Elizabeth Barrett Browning s liberation unfolds in Two-Way Mirror
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The first biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning in 30 years reminds readers of her significance, both in poetry and in politics
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by Fiona Sampson (Profile £20, 336 pp)
During her lifetime, Elizabeth Barrett Browning was our most popular woman poet yet, today, even the most passionate poetry lover would struggle to quote more than a few lines of hers.
If you re familiar with her story, it s probably because of The Barretts Of Wimpole Street.
This 1930 play, which has been filmed three times, is an irresistible slice of melodrama about the romance between Elizabeth and the dashing poet Robert Browning a love affair which was opposed by her tyrannical father, who wanted Elizabeth all to himself. As the trailer for the 1957 version gasped, Behind the doors of a proud, respectable house surge the conflicts of dark, hidden passions!
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Derry/Londonderry – where even the choice of name reflects ‘which foot you kick with’ – has a compelling and fractious history. It has often been synonymous with sectarian tensions, not least at the violent onset of the Troubles in the early 1970s, during which large numbers of Protestants moved to the Waterside, while Catholics stayed on the Cityside.
The writer Kerri ní Dochartaigh not only grew up amid these divisions in the 1980s, but, with a Protestant father and a Catholic mother, she embodied them. If religious identity was not an issue at home, it certainly was outside.
The family was living in a working-class Protestant housing estate when their father left, and the thuggish enforcers of tribal purity soon came after those who remained. Their message to leave arrived in the form of a petrol bomb through the window – ‘We were not Protestant, now that Dad had left. We were not Catholic either, though… we were nothing other than other – indefinabl