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rrJorothy Wordsworth (1771-1855) Only in the twentieth century has the literary production of Dorothy Words­ worth become widely known. During her lifetime, readership of her journals and poems was, with few exceptions, confined to those within her intimate circle of family and friends. Only five of her poems were published during her lifetime, all anonymously in collections by her brother, William; never­ theless, she was from the beginning an important literary influence: aspects of her style and many of her ideas and images, both from written work and conversation, found their way into the writings of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Born on Christmas Day, 1771, Dorothy was the third child and only daugh­ ter of Ann Cookson and John Wordsworth, attorney to Sir James Lowther, Cockermouth. After her mother died in 1778, six-year-old Dorothy was separated from her siblings and sent to live in Halifax, Yorkshire, with her mother's cousin Elizabeth Threlkeld. ''.Aunt Threlkeld," as Dorothy called her, gave the little girl a loving home in a household of six children, the others from ten to seventeen years old. As the youngest, Dorothy was the favorite. The Halifax Old Subscription Library was housed for some years in Elizabeth Threlkeld's haberdashery shop, and Threlkeld, whom Dorothy came to idol­ ize, taught her an early love of reading as well as skill in cooking, sewing, accounting, and general household management. Dorothy briefly attended a boarding school two miles from town in 1781, when she was nine, but then became a day student in Halifax. She attended the Unitarian chapel regularly with Threlkeld. On 30 December 1783 Dorothy's father died. She had not seen him in the years since her mother's death, but his death was to change her life pro­ foundly. John Wordsworth had died without a will and with a major sum owed to him by Sir James Lowther, who refused to make good on his debt. The executors were forced to sue, but in the meantime far less money was made available for Dorothy's support than had been forthcoming in the past. 824 Dorothy Wordsworth ~~~~~~~~~~~~-=-~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~- As an economy, in May of 1787 she was sent to live for a brief but unhappy period with her mother's parents in Penrith over their draper's shop. Her grandmother found her "intractible and wild." Afterward Dorothy went to live for six years in Norfolk to help care for the growing family of her aunt Dorothy Cowper and her uncle William Cookson. Dorothy and her brother William, who was twenty months her senior, had long dreamed of setting up a household together, and in 1795 they were able to do this at Racedown Lodge, Dorset, near the Devon border. As Thomas DeQuincey later observed, the mission Dorothy saw for herself was "to wait upon him [William] as the tenderest and most faithful of domestics; to love him as a sister; to sympathize with him as a confidante; to counsel him as one gifted with a power of judging that stretched as far as his own for producing; to cheer him and sustain him by the natural expression of her feelings - so quick, so ardent, so unaffected-upon the probable effect of whatever thoughts, plans, images he might conceive." 1 At Racedown Dorothy also cared for the toddler Basil Montagu, and in 1797 she and her brother met and established a close friendship and eventually an intellectual and liter­ ary collaboration with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The Wordsworths were so taken with Coleridge that they moved to Alfoxden House in Somerset to be near him in Nether Stowey; Dorothy kept a journal now referred to as the Alfoxden Journal, from 20 January to 22 May 1798, a period of great poetic creativity in the household. DeQuincey describes her at this time as "too ardent and fiery a creature to maintain the reserve essential to dignity; and dignity was the last thing one thought of in the presence of one so artless, so fervent in her feelings, and so embarrassed in their utterance-"; he also recalls her "originality and native freshness of intellect, which settled with so bewitching an effect upon some of her writings, and upon many a sudden remark or ejaculation, extorted by something or other that struck her eye, in the clouds, or in colouring, or in accidents of light and shade, of form, or combination of form." 2 Coleridge referred to her as Wordsworth's "exquisite Sister" and described "her eye watchful in minutest observation of nature­ and her taste a perfect electrometer-it bends, protrudes, and draws in at subtlest beauties and most recondite faults." 3 William said of Dorothy: She, in the midst of all, preserv'd me still A Poet, made me seek beneath that name My office upon earth, and no where else. 4 r. Tait's Edinburgh Magazine 6 (1839): 252. 2. Ibid., 251, 253. 3. Robert Gittings and Jo Manton, Dorothy Wordsworth (Oxford, 1985), 65. 4. The Prelude (London, 1850), bk. II, lines 346-48. Dorothy Wordsworth After a dispiriting winter in Germany, Dorothy and William returned to the Lake District, to Dove Cottage, Grasmere, in 1799. There on 14 May 1800 Dorothy began another journal "because I shall give William pleasure by it." 5 In later years she explained her own apparent lack of poetic ambition: - I reverenced the Poet's skill, And might have nursed a mounting Will To imitate the tender Lays Of them who sang in Nature's praise; But bashfulness, a struggling shame A fear that elder heads might blame -Or something worse-a lurking pride Whispering my playmates would deride Stifled ambition, checked the aim If e'er by chance "The numbers came" 6 Even so, many modern readers have been struck by the poetic nature of Dorothy Wordsworth's prose in her Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals. Indeed, in her later journals she experiments by arranging passages in verse form. But as Susan Levin points out, Dorothy would not have thought of these passages as poems. And William's patronizing attitude toward women poets also played a part in her decision to turn her own talents largely to prose. Just as William criticized Felicia Hemans for being "totally ignorant of house­ wifery;' Dorothy shows her own anxiety about female authorship when, for example, she lauds Joanna Baillie for being not simply a "literary Lady" but a person devoted to her home.7 But in 1940 Hyman Eigerman published short passages from Dorothy Wordsworth's journals arranged in verse form to show that in such a format they resembled imagist poems. Read in this way, Dorothy Wordsworth seems to anticipate by many years the work of Wallace Stevens, Baudelaire, and Ezra Pound. Writing was not only an essential part of Dorothy Wordsworth's everyday life; it was crucial to her self-definition. Clearly, from the start she envisioned that her own literary production would contribute to the household she and William planned to set up, for her Aunt Rawson remarked disapprovingly, "Dorothy and Wm. have now a scheme of living together in London, and maintaining themselves by their literary talents, writing and translating .... We think it a very bad wild scheme." 8 William Wordsworth's own poetry 5.Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. E. de Selincourt, 2 vols. (London, 1952), l :37. 6. "Irregular Verses;' lines 60-69; the entire poem appears in Susan Levin, Dorothy Words­ worth and Romanticism (New Brunswick, NJ, 1987), 202-3. 7. Levin, Dorothy Wordsworth, 155-56. 8. Ibid., 58. Dorothy Wordsworth became simpler, more concrete, less traditional, and less ornate after he began living with his sister. That is to say, his style came more to resemble her own. Although Dorothy's work rem~ined, for the most part, unpublished during her lifetime, she was an active participant in the collaboration that led to the publication in 1798 of the Lyrical Ballads, by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Both for this project and on other occasions, the two male poets mined her journal for poetic images and ideas and liberally borrowed from her verbal observations of the natural world. For both men, she was a sounding board, a critic, an amanuensis, and a significant literary influence. In August 1802 the Wordsworths visited France, and in Paris Dorothy met William's French daughter, Caroline, now nine years old, and her mother, Annette Vallon, from whom William had been separated by political events. Dorothy kept her journal during the trip, but as part of the conspiracy of silence William imposed on this chapter of his life, she omitted the month in Paris. The Grasmere Journal ends on 16 January 1803, not long after William's marriage on 4 October 1802 to Dorothy's friend Mary Hutchinson, an event of such import in her life that Dorothy was unable to bring herself to attend. But Dorothy remained in the household, continuing to play a crucial part in William's life. Eventually she was to become a second mother to William and Mary's five children. Was William and Dorothy's relationship an incestuous one? Certainly some of their neighbors thought so, and many modern commentators have voiced similar suspicions. Clearly their relationship was closer and emotion­ ally more intense than is usual between sister and brother. But whether that bond was physically consummated is something we may never know for certain. It is, however, unlikely to have been. And perhaps Coleridge was responding to such rumors when he said of Dorothy, In every motion her most innocent soul Outbeams so brightly, that who saw would say, Guilt was a thing impossible to her- 9 In 1803 Dorothy made a tour of Scotland with her brother and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, meeting Walter Scott along the way.
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