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

summer a new Italian plan develops: the couple will run away together. They no longer pretend to each other that this trip would be primarily for health reasons, but, ironically, offers to act as travelling companion now arrive from friends anxious to rescue Elizabeth from another London winter. Fanny Dow-glass, an Irish friend of almost Elizabeth’s age and experienced in travelling for her own health, is put off with a fluent untruth: ‘I cannot count on my courage—I have nerves like so many threads.’ Anna Jameson, who is a highly experienced traveller, discusses routes through France while making her own plans. But when might the lovers leave? And where will they go? Elizabeth fancies Cava de’ Tirreni, north of Salerno, whose Romanesque Benedictine abbey is an ancient seat of learning.

While they wait and plan in the privacy of her third-floor room in Wimpole Street, the lovers’ shared world develops. Robert has known Elizabeth by her family diminutive since at least January, when she signed a couple of letters with a doodled ‘Ba’ instead of her usual ‘EBB’. But it’s not till July that she starts thinking of him as ‘Robert’ instead of a limitless ‘you’, that ‘O, tu’ he introduced at the very start of their correspondence. Now she learns about his background: parents, Robert senior and Sarah Anna, née Wiedemann, and sister Sarianna, two years his junior.

Like the Barrett family, the Brownings are Whigs. But they’re also wholehearted abolitionists, whose lives have in no small measure been defined by their convictions. When he was twenty, Robert senior was sent to work on a St Kitts plantation belonging to his mother’s family but, to his own father’s fury, was so disgusted by the realities of slavery that he turned down the opportunity to run the estates and returned to London. ‘Elizabeth’s’ Robert only learns the full extent of his father’s sacrifice this August:

If we are poor, it is to my father’s infinite glory, who, as my mother told me last night […] ‘conceived such a hatred to the slave-system in the West Indies’, (where his mother was born, who died in his infancy,) that he relinquished every prospect,—supported himself, while there, in some other capacity, and came back, while yet a boy, to his father’s profound astonishment and rage—[…] You may fancy, I am not ashamed of him.

Robert’s cousin Cyrus Mason will later claim that this wasn’t a question of principle but of an ‘artistic nature’ and ‘refined instincts’ that couldn’t cope with rough and tumble plantation life. But to defend cruelty by calling objectors weak or ineffectual is an old trick – in twenty-first-century Britain the argot will be ‘snowflakes’ – and the son has no trouble turning around such verdicts. He tells Elizabeth how his father, ‘tender-hearted to a fault’, detests violence as a result of ‘some abominable early experience’ on the plantations, at the mere mention of which he ‘shuts his eyes involuntarily and shows exactly the same marks of loathing that may be noticed while a piece of cruelty is mentioned.’

When Robert’s grandfather ‘Rob’ Browning came to write his will in 1834, he left Robert senior and Margaret, the children of his first marriage, just token sums on the grounds that they ‘have had by their uncle Tittle and aunt Mill much greater portion than can be left to my other dear children’. It was Robert senior’s maternal grandfather, the Revd John Tittle, who owned the family plantations when he was a young man: Rob’s will implies that he benefited from them after all. But there’s no evidence corroborating what it so conveniently assumes. And even if the sacrifices Robert senior made were incomplete, perhaps this is as much as we can expect from one individual. For when he rejected the planter’s life his own father in punishment demanded he pay back the money spent raising him. That one gesture has defined his life: even the comfortable family home at New Cross in Surrey is within commuting distance of the City of London because he’s forced to work there in a bank.

Despite being prevented from following what is in fact his artistic vocation by the need to earn a living, Robert senior has filled this family home with art and books. He will draw – particularly satirical cartoons – all his life, and he collects engravings and drawings, notably by William Hogarth and artists from the Low Countries. He especially enjoys David Teniers the Younger. He has a 6,000-volume library; treasures of his rare book collection include first editions of Sir Thomas Browne’s Works, Ben Jonson’s First Folio, John Milton’s Paradise Regain’d and Poems on Several Occasions, Thomas More’s Utopia, and – demonstrating genuine intellectual eclecticism in a Nonconformist household – Eikon Basilike, the book of meditations supposedly written by Charles I during his final imprisonment.

All this reveals a creative, wide-ranging mind that must have been at least partly formed by his schooldays at Cheshunt, where he befriended John Kenyon, later Elizabeth and Robert’s ‘dear Mr Kenyon, with whom we began’. But his son is largely home-educated, brought up on this astonishing library. Like Elizabeth, Robert has been thoroughly encouraged by both parents. His artistic mother Sarah Anna is an accomplished pianist and a creator of beautiful gardens. Her German ship-owning father met and married her mother in Dundee: this northern background powers the family’s Nonconformism, and Sarah Anna is devout. Yet, life-loving rather than austere, she’s altogether less fundamentalist than many of her fellow worshippers at York Street Chapel.

She also offers a template for Robert’s relationship with a woman six years older than himself. Elizabeth’s mother was four older than her father; her sister Henrietta is also four years older than the man she’s fallen for. But Robert’s mother is a full decade years older than his father. When they married in 1811 she was thirty-eight, the same age Elizabeth is when Robert starts writing to her, and gave birth to the poet, her first child, at just a month shy of her fortieth birthday.