair is the turning point of her psychic life. The later twentieth century will invent the trope of the suffering woman poet, either choosing to ‘flay’ herself into authenticity, as critics like Germaine Greer in Slip-Shod Sibyls have it, or else unable to escape from repeatedly going over her psychic wounds instead of repairing them, as psychoanalytic literary critic Susan Kavaler-Adler insists in The Compulsion to Create. Elizabeth certainly pushes herself hard – in her writing, in her physical survival – and in the past she’s ‘kissed the rod’, internalising her adored father’s authoritarianism as love, and abasing herself before Boyd’s cruelty. But she’s outstripped these early love-objects. Perhaps it’s her good luck that they were, each in their own way, second-rate. Had she met a great, established male artist when she was younger, would