TWO-WAY MIRROR: The Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning

A beautifully told award winning biography, the first full study for over 30 years which incorporates recent archival discoveries to reveal more about Elizabeth Barrett Browning. She famously wrote 'How do I love thee? Let me count the ways', shortly before defying her family by running away to Italy with Robert Browning. But behind the romance of her extraordinary life stands a thoroughly modern figure. Born in 1806, a time when women could neither attend university nor vote, Elizabeth achieved lasting literary fame and remains Britain's greatest woman poet whose work has inspired writers from Emily Dickinson to George Eliot and Virginia Woolf. Here is the woman as a literary giant and high-profile activist for the abolition of slavery who believed herself to be of mixed heritage, and a writer who defied chronic illness and long term disability to change the course of cultural history. The book holds up a mirror to the woman, her work and the art of biography in itself and a life that remains an electrifying study in self invention. Sampson makes a convincing claim that EBB was the first female lyric poet and her point is that Aurora Leigh provides us with a model for understanding how EBB forged a new relationship between female subjectivity and public utterance. 322pp, paperback, colour illus.