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

Robert, who’s preparing an edition for Moxon of what will unfortunately prove to be forged letters by Shelley:

has taken to his new room with green curtains, & sits there half in sun & half in shade, ‘doing’ his Shelley to his heart’s content. ‘Monday,’ he said, ‘was the happiest day he had had since he left England; and we never have lived in a house, he likes so well as this.’! So ‘Casa Guidi’ is slighted you see—dear Casa Guidi.

It’s a moment of what seems like masculine ascendancy. In the same week ‘Baby’, now two and a half, invents his family nickname: ‘He has now taken to call himself Peninni—by an extraordinary revolution of syllables: he means Wiedeman […] Peninni can do this, Peninni can do that, Peninni wants this & that, all day long’. This autumn, the small boy obsessed with soldiers graduates to trousers: ‘Such ridiculous tiny trowsers up to his knees!—and long, white knit gaiters. It’s a beautiful costume, & he is much admired’, his mother boasts. She still loves dressing him up in ‘a white felt hat, white satin ribbons & feathers .. really the prettiest hat I ever saw, & he looks lovely in it—with a trimming of blue satin ribbon inside at each cheek!’ But, odd though this sounds in the twenty-first century, she’s doing nothing unusual. Even in sleepy Taunton, Henrietta contemplates a black felt hat for her first son Altham, while Parisians go altogether further: ‘Do you know, in Paris, they even put the boys into curlpapers? boys ten years old, Wilson has seen curled up regularly in the morning, .. a process which I could not approve of.’

It’s nothing to do with gender: only with privilege and ostentation. For appearances matter. Soon after moving in, Elizabeth has to sack the cook-housekeeper, caught three times with her lover coming out of her room, because ‘the facts were known in the house, & we could not keep a woman of a disreputable character’. Her replacement is Desirée, ‘a little brisk laughing creature, who tumbles about everything .. “has no method,” Wilson says, but who cooks extremely well & is as good natured as possible’.

But scandal turns up nonetheless. Desirée is installed in mid-October, just in time for the arrival of Robert’s father and sister on a three-week visit, during which Robert senior divulges that back in New Cross he’s got involved with a widow called Minny von Müller. Under the misapprehension that she’s bothering his father, Robert writes the lady a stern letter. Unfortunately, the old man hasn’t been entirely honest. Scandalously, on 1 July the following year huge damages of £800 – about twenty-five times an agricultural labourer’s annual salary – will be awarded against him for both breach of promise and defamation of Mrs von Müller’s character: on evidence which includes over fifty love letters plus a (false) accusation of bigamy, and Robert’s own shot across her bows. Three weeks after the court ruling, Robert’s father and sister will flee the country. The case is shocking enough to make the papers and Robert, who escorts them to Paris, will feel it ‘to the heart of his heart’.

But these personal embarrassments are to come. Meanwhile, the old year ends with darkness and drama. On 2 December 1851 Charles-Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte leads a coup in the streets of Paris. Elizabeth is sanguine in letters home: she’s used to European revolutions going on around her. But she has battles of her own. This month she’s once again seriously ill with bronchitis, perhaps even pneumonia; and in January, as she sits coughing in the Champs-Élysées apartment, she is deeply hurt to discover that Mary Russell Mitford has betrayed her confidence by writing about the death of Bro in a memoir, Recollections of a Literary Life.

Robert, on the other hand, is thriving in Paris. His New Year’s resolution for 1852, to write a poem a day, will result eventually in Men and Women, the book with which he takes his great step forward. He’s being encouraged in his work by a new friend, the critic Joseph Milsand, who, back in August, published a highly complimentary essay dedicated to his work, ‘English Poetry after Byron II’, in La Revue des deux mondes. On 15 January Milsand’s follow-up three-hander, covering Elizabeth alongside John Reade and Henry Taylor, is positive enough; but certainly no rave. Still, by the spring, Milsand is spending every Tuesday evening at the Brownings’.

Their cultural milieu is tilting towards Robert; this tilt increases as Elizabeth’s illness allows him to resume the conventionally male literary life. While she’s confined at home by pulmonary disease he goes out alone, though with her blessing, for intellectual chat and writerly gossip. But she is determined to meet George Sand, the brilliant Frenchwoman who is her near contemporary. Almost as soon as they had arrived in Paris, she had persuaded Robert to ask Carlyle for a letter of introduction to Sand from Italian activist Giuseppe Mazzini. Robert, who himself meets Sand several times, seems offhand virtually to the point of obstructiveness. It’s almost as if the diminutive ‘Ba’ has replaced the major talent who is ‘Elizabeth Barrett Browning’ in his mind. Or perhaps he’s simply not quite as Bohemian as he thinks: Sand has a scandalous reputation as a sexual free spirit. And as a woman writer and thinker too; when all three do eventually meet, on 15 February 1852, Elizabeth encounters once more that other way of being a female intellectual:

she seemed to be in fact the man in that company, & the profound respect with which she was listened to, a good deal impressed me […] scorn of pleasing, she evidently had—there never could have been a colour of coquetry in that woman. […] I liked her .. I did not love her .. but I felt the burning soul through all that quietness, & was not disappointed.

Life seems a little easier come the summer. From 6 July till 12 October 1852 the Brownings are back in London, renting