“Of writing books there is no end,” begins Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s novel-in-verse Aurora Leigh. This opening phrase echoes a line from the Book of Ecclesiastes — a line that cautions that “much study wearies the body.” The poet at the heart of Browning’s fiction is willing to risk weariness in order to study. Her topic is herself: “I who have written much in prose and verse / For others’ uses, will write now for mine — / Will write my story for my better self.” Aurora Leigh suggests that her book will resemble an artist’s portrait of a friend, often examined by its subject just to “hold together what he was and is.” She decides to become both painter and subject, both poet and muse. What she produces is the creation of the artist as a young woman — not merely portrait but mirror as well. The fictional poet uses herself as an inspiration for her work — and she will also use the image she produces in order to better see herself.
Of course, the most significant reflection here is Aurora Leigh as a mirror of Barrett Browning herself. This is not proto-autofiction; the details of the lives of the two poets differ. Still, this is the story of a female poet writing a novel-in-verse — written by a female poet writing a novel-in-verse. Both women are writing about the creation of themselves as female authors — each aware that “life develops from within.”
Although not a novel-in-verse, Two-Way Mirror: The Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning by Fiona Sampson adds yet another mirror to this funhouse. Sampson’s biography is, to quote Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “like the picture on the Quaker Oats box / that shows a figure hold up a box / upon which is a picture of a figure / holding up a box.” Just like Aurora Leigh and Barrett Browning, Sampson (not only a biographer but an accomplished poet) is interested in how female writers construct not only their professional roles but their interior lives — a process she sees as self-invention. Sampson’s biography is almost a bildungsroman: “We can’t ignore how central the construction of identity is to Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s story,” she says. “Hers is a story about how a writer becomes —and that’s what this book tries to mirror.”
Sampson’s elegant study is the first biography of Barrett Browning since the 1980s. Although the author praises earlier studies, she points out that many additional primary sources are now available. Now is a particularly resonant moment to consider Barrett Browning, Sampson suggests. First, the 19th-century poet’s experiences with illness and isolation might resonate with today’s readers even more than it did even when Sampson began her biography. Because she was frequently confined to home, Elizabeth created a vibrant correspondence with peers and mentors, relationships which Sampson sees as analogous to the “screen lives” people have fashioned during the pandemic. Secondly, the poet’s grappling with issues of identity reflects a contemporary concern.
Born roughly a decade after Mary Shelley and a decade before Charlotte Bronte, Barrett Browning helped shape the transformation from Romanticism to the Victorianism. Nevertheless, she has often been regarded as an inconsequential poet. Sometimes she is cast as a “swooning poetess” with a “little, couch-behind life” — a woman significant to literary history only because of her marriage to Robert Browning. A few critics have suggested that she was merely “hindering that real writer, her husband.” Often people assume her poetry is mere sentimental dross, knowing her only from the first line of her famous Sonnet 43 quoted on Valentine’s Day cards: “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” Sampson very convincingly refutes all of these negative assumptions.
The biographer argues that Barrett Browning was no “Victorian invalid” with “psychosomatic or even hysterical symptoms in protest at her restrictive family life.” Nor was she “faking illness in order to free herself from the conventional roles played by young women of her time,” as some have assumed since her death. Instead, says Simpson, Elizabeth’s symptoms suggest she suffered from what we would now diagnose as viral infection quickly followed by post-viral syndrome. Some of her treatments — especially the months confined to her room in a spinal sling and a lifelong use of laudanum — may have worsened her health.
Sampson demonstrates that, despite her dismissal by mid-20th-century male literary critics, Barrett Browning was actually far more critically acclaimed than Robert Browning during most of their years together. During her lifetime, she was widely considered not only Britain’s greatest women poet of all time but an obvious candidate for Poet Laureate (an honor never awarded to her).
Sampson gives ample evidence that Elizabeth produced intellectually rigorous work starting very early in her life. At age eleven, her fascination with ancient literature and history led her to write and publish a Homeric epic, The Battle of Marathon. When she was 19, she published An Essay on Mind, a book of philosophical poetry that first articulated her conception of the poet as a thinking self and her belief that poetry, as Sampson says, “earns its keep by aiding serious thought” for both writer and reader.
Elizabeth’s education included not just classical literature but political tracts and moral philosophy. As a young teenager, she read Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which helped shaped her burgeoning political consciousness. Unlike many female authors of her day, Elizabeth never hid her identity with masculine pseudonyms or gender-masking initials, even when she was very young. Instead, she proudly distributed her work with her own name on the title page. Over time, she began to contemplate going further; political and moral thinking soon emerged in her work.
Barrett Browning struggled with issues of racial identity, white supremacy, and the horrors of slavery. One might think that as progressive Whigs, “the Barretts would be natural abolitionists,” argues Sampson — but they did not embrace that commitment. Family fortunes on both sides of Elizabeth’s family were made on the backs of enslaved Africans forced to labor on Jamaican sugar plantations. While there is some evidence that the young Elizabeth might have felt guilt or shame about her family’s ties to slavery, she couldn’t speak against her father while she lived under his roof. Eventually she moved out. But what gave her the independence to leave and the room of her own in which to think and write, Sampson shows, was this “blood money.”
Despite not publicly acknowledging the source her privilege, Barrett Browning eventually became a “true abolitionist.” During the late 1840s, she began to see the British Empire as “a violent aberration.” When she heard news of the thousands of Sikhs killed during the First Sikh War, she realized that, as she said, “empire subjugates rather than ‘civilizes’.” Sampson argues that the poet “takes this insight and runs.” She first published “The Runaway Slave” in an American abolitionist tract in 1848. The poem tells the story of an enslaved woman who has been beaten, raped, and impregnated by her enslavers. She knows her infant will also be enslaved, so she (in an act later mirrored by Toni Morrison’s Sethe) kills the child. The poem was electric for the time. “It is as if [Barrett Browning] has finally caught her breath enough to speak out,” Sampson writes movingly, “producing personal, political poetry that isn’t just concerned with art for art’s sake, but takes part in the world around her.”
Although Barrett Browning is now best known for her Sonnets from the Portuguese, the most important piece she wrote may be her 1856 Aurora Leigh. After she stepped into the political sphere and published her poem about slavery, she started to write extensively about the limits and complications of being a woman poet. In the process, she created a new fictional form by blending epic poetry with the novel.
Although contemporary readers might see both the Sonnets and Aurora Leigh as conventional, both works were transformative. “Radical writers change their own zeitgeist, not ours,” explains Sampson. “Or rather: they already changed ours, back when they changed their own.” Barrett Browning’s work inspired poets from Sylvia Plath to Anna Akhmatova and writers from Simone de Beauvoir to May Sarton to use a specifically feminine lyric voice to talk about women’s desire, and to copy Elizabeth’s idea of using herself as her own muse. Emily Dickinson also clearly saw Barrett Browning as a reflection of herself; in the intimacy of her bedroom, in place of an actual mirror hung a framed portrait of Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
As her title Two-Way Mirror suggests, Sampson is quite aware of the place of mirroring in the life and work of Barrett Browning. The biographer highlights this theme by creating a bit of mirroring in her own book. She organizes it into nine narrative and roughly chronological chapters, copying the nine-chapter structure of Aurora Leigh. A short meditation follows each chapter in which Sampson reflects on the craft of biography. Although she acknowledges that “biography is a portrait, not a self-portrait,” she also asks us to consider that “imagination is greedy” and that we see ourselves mirrored whenever we read biography. “There’s nothing wrong with such feelings — let’s call them recognition, or complicity. It’s how humans have always used stories, after all,” she concludes. “Besides, how else can we encounter our biographical subject, except by coming to meet her?”
[Published by W.W. Norton on August 17, 2021, 336 pages, $27.95 hardcover]