RaveThe New York Times Book Review... profits from an immense amount of arduous research (notably by the eminent Browning scholar Philip Kelley and his collaborators) in the intervening years. Yet there is more to this biography than simply access to new source material ... Sampson casts a much needed cold eye on the economic underpinnings of the celebrated Barretts of Wimpole Street ... Principally, though, Two-Way Mirror pushes back against 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 ... Battling polite silence more than the mistakes or omissions of earlier critics and biographers, Sampson wants readers to see Barrett Browning afresh. That explains her book’s relative concision and snappy chapter titles. She wants us to ask what it must have felt like to be a brilliant, ailing, tragically opium-dependent shut-in ... Sampson does not slight Robert Browning...But she also makes welcome space in Two-Way Mirror for Barrett Browning’s array of female friendships, which sustained her in her unlikely vocation of poet ... Another strength of the biography is its astute comparison between the care Barrett Browning lavished on pets and that she accorded her servants ... Sampson sympathizes with what it cost Barrett 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.
