Lady's Maid by Margaret Forster

I read the book about 17 months ago.  Yup you read me right.  So I'm gonna skip my usual excuse of why I'm not updating frequent enough etc etc and straight to the book.  

Lily Wilson arrives in London in 1844 and become a lady’s maid to the fragile, housebound Elizabeth Barrett. Lily is quickly drawn to her mistress’s childish curiosity and intelligence, her poetry and her deep emotional need. It is a strange intimacy that will last sixteen years.

From page 169, how accurate the writer observed and wrote about matters of the heart especially on woman's indecisive feelings towards a man who fancy her but she feels entitle to a better candidate (yeah, sometimes we feel that way); not allowing to trust herself to be totally in-like or in love with a guy. And in the guy's absence, finding it very hard to phantom the lost or empty feelings we experienced. The usual what is wrong with me question.

Back to the book - it is Lily who smuggles Miss Barrett out of the gloomy house, witnesses her secret wedding to Robert Browning and flees together with them to Italy. 

I must confess that I'm not familiar with neither poets Elizabeth Barrett nor Robert Browning.  However I'm familiar with this quote:

'How do I love thee? Let me count the ways' 

Little that I know it was penned by Elizabeth Barrett.  So now you and I (well maybe its just me) know *smile*

'Mrs Browning refused to acknowledge that she is carrying a child' (pregnant).

I wonder is it because she doesn't want the baby or is it because she's not ready to become a mother (especially the way she likes to be mothered for) or is she afraid of the delivery process since she is always so sickly and fragile.  Anyways, as a result of not being careful with herself, she had a miscarriage at 5 months.

At pp 230, the book described the foetus ~ 'a liver like' appearance.  Remind me of my own experience.

As housekeeper, nursemaid, companion and confidante, Lily is with Elizabeth in every crisis–birth, bereavement, travel & literary triumph. As her devotion turns almost to obsession, Lily forgets her own fleeting loneliness. But when Lily’s own affairs take a dramatic turn, she comes to expect the loyalty from Elizabeth that she herself has always given.

This was not a fast read for me.  Sometimes I'm irritated with Mrs Browning but most often than not my irritation turned to the protagonist Wilson ~ the lady's maid.  To me, she's never fully appreciative of her life or the adventures that she had  with the Brownings.  But she is taught to be ambitious by her employer - is she not?  And the Brownings can be too much too especially when Wilson is denied a pay raise even after a long faithful service without any raise.

I don't completely enjoyed the book but I don't totally dislike it either.  The book marks my last read for the year 2011.

ps/ I was browsing thru E.B.B other  poems and found this one on books.  I can't resist sharing it here.

Books, books, books! 
I had found the secret of a garret-room 
Piled high with cases in my father's name; 
Piled high, packed large,—where, creeping in and out 
Among the giant fossils of my past, 
Like some small nimble mouse between the ribs 
Of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there 
At this or that box, pulling through the gap, 
In heats of terror, haste, victorious joy, 
The first book first. And how I felt it beat 
Under my pillow, in the morning's dark, 
An hour before the sun would let me read! 
My books! ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning