MixedThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)\"The EBB of Fiona Sampson’s Two-Way Mirror is a contradiction: a social campaigner against imperial expansion and for the abolition of slavery and child labour, who is also \'a cultural Victorian, aiming to speak … from the heart of consensus morality\', in a period in which \'mainstream values are genuinely shared\'. While this middle-class picture of Victorian Britain should raise eyebrows, and so too should the idea that EBB was the first anti-imperialist poet in a tradition which includes William Blake and Helen Maria Williams, there is something brilliantly astute about the awkward placement of EBB at both the radical periphery and polite centre of her culture. Sampson manages to express the difficult and often unspoken negotiations in EBB’s public and private life ... Sampson’s biography is structurally innovative ... The mode of narration is effective when there is something going on...and when it allows for taut vignettes of moments such as the kidnap of EBB’s spaniel Flush. But when there is little to report, the method stumbles ... For all its qualities, the main thing that disappoints about Two-Way Mirror is how little time is spent on EBB’s poems ... Sampson captures very well a headstrong EBB, both a campaigner and a commercially successful poet untamed by established tropes of the \'women writer\', but more attention could have been paid to her use of the poetic medium which, to repurpose a phrase of EBB, \'straight outreaches all things\'.
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