Description
Book SynopsisFinalist for the 2022 Plutarch Award
A "nuanced and insightful" (
New Statesman) portrait of Britain’s most famous female poet, a woman who invented herself and defied her times.
Trade Review"This superb biography rescues Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s work from the dustbin of Victorian sentimentality to which her poems have been wrongly consigned for the better part of a century. Peeling back layers of myth, misogyny and critical dismissal, Fiona Sampson allows us to see anew an extraordinary woman whose crowning book-length poem,
Aurora Leigh, traces, for the first time in our language, the way a woman became a writer…Sampson’s engaging, deeply intelligent book, which at last gives Barrett Browning her due, is a profound inquiry, a vindication, and a delight." -- Mark Doty, author of What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life
"Fiona Sampson’s vivid new biography gives us Elizabeth Barrett Browning as busy and ambitious rather than a swooning sleeping beauty…Sampson’s biography consciously mirrors her subject’s masterpiece, but then biography, she suggests, is itself a mirror that both reveals and distorts its subject…[B]eautifully told. It is high time that Elizabeth Barrett Browning and
Aurora Leigh were once again household names." -- Frances Wilson - Daily Mail
"[
Two-Way Mirror] restores [Barrett Browning] 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." -- Lucasta Miller - Telegraph
"Sampson’s passionate and exacting biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning is a surprisingly compact volume, a bristling lyric sandwich of philosophy and action. It is also a page-turner." -- Martina Evans - Irish Times
