The Poets' Daughters: Dora Wordsworth and Sara Coleridge
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The Poets’ Daughters: Dora Wordsworth and Sara Coleridge Katharine Mary Waldegrave Submitted for the degree of PhD in Life Writing Univerity of East Anglia Registration Number: 3352749/2 October 2014 Word Count:109,412 This copy of the thesis has been supplied on condition that anyone who consults it is understood to recognise that its copyright rests with the author and that use of any information derived there from must be in accordance with current UK Copyright Law. In addition, any quotation or extract must include full attribution. 1 2 ABSTRACT Dora Wordsworth and Sara Coleridge were lifelong friends. They were also the daughters of best friends: William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the two poetic geniuses who shaped the Romantic Age. Living in the shadow of their fathers’ extraordinary fame brought Sara and Dora great privilege, but at a terrible cost. In different ways, each father almost destroyed his daughter. And in different ways each daughter made her father. Growing up in the shadow of genius, both girls made it their ambition to dedicate themselves to their father’s writing and reputation. Anorexia, drug addiction and depression were part of the legacy of fame, but so too were great friendship and love. In this thesis I give the never-before-told story of how two young women, born into greatness, shaped their own histories. In doing I also re-examine the lives of Wordsworth and Coleridge and the significant role Dora and Sara played in their lives, their writing and their legacies. My study of the lives of Dora Wordsworth and Sara Coleridge was written as a biography aimed at a readership beyond academia. While the narrative is based on primary manuscript sources, I have deliberately used the techniques of the professional biographer to create character, pace, conflict and drama. In order to fit within the PhD assessment criteria, which requires me to submit no more than 100,000 words, the material submitted here is an abridged version of a full-length double biography of Dora and Sara. This main thesis is preceded by a short critical essay with some details about the nature of the research as well as assessment of the PhD’s contribution to knowledge. 3 4 Table of Contents Abstract ................................................................................................................... 3 Table of Contents ................................................................................................... 5 Critical Essay .......................................................................................................... 7 Wordsworth family tree ....................................................................................... 17 The Coleridge and Southey/Fricker family tree .................................................. 18 Illustrations ........................................................................................................... 20 Foreword .............................................................................................................. 29 Prologue ............................................................................................................. 31 Part One ......................................................................................................... 33 Chapter 1: ‘The Shadow of a Shade’, 1808................................................ 34 Chapter 2: ‘The Aunt-Hill’, 1810 ...................................................................... 48 Chapter 3: ‘An Agony of Tears’, 1812 ............................................................. 56 Chapter 4: ‘These Dark Steps’, 1816 ............................................................ 64 Chapter 5: ‘Like the Graces’, 1821-22 .......................................................... 74 Chapter 6: ‘Prime a nd Pride of Youth’,1823 ........................................... 85 Part Two ........................................................................................................ 96 Chapter 7: Precis- ‘Budding, Billing, Singing Weather’, 1823 ....... 97 Chapter 8: Precis- ‘The Parrot and the Wren’, 1826 ........................... 98 Chapter 9: Precis: Bridesmaid and Bride, 1828-29 .......................................... 99 Chapter 10: ‘Sorrows of the Night’, 1834 .................................................. 101 5 Chapter 11: ‘What is to Come of Me?’, 1834 ............................................... 111 Interlude (Abridged), 1834-35 ..................................................................... 120 Part Three .................................................................................................. 124 Chapter 12: A Moment’s Blaze Across the Darkness, 1836 ................. 125 Chapter 13: ‘This Filial Likeness’, 1836 ..................................................... 132 Chapter 14: Saudades and the Dread Voice that Speaks from out the Sea, 1837-38 ............................................................................................ 140 Chapter 15: Precis - ‘Hopes & Fears’, 1838-40 ...................................... 153 Chapter 16: ‘A New Hat With an Old Lining’, 1841 ........................ 155 Chapter 17: Precis - ‘Her Husband’s Desires’, 1842-43 ..................... 164 Part Three.......................................................................................................... 165 Chapter 18: For Truth and Justice: The Calumniated Poet, 1843- 44......................................................................................................................... 166 Chapter 19: Precis- ‘Yet Hope Still Lives’, 1845 .................................... 177 Chapter 20: ‘She Shines with a Light of her Own’, 1847 .................. 178 Chapter 21: ‘Strong Flight Home Again’, 1847 .................................... 188 Chapter 22: ‘Buckland In Petticoats’, 1847-50 .................................... 198 Chapter 23: ‘Bright Endowments Of A Noble Mind’ ............................ 208 Epilogue ........................................................................................................... 218 Notes .................................................................................................................. 222 List of Abbreviations used in the notes ............................................................. 222 Endnotes ............................................................................................................. 225 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………….…245 6 CRITICAL ESSAY Note on the text The thesis accompanying this essay is an abridged version of a longer (140,000 word) document which was completed in early 2013. The full text was subsequently published by Penguin Random House in August 2013 (The Poets’ Daughters: Dora Wordsworth and Sara Coleridge). A period of ill-health, including regular periods of hospitalisation, that year obliged me to intercalate from the PhD which I had intended to submit before the book was published. In the summer of 2014 I was finally able to adapt the text and notes and to write this essay. My study of the lives of Dora Wordsworth and Sara Coleridge was written as a biography aimed at a readership beyond academia. While the narrative is based on primary, and in some cases newly-discovered manuscript sources, I have deliberately used the techniques of the professional biographer to create character, pace, conflict and drama. In order to fit within the PhD assessment criteria which requires me to submit no more than 100,000 words, I have here omitted a number of chapters which appear in the published book. Included here in full are the first four chapters which set up the main characters, several of the central chapters and the final four chapters in which the story of Dora and Sara reaches its conclusion. Rather than ignoring the omitted central chapters altogether I have provided an italicised précis of each one (without footnotes) so that the examiners are able to make sense of the plot. I have also slightly abridged the central ‘interlude’ chapter. Research Sources The research for this project relied heavily on two main archives: the Coleridge family papers in the Harry Ransom Center (HRC) at the University of Texas in Austin and The Wordsworth Trust’s Collection relating to Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey and their correspondents at Dove Cottage’s Jerwood Centre (DC). It was also useful to have remote access to digitised copies of some of Sara Coleridge’s letters in the ST Coleridge Collection at The Victoria University Library, Toronto. Finally there were some valuable papers of Henry Nelson Coleridge’s and John Taylor Coleridge’s in the British Library Manuscripts Collection. Very little has been written about Dora or Sara (though a great deal has been done on their fathers and extended families) and so my research depended on Dora and Sara’s papers many of which had not been examined for years, if at all. The most important resources at the HRC were in the Sara Coleridge Collection (Manuscript Collection MS-0866) which 7 comprises fifteen containers of letters to and from Sara as well as some of her journals and other unpublished writing. Also critical was the Henry Nelson Coleridge Collection (Manuscript Collection MS-0860). The most important papers at DC were letters to and from Dora in the Wordsworth Letters and Wordsworth Manuscript collections (WLL and WLMS) as well as the letters and diaries of her husband, Edward Quillinan. In both libraries the papers of their lesser-known correspondents (Sara’s nurse, for example, or