Two-Way Mirror by Fiona Sampson (reading books for 6 year olds TXT) 📕

to love you and write to you & think of you as my friend’ – and picturing herself as a mentee. Nor should we jump to this conclusion, for in 1838 being single or married says more about a woman’s social and financial security than it does about her sexuality. The tension that Elizabeth would have to resolve if she were free to leave home isn’t between heterosexual marriage and loving women, but between what marriage means for a woman’s life, and her own desire to live and to write freely as men do. What matters for her story is simply that Miss Mitford’s affection is discerning, deep and enduring. But at thirty-two Elizabeth has anxieties all the same. Must a literary woman be a sacred monster? With conspicuous tactlessness she tells her friend of her fear that, ‘In seeing Lady Dacre I should see a woman of the masculine gender, with her genius very prominent in eccentricity of manner & sentiment’, because, apart from Miss Mitford, ‘The only literary woman I ever knew […] was Lady Mary Shepherd whose kindness & terribleness I equally remember.’

Elizabeth herself, of course, has proved all too feminine in her ability to fall damagingly for a male authority figure. But though she may look up to the literary friends she’s making now, unlike Boyd – or indeed her father – they don’t trap her in humiliating codependency, whatever their own feelings. It’s not inconceivable, for example, that the twice-widowed John Kenyon is attracted to his pretty and gifted protégée. At least that’s the complexion Henrietta puts on their friendship. ‘How would you like him to be your brother in law?’ she asks Sam. ‘You must know that he is in great esteem of our dearest Ba—we torment her most terribly about him.’ Kenyon, who has been alone since his wife died in 1835, is charismatic, sociable, kind – and wealthy. In short, he is a catch. But he’s also a year older than Papa and, although she frequently speculates with Miss Mitford about his private life, Elizabeth never seems to put her own self in this romantic frame.

Instead, ill-health is returning to claim her for a second time. By summer 1838 she’s coughing continually. Infection succeeds infection. In June, ‘I have been sometimes very unwell & sometimes better […] A cold this week threw me back a little […] The lungs are said to be affected—they did not respond as satisfactorily as heretofore to the latest application of the stethoscope.’ Struggling for breath, she’s confined to bed again, ‘& my weakness increases of course under the remedies which successive attacks render necessary’.

But these remedies represent the very best treatment available. Papa has hired the personal physician to the young Queen Victoria. Dr Chambers is renowned for using the still very-modern stethoscope to diagnose the presence or absence of TB. He gives Elizabeth the all clear: ‘Dr Chambers—the sincerest of physicians! has told me that there seems to be no ulceration of lungs, & that he has grounds for hoping for my ultimate complete recovery.’ Yet by mid-August it’s clear that she has chronic lung disease of some kind. In this era before antibiotics it’s easy for a chest infection to become life-threatening bronchitis, pneumonia or pleurisy; especially in someone as unfit as Elizabeth. ‘Consumption’ is far from the only fatal pulmonary condition; indeed Elizabeth’s unusually isolated lifestyle makes her a less likely candidate for this contagious disease, and we know of no sufferers in her circle apart from her late Uncle Sam, who was far away in Jamaica for the last decade of his life. But by now Elizabeth is ‘a helpless being […] whose migrations have for so many months been from the bed to the sofa’. She’s coughing up some blood, thought to be the result of breaking a blood vessel in a coughing fit, and Chambers ‘has made an essential condition of my leaving this part of England for the winter […] to stay at the risk of my life wd be wilfulness & foolishness at once’.

And so at the end of August, turning her back on literary London and her unfolding success as a poet, Elizabeth leaves for Devon where (after the usual tortuous decision-making) her father has allowed her to overwinter. She’s too unwell to manage the 200-mile journey by carriage, but 25 August sees her at the docks boarding the Saturday breakfast-time sailing for Plymouth. There she connects with the packet, a fast, stopping mail boat, which arrives in Torquay on the evening of 27 August 1838.

For all her frailty, Elizabeth is a good traveller, ‘the only lady on board who did not suffer from seasickness’. Besides, she hasn’t made the journey alone. She’s accompanied by Bro and George; and by Henrietta, who’s by now desperate to escape the heavily supervised domestic round at Wimpole Street. Henrietta’s memories of the ‘gay’ months she spent with Bro at Torquay five years ago mix with guilt at leaving Arabella ‘sisterless’ in Wimpole Street; but Arabel, as family often call her, does have the Revd Hunter’s by now teenaged daughter Mary for company, and she and Henrietta have agreed to swap places at the turn of the year.

At first the siblings stay with their ‘aunt and uncle Hedley who have resided at Torquay for the last two or three years under Dr Chambers’s jurisdiction, on account of my uncle’s being affected in some similar way to myself’. (Hedley, an uncle only by marriage, offers no clue to genetic predisposition; besides, he will go on to a long, healthy life, dying in his seventies.) But awkwardly, their house is too far from the sea for Elizabeth, who’s by now confined to an invalid chair. It is also rather cold. So it’s agreed that from 1 October she will take a terraced house on the seafront. The rent, at £180 per annum, is high: poor health represents good business for these south Devon towns, famed for their mild climate and unpolluted sea air.