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

Is it indeed true that I was so near to the pleasure & honour of making your acquaintance?—[…] I would rather hope (as I do) that what I lost by one chance I may recover by some future one. Winters shut me up as they do dormouse’s eyes: in the spring, we shall see.

The next day is Sunday, so she has to calm her impatience for his response. The wait is worth it. ‘You make me very happy’, Robert writes, on Monday 13 January, and he goes on to ask for her poetic companionship, even guidance:

your poetry must be, cannot but be, infinitely more to me than mine to you—for you do what I always wanted, hoped to do, and only seem now likely to do for the first time—you speak out, you, —I […] fear the pure white light, even if it is in me: but I am going to try .. so it will be no small comfort to have your company just now.

But Elizabeth doesn’t hear the profound compliment in this. What she thinks is that she’s being offered the worthy but tedious role of mentor. That fierce childhood shyness remains just as strong as the rest of her passionate nature. Immediately she retracts her suggest of meeting:

The fault was clearly with me & not with you.

When I had an Italian master, years ago, he told me that there was an unpronounceable English word which absolutely expressed me […] ‘testa lunga.’ Of course the signor meant headlong!—[…] Headlong I was at first, & headlong I continue—[…] guessing at the meaning of unknown words instead of looking into the dictionary .. tearing open letters, & never untying a string,—& expecting everything to be done in a minute […]. And so, at your half word I flew at the whole one, with all its possible consequences, & wrote what you read.

In fact, hastiness has caused her to misread his second letter, not his first. Praising her poetry in terms of finding her own self present in it, Robert is finding a subtle way to keep open the possibility that he is interested in that self – even though he can’t know this, because the two have not yet met. He’s just as idealistic as Elizabeth about poetry, and every bit as likely to fall in love through it. And, while protesting that he hates letter writing, he has already told her that she’s the exception to this rule – and done so exquisitely, by quoting the epitaph to the great Renaissance poet Torquato Tasso, ‘O tu!’ – ‘Ah, you!’

Now he waits a prideful fortnight before replying to Elizabeth’s snip. These two weeks may also reflect a young man’s self-absorption. For of course Robert does want this poet who has become a writerly touchstone to help with his own poetry; but he doesn’t seem nearly so eager to produce a detailed critique of hers. With charm and vagueness, when he does get in touch he tells her:

Your books lie on this table here, at arm’s length from me, in this old room where I sit all day: and when my head aches or wanders or strikes work […] I […] read, read, read—and just as I have shut up the book and walked to the window, I recollect that you wanted me to find faults there.

Elizabeth manages to make herself wait a week before responding. She’s struggling against powerful impulses, not just the draw of this particular correspondence. For her, letter writing is no chore: it’s her social life: ‘As for me, I have done most of my talking by the post of late years—’. Her response artfully coaches ‘Dear Mr Browning’ in the art of correspondence:

Only dont let us have any constraint, any ceremony! Dont be civil to me when you feel rude,—nor loquacious, when you incline to silence,—nor yielding in the manners, when you are perverse in the mind. […] .. & let us rest from the bowing & the curtseying, you & I, on each side. You will find me an honest man on the whole, if rather hasty & prejudging .. […] And we have great sympathies in common, & I am inclined to look up to you in many things, & to learn as much of everything as you will teach me.

And so Robert realises that he has played it too cool. He writes back, after carefully observing the one-week rule:

for reasons I know,—for other reasons I don’t exactly know, but might if I chose to think a little, and for still other reasons, which, most likely, all the choosing and thinking in the world would not make me know, I had rather hear from you than see anybody else […] Are not these fates written? There! Don’t you answer this, please, but, mind it is on record.

Their fates are indeed written. When Robert posts this letter, on 11 February 1845, Elizabeth is about to turn thirty-nine, and established as one of the country’s leading poets. Robert, six years her junior, is regarded as having lost his early gift, and his poetic way, with the rebarbative seven-part verse novel Sordello, published five years before. But reputational mismatch is balanced out by Elizabeth’s loneliness, her gender – and something generous about her imagination. She has the ability to think the best of those she believes in, and believe she does in both Robert’s attitude to poetry, and his ‘genius’ for it.

Right from the start she writes to him differently from the way she addresses Miss Mitford, hitherto her closest confidant beyond her sisters. It’s as if there’s no time to waste on gossip. She plunges straight into sharing her deepest self with Robert, telling him ‘I am not desponding by nature’, and that, ‘I am essentially better, & have been for several winters’, but ‘a course of bitter mental discipline & long bodily seclusion’ leaves her longing for life experience: ‘If I live on & yet do not escape