Two-Way Mirror: The Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Review Beautifully told. It is high time Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Aurora Leigh were once again household names. -- Frances Wilson ― Mail on SundaySampson explores Elizabeth's long illness ... with compassion and scepticism ... Sampson is an astute, thoughtful and wide-ranging guide ― The TimesA fine contribution to a growing number of biographies that try to pick off the barnacles of rumour and legend that have attached themselves to the lives of writers, and instead reveal them as they really were. -- Robert Douglas Fairhurst ― SpectatorThis new biography [shows that she was ... determined, ambitious and engaged in the public debates of her day. It] restores her to her proper place as one of the leading voices of the Victorian era ... This book is an empathetic - and much-needed - reassessment which tells a fascinating story. The decision to use the present tense [may not be to every reader's taste, but it] underlines the sense that the biographer is bringing her subject back to life. Most importantly, Sampson makes one want to read Barrett Browning -- Lucasta Miller ― TelegraphTwo-Way Mirror pushes back against the neglect, bordering on amnesia, that has descended on a poet once widely celebrated ... battling polite silence more than the mistakes or omissions of earlier critics and biographers, Sampson wants readers to see Barrett Browning afresh -- John Plotz ― The New York TimesBrilliant, heart-stopping ... reads like a thriller, a memoir and a provocative piece of literary fiction all at the same time ... magical and compelling -- Charlotte Gordon ― Washington PostThe first biography of Barrett Browning in more than 30 years is a nuanced and insightful account, dismantling previous studies [that viewed the poet only in relation to her domineering father or husband]. Fiona Sampson, a poet herself as well as a biographer of Mary Shelley, argues that central to Barrett Browning's story is the construction of identity - both in her life and the myth-making that surrounds it. Such a construction is itself a two-way creation, argues Sampson. "That the life of the body both enables and limits the life of the mind is the paradox of the thinking self." ― New Statesman"[It is [the] publicly engaged Elizabeth that Fiona Sampson sets before us in] this fine biography, the first since Margaret Forster's more than 30 years ago. For her frame and point of reference Sampson uses Aurora Leigh... [which tells the story of a young female writer's early career, specifically an artist's development. At first glance this might seem to mark a retreat to the personal and the biographic, but] Sampson's point is that Aurora Leigh provides us with a model for understanding how Barrett Browning forged a new relationship between female subjectivity and public utterance. ... The content... is spot-on. Sampson is particularly interested in Barrett Browning's personal and political entanglement with empire and race. ... Sampson is not too fastidious to deprive herself - or us - of the schlockier pleasures of biographical speculation. ... Sampson is ... judicious... but she understands enough about the pleasures of transgression to leave ... possibility in play. -- Kathryn Hughes ― GuardianThe award-winning poet Fiona Sampson ... in her intriguing biography of and meditation on EBB, making the convincing claim that she was the first female lyric poet ... Sampson's book is timely [in its examination of EBB's political awakening] ... as a poet she puts the work before the life, and that surely is the right way round. -- Daisy Goodwin ― Sunday TimesFiona Sampson spins an intriguingly complex account of her subject. ... a refreshing, contemporary take on a poet who, no matter her bodily constraints, ranged freely over subject area, form and feeling ― Wall Street JournalSampson's central argument is that the real drama and interest of EBB's life are to be found in her work ... Sampson has written an often absorbing study of EBB's risk-taking and or