Two-Way Mirror: The Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Praise for Two-Way Mirror: The Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning

[A] brilliant, heart-stopping biography [that] reads like a thriller, a memoir and a provocative piece of literary fiction all at the same time.… [Sampson’s] authorial asides are always helpful, often provocative and sometimes outright funny. Most importantly, they help Barrett Browning seem more alive, as the two poets’ voices often intertwine on the page.… [Two-Way Mirror is] a vividly drawn exchange between a living poet and a dead one.… Throughout this magical and compelling book, Sampson shows us that we, too, can speak to the dead, or, at the very least, we can listen to their words.


— Charlotte Gordon - Washington Post

Fiona 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.
— Abigail Deutsch - Wall Street Journal

Astute, thoughtful and wide-ranging.
— Laura Freeman, Times (UK)

It is [a] publicly engaged Elizabeth that Fiona Sampson sets before us in this fine biography.
— Kathryn Hughes, Guardian (UK)

There is more to this biography than simply access to new material.… Two-Way Mirror pushes back on the neglect, bordering on amnesia, that has descended on a poet once widely celebrated and still capable today of chilling readers with a sudden plunge from the shared everyday into frightening depths of feeling.… [Fiona] Sampson sympathizes with what it cost [Elizabeth] Barret Browning to become a poet. More than that, she hopes to inspire a new generation of readers, so that the price will have been worth it, after all.


— John Plotz - New York Times Book Review

Sampson?is adept at switching between personal history and literary analysis.… [She] does [Barrett Browning’s] achievement justice in this acute and well grounded psychological portrait.
— Mary Ann Gwinn - Minneapolis Star Tribune

[An] intriguing biography of and meditation on EBB, making the convincing claim that she was the first female lyric poet.
— Daisy Goodwin, Sunday Times (UK)

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

[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 (UK)

Fiona Sampson’s vivid new biography gives us Elizabeth Barrett Browning as busy and ambitious rather than a swooning sleeping beauty.… [B]eautifully told. It is high time that Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Aurora Leigh were once again household names.
— Frances Wilson - Daily Mail

Sampson’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 originality as a poet.
— Claudia Fitzherbert - Literary Review

The central aim of Fiona Sampson’s new biography is to strip away the illusions we have about this unfashionable poet and get far closer to seeing her as she was. It is a bold attempt to understand Elizabeth Barrett Browning before her reputation started to ebb.… [A] fine contribution.
— Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Spectator (UK)

Sampson uses both ‘Aurora Leigh’ and a complex, contemporary lens to understand how Barrett Browning defined herself, and why her struggles speak to our own. The result is a powerful restoration of the poet’s reputation and legacy.
— Elizabeth Lund - Christian Science Monitor

A welcome update that avoids sensationalism to pursue a more complex history of a much-loved literary figure.
— Library Journal, starred review

Sampson sensitively elucidates how Barrett Browning’s unusual life shaped her imagination and social consciousness.… [A] gleaming two-way mirror reflecting Barrett Browning and her profound and extraordinary oeuvre.
— Booklist, starred review

Sampson reintroduces Browning to a 21st-century audience, puts the more notorious aspects of the poet’s life in perspective, and makes the case that Browning was one of the great poets of her age.… An acute and insightful study of the life and work of a pathbreaking 19th-century poet.
— Kirkus Reviews

This account shines when breaking the mythologies that surround Barrett Browning’s reputation.… [A] refreshing portrait of the poet as an empowered woman.
— Publishers Weekly

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