Wilson of Wimpole Street

Nicola Beauman

LADY'S MAID by Margaret Forster

Chatto & Windus, £13.95, pp. 536

I. life of Lily Wilson is extremely

obscure and thus cries aloud for the ser- vices of a biographer. No human figure in the Browning letters, save the principals, more excites our curiosity and baffles it', wrote Virginia Woolf in 1933, in a six-page note at the end of her 'life of a dog, Mrs Browning's Flush'.

Lady's Maid is a novel about Wilson's life from 1844 when she came from New- castle to be Elizabeth Barrett Browning's maid at 50 Wimpole Street until 1861 when her mistress died. Some details have long been known from the Browning letters: Wilson's 'honest, true and affectionate heart', her cheerful adaptation to life at Casa Guidi. Then, in her 1988 biography of Elizabeth, Margaret Forster elaborated on Wilson's marriage to the Brownings' man- servant Romagnoli, on Elizabeth's mean- ness about paying her more than 16 guineas a year and, saddest of all, on the Brownings' prudish refusal to allow Wil- son's son Oreste to live in Italy.

Now, in a highly original attempt to demolish the wall between fiction and biography, Margaret Forster has drawn on her experience as a novelist, as a biog- rapher, as a feminist historian and as author of Thackeray's 'autobiography' to write a novel where the parameters are real events and real people. Wilson's long, very long, letters, home, her endless thoughts (she seems to have a great deal of time to think) and far-from-brief conversations with other people are all 'made up'; points of fact are (presumably) not.

The drawback is that Wilson is a maid. Unlike Nerissa or Emilia she is a passive onlooker who has no significant role in the rather familiar story of the Barretts of Wimpole Street. Of course one feels com- passion when, after 534 pages, she thinks 'never again would she tie her life to another person in quite that way but would seek to stand on her own more truly than had ever been possible' — she .had, after all, to earn her living. But I could not help remembering Henry James's remarks (in his preface to The Portrait of a Lady) about the process whereby a 'slight "personal- ity" ' becomes 'endowed with the high attributes of a Subject'. There is a good reason why biography is about a Subject not a subject — the former is far more interesting.

Of course, as 'subjects' lack 'papers' they are not often written about and Lady's Maid is a wholly admirable attempt at feminist revisionism.

As Nicholas Mosley observed in his life of Julian Grenfell:

[Servants] existed as a sort of ghostly sub- world like that of atomic particles; their existence was recognised, but easily ignored. Ettie [Grenfell] for instance would have seldom dressed or travelled without her lady's maid; she would probably have spent more time morning and evening with her then anyone else; yet in all Ettie's extant letters there is only one mention of her lady's maid . . . (my italics)

Because Mrs Browning mentioned her maid so often the letters are the source of almost all that is known about her; this is Wilson's story without the Browning filter.

Yet, like a phone-in programme, ordin- ary life ought to be interesting but so rarely is. When Wilson thinks that 'what was even harder to accept was the measure of boredom [she] experienced each day' the reader feels quite as bored as she does and probably more. Dailiness palls and in literature needs wit to convey it (The Diary of a Nobody, of a Provincial Lady).

Wilson is meant to think, write and speak like a maid, albeit an unusually intelligent and kindly one, because other- wise the novel would be implausible. So the style must be a maid's style — she thinks things out slowly and carefully, she knows that 'something was up', that some- one is 'nothing if not correct', that it was 'galling to her to observe his change in demeanour'. These are the clichés of a maid's outlook, but their cumulative effect is leaden.

Nor is there any sensuous, physical description. I turned for contrast to Richard Holmes's Shelley where, in a page, he magnificently evokes early 19th-century Pisa; for Wilson, apparently, Pisa was not so different from Newcastle. And Mar- garet Forster's strengths as a novelist (cf. her brilliant Have the Men had Enough?) have been ill-served by the form of a blockbuster without its liveliness.

In the 115 pages of Flush, Virginia Woolf used her light fantastical imagina- tion to evoke the Brownings' life through a dog's eyes. When jealous, he was able to take part in the action by sinking his teeth

'It's a pretty sophisticated device, Sarge.'

into Robert's shin; Wilson, passively, 'found the eagerness, the open hunger, with which Miss Elizabeth now waited for Mr Browning almost unbearable'. (Later on, when she has her own lover, she too feels hungry rather a lot.) I think Virginia Woolf was probably right when she wrote that, although there can have been no lack of thoughts in the aging Wilson's head, nevertheless 'no- thing can be more vain than to pretend that we can guess what they were, for she was typical of the great army of her kind — the inscrutable, the all-but-silent, the all-but- invisible servant maids of history.'