Two-Way Mirror: The Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
FIONA SAMPSON
(PROFILE books, 336 PP, £20)
Tablet bookshop price £18 • tel 020 7799 4064

A Victorian image and retrofitted myths have long dogged Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Two-Way Mirror marks a vital effort to scrape them away. The besotted, bedridden poetess of ­popular imagination, clinging to her husband’s coat-tails, is “a bellwether for the rising and sinking stock of women writers”, of whom very few have been canonical for very long. As Fiona Sampson points out, most of the women writers who conquered nineteenth-century Britain wrote under pseudonyms or no names. Elizabeth was exceptional.

Elizabeth Moulton-Barrett was born in Durham in 1806, but when she was four her family moved to Hope End, her father’s Herefordshire passion project. The money on both sides of her family came from slave-worked plantations in Jamaica, where the two branches had met. Elizabeth’s filial piety was extreme, and according to Sampson it took a good three or four decades before her abolitionist sympathies entirely overrode her sorrow at the ruined family business. Those decades were highly sheltered, though blighted by a number of family losses, and Elizabeth spent most of them loaded with the laudanum that was prescribed to treat what was probably bronchitis and asthma.