Two-Way Mirror: The Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning

[Music] hello and welcome to tonight's event from the british library i'm brett walsh of the cultural events department and i'm super excited to welcome you to this event on the poet elizabeth barrett browning before we kick off i have a few points of housekeeping we will be taking questions later in the event so if you want to submit a question please use the form below the video and you can buy fiona sampson's new book using the bookshop button at the top of the screen there so tonight's conversation is going to be chaired by peter salmon peter is an australian writer living in the uk and he recently published a biography of derrida called an event perhaps and it was released to critical acclaim in 2020 so without further ado i'm going to hand over to peter welcome to the british library tonight whichever wing of the british library you're in there are many many wings throughout this country and um it's fantastic to have you here we're here to discuss two-way mirror the new biography of elizabeth barrett browning by fiona sampson so welcome to everyone um i will be harassing you about buying the book i'm assuming that most of you actually already bought the book so um so ignore that if you have i'll also be harassing you about asking some questions for fiona during the night but first of all i'd like to welcome fiona sampson who will now say hi to me hello peter and i'm going to do the bio of fiona but we also have mark padmore who will be doing some of the readings tonight but fiona sampson is a leading poet and writer published in 38 languages her 27 books include eight poetry collections an edition of percy bish shelley and a critically acclaimed in search of mary shelley she is a fellow of the royal society of literature and published her acclaim biography of elizabeth barrett browning in 2021 doing some of the readings of elizabeth barrett browning's poetry tonight will be mark padmore who has an international career in opera concert and recital his work with directors peter brooke haiti mitchell mark morris and deborah warner has performed with the world's leading orchestra he was the artist in residence of the 2017-18 season with berlin philharmonic orchestra and 2016 was voted vocalist of the year by musical america so welcome to everyone who's here and fiona congratulations on your book thank you very much peter and i think it falls to me to introduce you so peter salmon is a fellow biographer which is why it's a thrill to have him introducing me in fact we're speaking from the biographer's house and peter's biography of jacques derrida an event perhaps uh was published by verso in november and has been very enthusiastically received i was going to say ecstatically but i realized that's probably an inappropriate thing to say about the world of philosophy and peter's also a novelist but he's not a poet i'm glad to say yes i've dodged that bullet so i'm welcome to any poets who are out there um so we're going to be talking about elizabeth barrett browning tonight particularly um fiona's biography of elizabeth barrett browning um and fiona can i ask you why now for writing a biography of elizabeth rowling well elizabeth browning was a canonical figure for me um when i was well coming into poetry and actually even earlier than that and she um she's one of those rare figures who is actually a woman who's um in the old anthologies um and yet there hasn't been a biography of her since um the 1980s when margaret forster wrote a a great biography um which is called elizabeth browning um but at that point quite a lot of the um archival material um the letters and journals from really from elizabeth browning's prime and the the time which is doing most of her work were not yet available so it's a kind of bugs which is absolutely wonderful about the earlier years and there has been nothing that has told elizabeth's own story since since then um and that seems to me a huge loss because she is still britain's leading woman poet she is the first female lyric poet she is a an important modernizer of um poetry she marks the term from romanticism to victorianism which you might think is a mixed blessing but that's what she did um she is a paradigm of a lockdown life which is something i'm sure we'll explore and she influenced a huge number of other writers i mean from emily dickinson to swinburne oscar wilde virginia woolf roger kipling she had very varied admirers and so i think it beholds us to see and to remember what all the fuss was about absolutely and i think it helped us to listen to a short reading to start the night um from aurora lee her novel which her poetic novel which was the um examination of a woman becoming a poet wasn't it and probably the first time that it happened yes so let's go start reading aurora lee book one lines one to eight of writing many books there is no end and i who have written much in prose and verse for others uses will right now for mine will write my story for my better self as when you paint your portrait for a friend who keeps it in a draw and looks at it long after he has ceased to love you just to hold together what he was and is the beautiful voice of mark padmore reading the beautiful poetry of elizabeth barrett browning um i'm going to ask the most basic of questions at this point who was she well yes well she was many things actually i mean i think one of the things that i think one of the reasons for writing biographies of women of the past but also possibly contemporary women writers one could argue is that they we are many things and somewhat in the eye of the beholder but of course there are facts about elizabeth's life so she was born in 1806 so that makes her halfway between mary shelley and charlotte bronte so she's nine years after mary shelley and 10 years before charlotte bronte she had a really precocious childhood um in a way self-educated she was writing poems from the age of six she was writing in plays in french at the age of eight she became a classicist and her first book was published to celebrate her 14th birthday in other words she wrote it when she was 13 the battle of marathon as you do um she contracted uh a likely virus and post-viral syndrome when she was 15 which was the start of a life of chronic ill health and disability against which she um her writing was in a sense a form of resistance i i always think of it as kind of reaching past the confines of her room to to her wider audience um she came to real critical attention in 1838 and then in 1844 so 1838 is her first sort of book of her maturity sarah from another poems and 1844 his poems 1844. lots of critical attention and um she's nominated to become the next poet laureate when wordsworth dies of course she doesn't um she um but she's the first woman to be so nominated she then marries robert browning who to whose attention she has come first as a poet she goes off to italy with him she becomes quite radicalized she writes very formative political poetry which helps change british popular opinion about a number of issues particularly italian reunification but also abolition of slavery the rights of women and when she dies in florence in 1861 she is given a sort of civic heroines funeral as a heroine of italian reunification so it's a kind of a public life as well as the private life for which she is traditionally known all of this is astonishing for any writer of course um but i'm particularly interested in the fact that she was a woman doing all this at the time you know she you're talking about politics you're talking about the personal you're talking about you know married tomorrow browning but also you know i think in many for many of us we hear of elizabeth barrett browning through um how do i love thee let me count the ways but she has a very very powerful impact obviously yes she did she had um she had a great impact on particularly women writers of her epoch and beyond i mean she was the great commission giver for someone like emily dickinson and not just someone like emily dickinson but actually emily dickinson who um had the great rossetti engraving which i think is the finest image of elizabeth browning um hanging in her bedroom you know her room in which she wrote and lived um but she's also a modernizer she's i think that elizabeth browning we forget that elizabeth browning was in a sense um in tandem with dickens it's it's the same gesture of um moving towards the social utility and the moral purpose of literature so like dickens she's writing for the new mass audience of the 19th century the newly literate um newly middle class lower middle class the kind of clarks class as it were the the families who are used to reading by the far side um so like dickens she's publishing in the periodicals as well as her book she's publicly in periodicals which are those eagerly weighted periodicals that we remember you know people waiting for the next installment of you know little nail or whatever and like dickens she's writing about the purposes of society and she's writing a newly narrative accessible not so elevated way there's a kind of intimacy and quetidian character to her language and a slight sentimentality to her emotional register and less abstraction but more kind of moral principled writing and that is really really part of the the shift into the victorian zeitgeist kind of shift towards family values and um and a sense of the risks of modernity that you know romanticism had embraced you know science is fantastic new you know what can we think of frankenstein you know the the victorian experiences on the one hand let's make lots of money but on the other hand you know a kind of um dark satanic mills i mean okay blake that's blake and he's earlier but you know there's a beginning to be good works of social conscience and and um and she's part of that dual approach that that develops through the mid 19th century is she where she's doing that yes she's aware she's quite explicit about from quite young about the moral purposes of poetry she that um she sees poetry's purpose as to illustrate what would otherwise remain abstract in um [Music] in the imagination so she sees it as a kind of the handmaid of thought actually she sees it as a handmaid of philosophy right yes certainly impressive reading the biography she she studied a lot of the philosophers the greeks and so forth and she does seem to have taken or taken that on board as a stupid phrase for it but she does seem to have incorporated that into what she was trying to do she was a she was a very intellectual writer wasn't she in many many ways yes she was a crafts woman as well i mean i think she she you know my last biography was of mary shelley and what's interesting about mary shelley is that um [Music] you know she's there sort of fully you know she writes her masterpiece when she's still a teenager whereas elizabeth brown is the opposite it's a very conscious and dogged form of self-construction um so that she is um she's quite aware that she on the one hash is this elevated note of the classics they are these um the great works and she admires them but she also thinks that that's how you learn prosidy that's how you train yourself to be uh to be a poet that's your ten thousand hours as it were that you you have to put in the hard yards and actually does make a difference because you can see her emerging it's quite a conscious willed self-development i don't mean in a careerist way she's not quite so good at that although she's not bad at it but in the technical terms she has a strong sense strong pragmatic sense about how you become a writer yeah and in terms of pragmatism returns the fact that she's a woman which i think we will return to a few times i mean that's difficult isn't it at that particular time to enter the literary scene to become part of the literacy scene i mean how does she actually do that yes it is very difficult um i mean she's interesting in that unlike um [Music] almost all her female peers she uh she always had her name on the title page so most of her most of her peers that's to say the women we've we remember um wrote either pseudonymously under a male pseudonym george eliot the bronte sisters or the bell brothers or they wrote anonymously so jane austen was a lady and um mary shelley was the author of frankenstein which is a little bit of a circular bit of nomenclature so um despite that she gradually acquired serious critical attention um and i think that that starts again that does start in 1838 with the seraphim where she starts to have she has a serious publisher and serious books from serious publishers simply are reviewed and so although there is always a strain of reviewing which something she satirizes at great length in aurora lee when she's looking at a woman's emerging life um although she in which it's you know she's kind of a performing monkey because she's a woman who's a poet or there's a sense later when she's a political poet that you know she shouldn't be troubling her head with these things she must have not understood them got them wrong nevertheless there she is um [Music] in in full view and i mean when she's nominated for the lawyership it's by the athenaeum which is a very conservative establishment publication you know she is and her reviews are in the mainstream press partly because at this stage there aren't little poetry magazines in the same way as there will be in the 20th century that's that's a phenomenon of modernism it's not a phenomenon of romanticism and and of um victorianism so she she is reviewed and her poems are singled out for review even when she's being published in anthology um and those reviewers aren't aren't you know are sort of looking past the genuine in a way yeah and i think that one of the things that that does reminds us thinking about the anthology is that it makes us think about um the importance of mentors in her life she was very wise and i think she was i think this was intuitive she had a sense that she needed um mentors she had a sense quite young i mean when her essay on poetry was published she when she's 21 20 actually um she immediately acquires three mentors um houston boyd who's a local a classicist local to her in herefordshire who was really problematic for her because his gifts were mediocre and he was a married man who was trying to groom her to have a relationship so it's kind of real suppression going on containment completely unheard of in in poetry ever since that that sort of election yes and executable i mean when you read this verse you could see why right um um there are a couple of poems particularly about um a pleasure party going up in moorville hills and getting struck by lightning and um they're really quite mcgonagall-ish i mean he's okay with meter because of the classical stuff but the content is just mortifying um and elizabeth who at that stage is already quite an acute critic somehow sublimates this and is able to see past it to some inner capacity in him which of course none of the rest of us can we can't see it in the capacity um so there's houston boyd for some years he hangs around and hangs around inordinately in her psychic space um then there's sir dale price who's a family friend who is quite the opposite also classicist but the man who who brought the idea of the picturesque so the last of the three romantic categories the sublime the beautiful and then he added the picturesque into british culture who's a very old man by the time she gets to know him and and has you know has very distinguished friends and um is friends with wordsworth indeed um and who um kind of gives her his blessing in a way and then there is john kenyon who is a distant cousin and who is a literary figure and knows everybody and he is a little bit later on in her 30s he is a wonderful mentor and in fact remains a mentor all through her most of her life until he dies and it's he who introduces her to wordsworth it's he who introduces her to miss mitford who is the um the other mentor the female figure the female novelist who mary russell mitford who then starts publishing elizabeth and starts introducing elizabeth to other women like lady daker who is barbarina wilmot the ladies vlan gotham these um very early 19th century important women writers to whom to from whom she sort of takes the bat on who hand their baton on to her so all these mentors are part of that same process yeah fantastic one of the things that um i think is always interesting about poets poets who are women is the way that they are often trade produced and one of the things about elizabeth barrett browning she wrote how do i love thee let me count the ways which is very convenient in some sense that we can say oh here's an emotional woman part of her but her political poetry is incredibly vital and wonderful and powerful and it was a huge part of what she did and i know your experience as a poet is that you you write poetry often that has intellectual heft and it's you know ignored or not noticed um but for elizabeth baraban and her politics were absolutely horrific weren't they yes they were um she her political conscience evolved so she um she is the daughter and the granddaughter of slavers i mean one of the things that we tend to forget about elizabeth browning is that she believed herself to be bane and not without reason in the sense that her family were an old jamaican family who had not only intermarried but all those kind of sexual crimes had gone on all those exploitations all those une equal relationships and she had first cousins who were baim she had um various kind of nieces who were nephews who were blamed so it was an entirely reasonable assumption on her part but at the same time like other family members who were actually so so situated themselves including for example her grandmother's close friend treppy um who who was baine but also kept slaves um you know she was part of she wasn't she she was a beneficiary of slavery when she was a child so how how were they beneficiaries of slavery can could you just um because they they owned cars they owned plantations and it was from that from trading in sugar was how the fact where the family fortune came from on both sides of her family which also applies to robert browning's father's side except that robert browning's father estewed that so by the time she was a young adult elizabeth had come to realize that i mean conveniently the brits had abolished slavery although completely imperfectly um and uh but america hadn't so elizabeth became an ardent abolitionist at the time when um you know britain and her family were no longer owning owning if you can own a person which of course you can't slaves but americans were but it was sincere i mean she was kind of she was revolted she said um she has a very nice quote about how um she says a philanthropy by the time she says 1845 so she's not quite 40. she writes to a friend a philanthropist and a liberal who advocates the slave trade is philanthropic veneering in other words you can't do slavery nicely she understands that and before she has left home she writes the runaway slave at pilgrim's point which is not which is kind of horrifying even today and this is um amazing to see the british library have the manuscript of it um you can see how hard one the poem is um so it's a very very dark poem and it's a poem in which there's not only enslavement but rape resulting in a a child um who is who's the color of whose skin condemns it in its mother's eyes and so the mother the raped woman kills the child the result of the rape and she is murdered as a result by her rapist in effect um so it's a very very dark poem and in other words it's saying that slavery isn't some sort of economic relation it's a sadistic relation and it's also saying that it's also not turning a blind eye to the sexual violence that was intrinsic to slavery and that would have been extraordinarily shocking it's shocking now to read it would be extraordinarily shocking in 1848 when she gave it donated it to an abolitionist publication to sell in other words in aid of the big the good cause yeah but before that in 1843 she'd written the cry of the children which is about um you know indentured child labor child slavery labor in in um in britain um and that she published that in blackwood so that's a really mainstream place so lots of readers yeah okay sorry sorry i was going to ask can i just get back to that slide of the the runaway slave poem because you you're a poet yourself and you say that was a very hard one just looking at that manuscript it really seems like she was attacking it in some sense it was a very difficult thing for her to produce is that your sort of understanding of it yes absolutely i mean you know there's obviously a huge question about register isn't that you know how extreme do you make it it's you're making it quite extreme by the kind of story you're telling but then how um how melodramatic you know there are errors of taste which are which matters so much in something that's high stakes like this that they become errors of like they become a kind of obscenity themselves i mean you know it's it's in it's like the adorno you know no lyric poetry after auschwitz is what theodore adorno actually said not no poetry after auschwitz that there are certain tones in which you cannot speak about certain kinds of thing and there are certain tones which aren't appropriate when you're dancing on the rim of the volcano so to speak yeah so yeah and i think also i mean i've got a soft spot for manuscripts where people are writing some stances around to the side you can see that it's kind of an iratum but it's not an irrational it's a supplementary thought yeah because it's not automatic the stances are in the in the order they are it's a native poem but it's also got reflective stances you know you can see you know there's questions about order there too yes now now standing slightly outside the frame at this point is robert browning uh also a poet obviously um and who came into her life and and obviously many people who have experienced elizabeth barrett browning have done it through the terrible terrible um rudolf bezier play film film film where somehow robert comes and saves elizabeth barrett browning and that's not strictly true might one say one might say that yes thank you for that cue yes um i mean you know elizabeth's life got a lot better when she fell in love and after years secret courtship married robert browning and they went to live in italy in haste and secretly so her father couldn't stop them not strictly enlightenment but not far off and he got a lot better in a number of ways because she was really in love with robert he was really in love with her they also had a great time together um because the climate was good for her health and the food was good for her health because she became able to do all sorts of things she had a literary salon life an artistic salon life at that point because she was able to have a child although she had four miscarriages but still at the age of 43 she had a child who survived who survived her with her his parents great kind of custodian and archive first archivist so all of that um but it wouldn't be quite right to say that he rescued her in the sense that in the rudolf bezier sense because she was no swooning near austenite before that i mean she was we've been talking about her craft she was extraordinarily self-made you know at a time when she when to be a woman writer and intellectual was unheard of it's still problematic today but it was absolutely sort of beyond the cultural pale she doggedly did that she could have been she could have settled for the domestic arts or a nice life as she didn't she pushed herself do she worked against the grain of kind of continual threat of death she kind of altered her beliefs she tried to find a sense of life after death and found she couldn't find that sense she kind of constantly she worked she worked very hard to create herself so in that sense he didn't rescue her also it was largely her money they ran away on and last but not least we have to remember that he was six years her junior and that when they ran away together he'd had some success a greater success with his first book and then had seen as having taken a wrong turn and kind of lost it and she was the the great rising not just hope but the great emergent poet of her generation and she was far ahead of him both in terms of professional reputation but also in terms of professional achievement and in terms of the modernity of her verse i mean the books the kind of narrative writing for which browning after her death would become so famous include the books from men and women onwards although she was alive when that was written are taking on the lessons that she gave him as it were because they are developing her style of poetics further she's not copying him he is copying her and it's a matter of public record you can see by the dates of the manuscripts and by the dates of the publication of the books and yet posthumously as it were the narrative has been the reverse that somehow he was doing that and she kind of came along for the ride in in ways personal and professional yeah can we actually actually be absolutely frank about this when they get together if you want to call it that she's the better poet and he learns from her and i think and one of the touching things about reading the biography is he acknowledges that it's that that's not some dark secret in his life he actually ignores that they have a very happy marriage and he knows that he's the bloke who's not quite as good as his missus can we do it that way yes that's true but it pulls for him so after a few years he gets he's got really got writer's block and then as she gets illa as she goes into her 50s early 50s he begins to have much more of an independent life and he has had a child at this point as well well they've had a child so they've had a child they've had pen yes and there is always that sense that he has a separate study and she doesn't um so they are still observing the gender conventions you know even as they go through the motions of she is elizabeth ranning and quite soon each the reviews of each one mention the other on pass on either to hers tend to be to sort of say oh well you know of course there's the young turk you know robert browning there is a there is a i think a loss that comes with adding browning to her name i think i think i found the same thing working on mary shelley there's a sense that whatever they contract within the couple and certainly shelley's contract was lousy compared to the brownies contract um [Music] it's just so difficult to write about uh a writer who is a woman if her surname is the same as the man's browning just does denote robert and shelley just does denote percy bish um i mean if they hadn't married those people then um godwin might have denoted mary who we know as shelley and barrett would have denoted elizabeth because she wasn't sharing with anybody perhaps but there is a kind of striking through the identity that comes along just like in a mills and boone almost you know take your pick happy marriage or writing a reputation i mean of course actually elizabeth wrote her best work while after she married and while she was with robert so i mean you know most of them thrived but i don't think we should forget that there may have been difficulties and in both cases can we say and i mean it's a difficult thing to say that the the wives if you want to put it that way we're the better writers oh i'm quite a fan of percy actually but i don't think i don't think the wives were worse writers right okay you know and i think i think that's the other thing you know that terrible sense that there has to be a comparative if you're with a man you have to be less than him or it's problematic that you're more than him you're a sacred monster you can't just be any longer you're always going to be in relation for the rest of your life yeah maybe talking of which we ought to hear a sonic for the portuguese do you think um so what's great about these is that they are genuinely love poems they are poems that elizabeth wrote in secret about robert while robert was courting her and even robert didn't know about them she didn't tell him about them until quite a long time after they were married sonnets from the portuguese sonnet 22 when our two souls stand up erect and strong face to face silent drawing nigh and nire until the lengthening wings break into fire at either curbed point what bitter wrong can the earth do to us that we should not long be here contented think in mounting higher the angels would press on us and aspire to drop some golden orb of perfect song into our deep deer silence let us stay rather on earth beloved where the unfit contrarious moods of men recoil away and isolate pure spirits and permit a place to stand and love in for a day with darkness and the death hour rounding it fantastic reading there by mark padmore um one of the one shouldn't bring european to everything let's bring europe into this one of the things about elizabeth browning was she was not a local poet in any sense was she she moved to whitley and well robert and her move to to italy and um had a a huge influential career over there as well in um azuidi was their place they moved to yes that's right um casa guidi is the name of elizabeth um and robert's home eventually in florence not quite the first place they lived in italy but they lived there fairly soon um and it's also the title casa greedy windows is the title she gave to a long poem that she wrote about italian reunification it's a it's a sort of 30-page book as it were um it's in two parts um written a year apart more than a year apart um as her convictions waned but um elizabeth was um kind of unnatural for um uh the italian struggle for liberation from the habsburg empire for a democratic a republican you know reunification unification i think because she had this sense of the importance of self-determination which was partly a religious sense from her dissenting christian background and was partly um a product of this this living with disability this having to try and find ways to have autonomy even when she had very little bodily autonomy um at times um what she wasn't as she wrote to kenyan telling him was actually socialist so on the one hand she was really inspired by scenes of joy at liberation um but then on the other hand she was slightly horrified when she realized that the upshot of a republic would be some of the things that were going on in france like um [Music] guaranteed work um and and cooperatives and so on and she was not so much the terror as as this she was she was really worried about why was she worried about her because she wasn't a socialist she was actually quite conservative right okay you know she she lived she although casa guidi is not actually very big and she wasn't actually as wealthy as um well she wasn't remotely as wealthy in her married life as um her childhood um in the mansion of hope end and herefordshire where she spent 26 years growing up um would have led her to believe um she you know she she was quite class conscious and she she did call her mate by their surnames and she although she was loyal to them and loved them in the the man of her time she didn't want to see the end of a hierarchical society she just thought that the italians ought to be ruled by italians right and she also kind of it would be simplistic to say that she liked the fancy dress of the parade i mean much more than that and i think having become an abolitionist she kind of understood sort of a sense of the rights of man and he did the rights of women and so a sense of um you know one man one vote as it were she would go as far as that i think um but she was very persistent in her love of italy and her desire to see well to see kavor as a premiere and so on um i mean she it's not just carl's greedy windows it's also she also her last collection before her posthumous sperms um was posed before congress which is about um it takes this title from a congress which was supposed to help italy out of the difficulties which result from um well from blockade and from from war um and she felt and britain was supposed to come to this congress and didn't and so this book was received in britain as a very anti-british book whereas in fact one could say it was more of a pro-italian book but so it's two collections about um italy but then again she's not doing something that's so different from other intellectuals or radicals of her time i mean she was very attracted to gervani italia and i mean you know she she moves to she gets married and goes to italy in 1846 so you think of 1848 there we are it's coming it's coming down down the track to walter um but you know mary shelley was also very taken up with gervani italia so there's a very there's a kind of zeitgeist thing going on as well i kind of slightly you know this week's cause yeah but it was a bit more than that for her wasn't it i mean she was not only doing the zeitgeist but she was one of the leading figures in this i mean in italy she had a state funeral she was got a state funeral yes as this huge figure who was talking about italian liberation if you want to call it that and that that's a huge part of her existence yes absolutely and of course italy then was a poor country we have to remember that um you know the sense it would be a bit like someone making the case in the states now for i don't know a country like i know georgia or somewhere um it was such a disparity in the kind of expectations and national sense between britain and italy that that shifting the middle ground of middle britain's opinion about italy was an enormous act of leverage that elizabeth performed for on behalf of italy and she um performed i think partly so successfully because she was also incredibly in touch with how to feel for that that that society that community she wasn't she was very unromantic in the sense that she wasn't ahead of her time she wasn't a radical she wasn't an elite in that sense she responded to and wanted to respond to her generation her time um it's a very different project in a way she says articulate she's almost you know purifying the dielectric type not quite that but she's mirroring back to her people what their values are or should be a kind of slightly polished or slightly upscaled version of their values and their morals yeah i think i think we should hear a reading from category windows before that i'm just going to remind people if they want to do any questions then do so now also if you want to buy the book i know that's redundant because you've all bought it already but for the two or three of you who are out there who just haven't invested their money just hit the button and buy the book and now we're going to reading of cars greedy windows from cars aguedy windows i heard last night a little child go singing neath karzagweedy windows by the church obella libertar stringing the same words still on notes he went and searched so high for you concluded the upspringing of such a nimble bird to sky from perch must leave the whole bush in a tremble green and at the heart of italy must beat while such a voice had leave to rise serene twixt church and palace of a florence street a little child too who not long had been by mother's finger steadied on his feet and still he sang for me who stand in italy today where worthier poets stood and sang before i kiss their footsteps yet their words gain say i can but muse in hope upon this shore of golden arno as it shoots away through the heart of florence beneath the four bent bridges seeming to strain off like bows and tremble while the arrowy undertide shoots on and cleaves the marble as it goes and strikes up palace walls on either side and froths the cornice out in glittering rows with doors and windows quaintly multiplied and terraced sweeps and gazers upon all by whom if flower or kerchief were thrown out from any lattice there the same would fall into the river underneath no doubt it runs so close and fast twist warm and warm how beautiful the mountains from without listen in silence for the word said next what word will men say here where jotto planted his campanile like an unperplexed question to heaven touching the things granted a noble people who being greatly vexed in act in aspiration keep undaunted what word says god for the heart of man beat higher that day in florence flooding all her streets and piazzas with a tumult and desire the people with accumulated heats and faces turned one way as if one fire both drew and flushed them left their ancient beasts and went upward to the palace pity wall to thank their grand duke who not quite of course had graciously permitted at their call the citizens to use their civic force to guard their civic homes so one and all the tuscan cities streamed up to the source of this new good at florence taking it as good so far pressage full of more good the first torch of italian freedom lit mark padmore there reading three extracts from cars of greedy windows the first is the famous scene setting the opening between the church and the palace between church and state as italy is the second is the kind of stondar syndrome her own anglo perspective on an italy of art history full of art treasures and a third passage describing what was actually her own first wedding anniversary when she and robert waved from their terrace to the florentines and tuscans processing to the pity palace which is just around the corner from casa guidi um to so render thanks to the archduke for the concessions he'd made to florentine well to tuscan of self-determination well and good but her book that you your biography drove me to and it's great aurora lee this astonishing book which you know uh reading it where did this come from it's just an amazing insight into writing about poetry and about life and and so forth and tell us about it i think it's the basic question well let me show you and uh uh there we are uh it's not a first edition but it's a it's an early edition can i just stop you for one second if anyone here who's watching hasn't read aurora lee reader or lee back to you really is um many things one of which is a page turner it's really interesting it's elizabeth browning's masterpiece um and it's of it's a novel in verse which of course is why it hasn't had quite the rediscovery that uh the great 19th century women prose writers and novelists have had because we are allergic to verse it seems but um not only was it international bestseller it's all about 20 editions in its first month of publication and and critically acclaimed by everyone from john ruskin to fakery to um well to to the this is called the panoply of critics in the newspapers about whom we were talking earlier it's also the first woman's buildings romance so it's the first story by a woman about how a woman becomes and of course that's a very serious form by the time elizabeth is writing um and it's published aurorally um i mean since gert is the sorrows of young worth her versa it's been a it's been a significant form because a way of interrogating what makes us human um he's also the first woman's kunstlero man so it's the first um account of how a woman maker becomes and you can see therefore instantly the appeal to other women makers particularly women poets at the time um book five in particular is a kind of great long arse poetica in which elizabeth browning explores all her beliefs about what makes a good poem through the persona of aurora lee because it's aurora lee whose story it is and aurora lee um becomes a poet and she becomes a poet through the enormous success of her autobiographical verse novel um so it's a masterpiece um verse novel semi-autobiographical written by elizabeth browning about aurora lee's autobiographical verse masterpiece which is buried inside the book which we never get to read um i mean we read aurora lee but we don't read aurora lee's book rory lee's book is told in stories told in nine books and i borrowed that structure for elizabeth's life even though i have to say the phases in elizabeth's life and the phases of aurora's lee lee's life don't match up as you will probably have noticed having read both absolutely yes but the the thing about aurora lee and i want to go back to this it's like that that idea of boxes within boxes that i mean it's incredibly sophisticated isn't it um yes i was going to say for its time but for any time but that she does this that she takes her struggle if you want to put it that way and she a fictionalizes it but then puts it within this incredible structure i mean it's one of the great books of the the of the time isn't it it is absolutely it's a it's a mighty book and um yeah you're right and it says it is the now scarred of her her era because although um aurorally has a quieter dramatic life um you know in a sense most of the melodrama is delegated to uh subsidiary secondary character so to the love interest or to who goes blind and loses his life's work in a fire or to a young woman whom she has mentored called marion earl get it marry an earl um who is trafficked into prostitution has an illegitimate child and there's lots of very radical writing about it isn't the woman who's been trafficked who is the sinner it's the men who who use her and about offering the child who is a result of that in effect rape um a secure home even though it's in a one-parent family um and supporting marion supporting the child that's another set of boxes actually um and i also find it very useful for thinking about biography in general um because you know biography always is always putting a frame around a life isn't it i mean it's selective at the at the first level um simplifying a life or simplifying an intellectual development into a narrative is um it's not arbitrary but it's it's not innocent either something is going on something is several things are going on and those things that are going on are being supplied by the biographer fairly obviously and that sense that the biographer should acknowledge their own lack of innocence should acknowledge the frame that a biography is seem to be very important and i really wanted to think about that in this book because particularly because because elizabeth browning's life is about so much about the becoming of a poet in a way that other writers lives perhaps have a different emphasis but that's the key thing about it the kind of the graduate partners and the difficulty of becoming um and because her masterpiece is also about that there's obviously a reflection going on and i think in any case because elizabeth wasn't invalid to use that old-fashioned term lived with disability so much of her becoming was becoming a writer and therefore so much of the mirror or the frame in which um [Music] she could see we can see her emergence as a person is in her writing not just because those are the only traces because they're not but there's a sort of elizabeth becomes elizabeth by dint of her poetry in many ways and so that sense of mirroring seemed to me extremely interesting the reason i've called sorry don't no go on sorry well i was going to say the reason i've called the book two-way mirror is because i'm very interested in that idea of biography's portraiture and that sense that you know in the portrait the subject looks back out at us but actually is looking back at the portraitist who is kind of hidden behind us you know they don't get seen and implicated um it seems as uh the person whose portrait is being shown is involved in a two exchanges looking at us but actually they're not there's something that has been cut off in the same way as um two-way mirrors which you know i think are used in interview rooms and police stations but they're certainly also used in mental health care units or used to be in the days when i worked in them where you know the staff sit behind her what looks to the people in the room like a mirror um but actually people behind it are watching so there's a kind of interrupted gaze there isn't there isn't a fair exchange of knowledge just as there isn't between our biographical subjects and us as biographers issa because i mean they can't answer back to us they don't even know we've written the biographies in these in cases of you know dead subjects that's brilliant we're going to go through a reading from um from aurora lee now um i just want everyone who's watching to remember the word radical which fiona said earlier because i think one of the things about this is it's a radical book and you don't want to just nestle it away as a non-radical book it's incredible radical after which there's a question and answers if you haven't already send a question then do so the organizers have told me we've got for like four or five hours where we can do this so do send the question through but now a reading of um aurora lee from aurora lee book three they yelled at her as famished hounds at a hair she heard them yell she felt her name hiss after her from the hills like shot from guns on on and now she had cast the voices off with the uplands on mad fear was running in her feet and killing the ground the white roads curled as if she burnt them up the green fields melted wayside trees fell back to make room for her then her head grew vexed trees fields turned on her and ran after her she heard the quick pants of the hills behind their keen air pricked her neck she had lost her feet could run no more yet somehow went as fast the horizon read twixed steeples in the east so sucked her forward forward while her heart kept swelling swelling till it swelled so big it seemed to fill her body then it burst and overflowed the world and swamped the light and now i am dead and safe thought marion earl aurora lee read by mark padmore and if i hadn't emphasized this enough read aurora lee read fiona's book first and then read aurorally it's quite an amazing book um question answers we've got a few questions have come in um well gosh i've just moved to my screen and there's a lot of questions come in so let's go with carol first of all um fiona can i ask what was the thinking behind the frames that introduced each chapter uh thank you for that question um well i i i think that biography is as i've just think i said not an innocent art and i i am really quite interested in it i'm really i'm fascinated by people which is why i'm why i'm a biographer but i'm also i don't want to put myself in the book but i want to look at the book doing itself and i am really interested in portraiture i mean one of the things i found while i was working on elizabeth about browning was i had a real difficulty getting started because i was still in love with mary shelley well what does that mean i mean the kind of it seems like a very simplistic emotional over-investment but that kind of sense of you know and it is in a sense because i didn't know her i don't know either woman i've never i can't meet them um and yet i'm extremely interested in them extremely absorbed by them i feel i think about them in a three in as many dimensions as i think about friends of mine so you know emotional and spiritual and moral and whatever intellectual and physical and you know so really what's going on there and it at the heart of cars agreed in the reconstructed apartment which has been brilliantly refurbished largely by philip kelly the great uh browning archivist um with with much of the original stuff and certainly accurate reproductions of everything that was there when elizabeth browning died there um is a great ornate mirror um which was the one that elizabeth looked at herself in uh every day and the straight and indeed it looks out of castle greedy windows because it's hanging opposite the long windows and the strangeness of that the strangeness of there being a mirror in which we can look in which she looked but we can't see her there is just very it's something very seductive and i wanted to play with it and i i guess the short answer to is i just don't want to play biography straight okay sassy i love the short answer right at the end that's brilliantly done um i've just gone back to the screen there's so many questions so i'd advise people to get another glass of wine maybe a kebab and we're going to move on to the next question kim robertson says how much do you think ebb continues to influence poets today oh and i think not enough but i think that for some women i i think she's a very important presence at the back of your mind um and i'd like to see her move more to the front of our minds um i think the british poet at the moment we're not terribly good at reading actually the canon and i think that as i've sort of alluded to i think that we aren't terribly good beyond poetry at we in britain at reading poetry anymore it's just not our thing it's not the same as it is on the island of ireland for example or i don't know in um serbia it's just um not seen as interesting cool attractive it's just seen as really problematic even among the literary chattering classes and so that means that in a sense the canon is a series of names a kind of mental slide index i think um and it's not actually a kind of living tradition always and so it's very hard if someone is pushed out by the gatekeepers as elizabeth browning was brutally really in the second half of the 20th century um by the kind of the howl blooms and so on the lionel twillings that kind of generation of male critic um how do we bring her back and it's important that we do because maybe you know poetry won't always be such an underregarded resource um and also because there's just something some really important woman's work about um bringing back the women and making sure that we keep the record turning because if we don't that's a kind of lie about history and therefore a lie about where we are now i'm going to ask a supplementary question which is against the rules but um it's one of the things that's striking about here you mentioned self-determination before and that's different isn't it to self-expression and i think one of the interesting things about her is that she determines herself and and then uses art she studies the greeks studies poetic forms in order to express herself and that's not just saying what she reckons is it yes and it's not saying what she feels either that's absolutely right i mean she does see even though she sees poetry as a handmaid of philosophy she does see poetry as a form of thinking and indeed one of the reasons she was took it took her such a long time to tell robert browning about the sonnets from the portuguese was that he and she were both very again confessional poetry so actually he and she would both have much rather it been the case that they were indeed a literary act of translation of somebody else's um poems and there's a whole stuff series of you know as it were frames about a literary homage to letters from portuguese nun and so which are kind of great erotic romantic texts and um european texts and so on and translated if you're a british reader so um so yes i think she i think she is a very there's there's a thinking it's a kind of not colloquial but a kind of speaking quality in her verse which is very it's not conversation not colloquial but because she's not using uh ornate language and she's using often quite sly or clunky rhymes and she's quite transgressive with this meter it cost us so much to learn from greek prosidy there's a kind of speakingness a kind of personality rather than a set of confessed feelings or confessed life that comes through her poetry and that i think is very very modern absolutely ellis steiner has asked would you say that the very fact she was modern in quotation marks in the sense of channeling the victorian zeitgeist as you've said between some of the more sentimental aspects was detrimental to a reputation after a death as part of a reaction against victorianism yeah that's such an interesting question alison thank you and i think that's absolutely true because i find it i find the same resistance as in myself as a reader the bits that i'm uncomfortable with are the sentimental bits um but i think that that in a sense i think that that's that too that we will turn because i mean you know victorianism victoriana has had its movings in and out of fashion you know even in recent decades you know the kind of the way that for example fusion and kind of high victory and gothic architecture kind of came back in um and i even painters like alma tadema suddenly being respected and having exhibitions and so on and um so i think that um [Music] i think that victoriana is not as disparaged as it was in the 60s and 70s i think that um we've moved away again from it a little bit um in terms of sentiment i mean it's hard for me to tell because at the moment i'm so embedded in romanticism that it feels to me as though our contemporary literatures are more towards the romantics and we're more you know interested in in what they had to say and we're returning to them more and that may well be what's going on but i don't think that that'll be permanent you know i think that you know contemporary culture is pretty capable of kind of kitchen sentiment and i for one have certainly looked at lots of baby armadillos and you know little goats jumping from haystacks and so on and you know in in lockdown i mean i'm you know online so you know i i don't think we quite i'm confessing this pete didn't know um the next question comes stephanie from the moderator which sounds like we're in a philip k dick novel um but fiona mentioned that her bigger feature on newer cover archival material not available previously can you tell us more about this fiona yeah well it's not arcane because it's all available it's an absolute wonderful resource which is the browning correspondence just google it and you'll find it and it's um it's incredibly well resourced and has been for decades it's a decades-long project led by philip kelly um with um the armstrong browning armstrong library at baylor university but um it's online it's a whole series of volumes of of the correspondence uh funded by nationally down with the arts i should send states um and it's collating all the primary correspondence so all to and from robert and elizabeth and anybody else who wrote direct and from them but also all the secondary stuff too so you know siblings of elizabeth writing to each other and and then collating portraits and um is just an incredible resource and you know in the in recent decades that has been bought and brought together and indexed and transcribed and it's it's available um doesn't quite go up to the end of elizabeth's life yet but so because obviously robert lived quite a long time after elizabeth died so if you're a robert brownish scholar it's you know you've got more you've got to more to wait for than if you're an elizabeth scholar because it goes up to very close to elizabeth's destiny and the material is all there so that just makes an enormous difference instead of having to kind of contact you know distant relatives who've maybe got one letter here and something else there so i mean you know it's not a matter of um having to go and you know do that or have somehow you know um like the aspen papers you know have a in with the right people you know it's it's simply a matter of doing the basic scholarly work of reading resources now but it wasn't and yet 40 has taken us nearly 40 years to now get another biography of elizabeth browning and you know no i feel like nobody's using this material i i should also say you know that it was a great disappointment to me that i couldn't get any of the gatekeeper publishing houses to produce a contemporary edition of elizabeth barbara and his poetry to come out at the same time as a biography which you would have thought would be a slight no-brainer um there are fabulous comprehensive scholarly additions but there's not you know a good reliable imprint edition but no this is kind of reinforcing no we don't want to know about it because we don't know about her from quite a lot of gatekeepers i've been quite shocked yeah speaking of which i'm going to ask one more supplementary question before we go to our final audience question and um if i may was just looking at you know the recent archival material and looking at that experience was there something that surprised you about elizabeth browning when you came to her for the first time or throughout the experience i think i was well i think i was surprised how feisty she was because you know i had absorbed the cultural myth of this kind of you know swooning lady on a catch and although i knew that she was more important than that because i loved her work i mean she might have kind of just come to that very easily i didn't know that it would be a book all about willpower and determination and endurance and i've really liked that about her i have a lot of time for people who put in the hard yards and do do you like her you like a little bit parabolic yeah i do yeah i do i like her very much i find barriers of class and sentiment when i uh think about her but i do i i really admire her and i think i think also you know it was very hard finishing this book during the pandemic because there she is in her throughout her life fighting for breath coughing nearly dying from you know chest infections which at the time when i got commissioned for the book seemed like a kind of safely in the past 19th century thing and of course now we know it's not and so in many ways it was very hard to write but then on the other hand it was very sanitary to be writing at this time and also useful because you know you realize that all of her achievement was against the grain of you know chronic really severeness i mean one knows that about d.h lawrence for example but i didn't really necessarily notice about elizabeth browning and the sense of you know just how hard it is to work and to write well when you know a large proportion of your faculties are kind of thinking am i about to die you know i mean it must be it's extraordinary fantastic there's a lot more questions we're going to have to stop at one more because you know the people from the british library they've all got their onesies on they've got their nachos they're ready for bed um but there's one more question that i'm going to ask you and i think it kind of brings all these things together we were talking about william gronawagen says how was the runaway slave received at the time of publication thank you villain and how nice to hear from you um well um it was it was certainly it was published first in an american abolitionist publication so it didn't have the sort of clear ringing impact on british public opinion that it would have if it had been published here um but it was taken very seriously as she was taken seriously in america i mean she was taken up by the kind of the young america movement well actually it's just its precursor um which is the kind of culture making which is going to produce all sorts of things like hawthorne and so on but um melville so which was therefore kind of young and radical and progressive um [Music] so it was you know it fitted right in i think it is interesting though that she returns to rape in aurorally and and and writes an even greater length of mistakes about the subject there because there's nothing in her correspondence around that that sort of says well i see myself as feminist i assume it just was common sense to her and um i i'm yeah i'm i'm excited i'm excited by that you know i think i think that's a kind of great act of courage um and i i should also say villain since you know in homage to your your work as a translator that um towards the end of her life she did quite a lot of poetry translation she prepared her poems in other words she prepared kind of literal notes for her italian translator and i think that as we've worked together like that you and i i think you'll be amused by that fact fantastic now i've got um three last things on my running shoe one is remind you to buy the book buy the book buy the book and then buy aurora lee there's the book fiona is holding up the book it's a magnificent book it's really really really good this is a real league so buy both of those and um the next month of your life will be absolutely fantastic the next thing my running list says pleasing remarks remind audience by the book that was the one i did he just says goodbye which has a kind of melancholy feel to it goodbye goodbye and then it says end slide but for all that i'm going to thank fiona sampson for a writing the biography and for a wonderful night entertainment and i hope you enjoyed it and um fiona thank you very much thank you very much peter for a great evening and thank you to mark padmore but thank you peter for stepping in and rescuing our event with such consummate grace and ease and i think we're going to end with some orally aren't we so this is this is elizabeth poetica from book five of aurora lee enjoy everybody thank you for a great night from aurora lee book five what form is best for poems let me think of forms less and the external trust the spirit as sovereign nature does to make the form for otherwise we only imprison spirit and not embody inward evermore to outward so in life and so in art which still is life five acts to make a play and why not fifteen why not ten or seven what matter for the number of the leaves supposing the tree lives and grows exact the literal unities of time and place when it is the essence of passion to ignore both time and place absurd keep up the fire and leave the generous flames to shape themselves [Music] you

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Length: 74min 19sec (4459 seconds)

Published: Mon May 10 2021