Writing isolation—why Elizabeth Barrett Browning is the poet for our time

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, although a famous poet in her lifetime, has struggled to hold her rightful place in the literary canon. Poet Fiona Sampson’s new biography, Two-Way Mirror, the first of Barrett Browning in 30 years, seeks to rectify that anomaly by looking at the personal life and poetic influence of this remarkable woman.

Growing up in Herefordshire, Ba, as she was affectionately known at home, was a tomboy who relished country living. However, as well as her overbearing family, Elizabeth faced another bodily oppression: grave but undiagnosed illness. Sampson speaks of the poet’s cloistering illness in the context of our own period of isolation. “She is a fascinating model of how to live a locked-down life,” Sampson tells me. “She railed against it frequently. She described it as a prison.” Indeed, Elizabeth’s social life largely depended on letters, “the equivalent of screen time now. I wouldn’t say that she profited from being shut away.”

Despite her physical problems, “she had a very clear mind-body distinction, which now we are not supposed to do; we are meant to be all anti-Cartesian,” says Sampson. Elizabeth resented her body—“my stupid vibrating body,” as she called it—yet her mind roamed free. She was prolific in her confinement, publishing poetry on Italian reunification and the abolition movement that “was having a huge leverage on public opinion in Britain… doing extraordinary things that changed European culture, the culture of a whole continent,” as Sampson puts it.

Biographers spend what Sampson describes as “conceptual, quality time” with their subjects. “It was a book which was quite hard to finish because she does die of a respiratory illness… you can almost feel it yourself. That suffocation, that struggling for breath: writing about it during the pandemic has been an extraordinary test.”

Alongside the themes of illness and isolation, another moment of Elizabeth’s life struck a chord. Her brother, known as Bro, comes to visit her in Torquay and drowns in an inexplicable boating accident. Elizabeth felt responsible for his death. Sampson points out that “years later she wrote to Robert [Browning, her husband] that she couldn’t get over the guilt and grief. She only writes about it once, about how she asked Bro to stay, that she knew he was bored and ‘quenching the energies of his life’ as she put it, and that she knew even her father needed him back in London for the family business and yet she got her way. To die in a boating accident even suggests dying of boredom in a way, through taking unnecessary risks. It was a wholly unnecessary death.”

Two-Way Mirror raises an intriguing question: do we become different people in different places? Elizabeth seems to adopt different characteristics as she moves from rural Hope End, to urban smoggy London, and then to Cornwall for her health—and finally to mainland Europe when she married Browning.

Gloucester and Torquay are associated with frustrating, debilitating ill health while London offers creative inspiration and renewed energy. “I do feel that there is a spring in her mental step immediately when she gets back to Wimpole Street from Torquay, where she lapsed into depression, especially after Bro dies. She escapes that provincialism of a small, gossipy place.” Going abroad rejuvenated her spirits. After her marriage to Browning in 1846, the couple went to France and then Italy. “She had a happy decade,” as Sampson puts it, “where she turned out to have so much more health and strength than she thought.”

Sampson thinks there is a precursor here to digital nomadism, as the Brownings travel and write, sending their work back to London to be published. “There is a funny bifurcation, going from locked-down life to being a digital nomad. It’s encouraging actually, I think it’s something we should all pin our hopes to.” A strong sense comes out of Elizabeth’s letters from abroad that life is there for enjoying at long last.

“It is only when she gets to Europe and she is no longer a daughter in a household but head of her own that she can apply intellectual will to the problems of the world. She is doing this against the odds, as a woman and a woman living with chronic illness.”

Indeed, when she was young Elizabeth expressed optimism about the status of women, though she changed her mind when she came up against solid barriers. Although she could be published, even under her own name—unlike Charlotte Brontë, who opted for a male pseudonym to secure a publisher—criticism of Elizabeth’s work retained a patronising air from the literary establishment. “She’s practically [described as] a poetess, which is a diminutive, isn’t it,” says Sampson. “I do think these things haven’t gone away. I think she speaks enormously to women’s experience now particularly within literature and academia, publishing and journalism. Her experience is not, alas, obsolete.”

Elizabeth presents a mix between conformity to her era’s expectations as well as a pioneering defiance of their boundaries. “She pushed as hard as she could, as much as she could, mostly by writing, against those boundaries and I think she shifted those boundaries for public opinion,” says Sampson. The biographer sees a link between her battle with illness and her apparent conformity within her family prior to her elopement: “she had fought so hard to stay alive, she was happy to do the extra work, the planning, keeping a respectful life, to seem to conform in order to keep the space on the page, in order to radically not conform.”

Sampson sees her biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, as well as her earlier one of Mary Shelley, as a way of maintaining space for female writers of the past and their present-day successors. “To try and rope them together to climb the mountain, to keep checking the links in the chain in women’s writing—not because I think it is a separate tradition, which can be dismissed as a minor tradition, but because it is part of the Great Tradition.”

The life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sampson concludes, “is a story about willpower. A story about absolute determination to be a writer: wilful, brave self-invention.”