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

verse as public speech, aiming to create a moral catharsis when shared emotion leads to shared moral insight. Such an elevated view of poetry’s social role comes, like so much in Elizabeth’s work and thought, from her classical education: after all, Homeric epic celebrates public, political ethics. This places poetry excitingly at the heart of contemporary debates. But it can also be inhibiting. Morally necessary conclusions may leave little room for poetic ambiguity; the effort to be persuasive can make a poem over-rhetorical or simplistic.

Yet the fiercely inhabited psyche of the ‘Runaway Slave’, together with the poem’s obsessional iteration of ‘black’ and ‘white’ – first as colours in the non-human natural world, but then also as racist constructions of human identity – create a genuine feeling of terror and hyper-reality:

I look at the sky.

The clouds are breaking on my brain;

I am floated along, as if I should die

Of liberty’s exquisite pain.

In the name of the white child waiting for me

In the death-dark.

It works so well indeed that this is sometimes taken as evidence of Elizabeth’s anxiety about her own possible African-Caribbean heritage. After all, it’s in December 1845, while working on this poem, that she sends Robert her famous ‘blood of a slave’ letter. But the assumption is reductive. Elizabeth is turning such prevailing prejudices on their head. In her poem it is whiteness and all that it means – the abuses, the power-relations – that is disgusting.

That the possibility of mixed heritage haunts the West Indian plantocracy is poetic justice, of course. But it is a haunting, and, just as it can’t be proved in Elizabeth’s case, it’s no more than rumour in Robert’s. Claims that his maternal grandmother Margaret Tittle was the daughter of an enslaved woman are simply untrue. Her mother Margaret Strachan was the daughter of a St Kitts surgeon, Dr George Strachan, while her father, the Revd John Tittle, was an estate manager and legal representative for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel.

In fact, during 1846 Elizabeth is also secretly working on what will become a famous marker not of African-Caribbean but of her possible Portuguese heritage: the forty-four love poems that will eventually be published as Sonnets from the Portuguese. In both this sequence and, in a different way, in ‘The Runaway Slave’, it’s as if she has finally caught her breath enough to speak out, producing personal, political poetry that isn’t just concerned with art for art’s sake, but takes part in the world around her. Yet she remains uncertain about the confessional character of this verse, which she knows Robert disdains, as she’ll later tell Arabella: ‘I never showed them to Robert […] I felt shy about them altogether […] I had heard him express himself strongly against “personal” poetry & I shrank back.’

Besides, she’s still hesitating over giving herself away, one way or another. All summer the lovers’ correspondence has yawed between the impossibility and the necessity of eloping. Elizabeth’s panics are in proportion to the size of this step. She’s particularly worried that John Kenyon, who understands both her and Robert well, will winkle out their secret. She hates lying to him, and all her friends: it makes her feel she’s ‘swindling’ them. But preoccupation is itself a giveaway. By early September 1846, both Mr Boyd and Treppy, who’s visiting Wimpole Street, seem to guess what’s afoot. As Treppy says, ‘Secrets indeed! You think that nobody can see & hear except yourselves, I suppose,—& there are two circumstances going on in the house, plain for any eyes to see!’

That second ‘circumstance’ is Henrietta’s love affair with an army ensign the family call Surtees: full name, William Surtees Cook. (He’s actually a second cousin, whose mother and Elizabeth’s maternal grandmother were sisters.) Henrietta’s courtship, unlike Elizabeth’s, is an open secret not least because Surtees has seen off two other suitors since 1844 by laying siege at Wimpole Street. The siblings and their servants close ranks to protect the romance as he takes up residence in the drawing room during visiting hours, breaks down in tears, and generally outlasts his rivals’ stores of time, patience and dignity. It’s dramatic stuff, which quite possibly helps distract everyone from the equally intense affair being conducted altogether more discreetly on the third floor.

In July 1846 Elizabeth’s maternal aunt, Jane Hedley, staying at Wimpole Street for her own daughter Arabella’s marriage, conjectures that if Henrietta and Surtees were to elope to Italy they could take Elizabeth with them. But elopement is a radical step, even for these more able-bodied lovers. Besides, Surtees lacks the money to marry. He’s hoping against hope for promotion: things have become so desperate that he has even written a novel in hopes of making money from fiction. As many an aspirant has discovered, this isn’t as easy as it looks, even if, like him, you have Elizabeth Barrett as personal editor. Johnny Cheerful is submitted to Colburn but turned down, and remains unpublished. Besides, when Surtees is promoted to captain at the end of 1845, he almost immediately retires from his regiment on half pay, cancelling out the rise.

Still, all this adds to the general undertone of plotting with which, this summer, 50 Wimpole Street is seething; and Aunt Hedley, with her ‘beaming affectionate face’, keeps accidentally putting her foot in it. First she teases Elizabeth in front of Papa that an investment document is her marriage-settlement, then she reveals to him that Robert has been visiting her niece. Meanwhile Robert himself is feeling compromised in another way. He’s desperate to tell his beloved parents everything:

Why should not my father & mother know? What possible harm can follow from their knowing? Why should I wound them to the very soul and for ever […] For in any case they will take my feeling for their own with implicit trust.

It would all be so much easier out of Papa’s punitive reach in cheap, sunny, southern Europe. So the summer of 1846 comes to an end with a vertiginous feeling of