The Other Wordsworth
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
Writers & Writing THE OTHER WORDSWORTH BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL Few in the gallery of literary sisters and brothers are more intriguing, or lately more controversial, than Dorothy and William...
...Davies argued that newly discovered letters proved the role more properly belonged to the poet's patient fiancee and wife, Mary Hutchinson, and that the sister was often hysterical and possessive...
...Still, her bitterness when one of her brothers and De Quincey each married pretty servant girls suggests that down deep she was jealous of good looks and male attention...
...Dorothy, after all, placed her considerable literary powers at William's disposal, adopted his opinions and cultivated his friends...
...What remained rivaled William's most elevated lines— as one can see in her notes on the Alfoxdon shoreline: "The sea at first obscured by vapour...
...Soon they made the acquaintance of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a neighbor, who first described the effect of Dorothy's personality on others...
...The Words-worths introduced him to Mary Hutchinson and her sister Sara, with whom he fell hopelessly in love (possibly transferring his feelings from Dorothy...
...She did not die until 1855, at the ripe age of 83...
...Her information various—her eye watchful in minutest observation of nature—and her taste a perfect electrometer—it bends, protrudes, and draws in at subtlist beauties and most recondite faults...
...They undertook the care of a small child in exchange for a place to live...
...Gittings and Manton base their denials on evidence given by Thomas De Quincey (the opium eater), although he did not really know the Wordsworths during the suspect period...
...In many respects, her life strikes one as unfulfilled...
...Evenmore, the authors wish to refute 19th-and20th-century rumors that Dorothy and William committed incest...
...Anxious to be loved, she made herself indispensable to her family to the extent that a few people privately called her William's "second wife" and, a laDavies, thought she constrained him not only as a husband but eventually as a poet...
...She wore herself out taking care of him (a sacrifice he easily accepted from her and from Mary and Sara Hutchinson...
...Perhaps she indeed had secret poetic aspirations...
...that vapour afterwards slid in one mighty mass along the seashore...
...This maybe partly due to the biographers' desire to stress that Dorothy was a hardworking homemaker, too, cleaning, gardening, baking, going to market—not merely admiring the scenery with the men...
...Coleridge, in turn, presented the Wordsworths to former schoolfellow Charles Lamb and his gifted, sometimes mad sister, Mary...
...She suffered most of her life from migraines and intestinal neuralgia, always brought on by nervous strain (William had similar symptoms when revising poems...
...All this, Gittings and Manton believe, explains her lifelong dedication to her brother...
...He saw Dorothy as bitchy to the point where her sharp-tongued comments prejudiced future generations about acquaintances...
...Yet Gittings and Manton's biography, despite its shortcomings, reminds us that in "the gleam" of Dorothy's "wild eyes" the Romantic vision of Nature was first perceived—and that it was embodied no less in her clear prose than in her brother's verse...
...Upon losing a tooth at 30, Dorothy wrote bravely, "Let that pass, I shall be beloved—I want no more...
...Thus before the appearance in 1980 of Hunter Davies' popular biography, William Wordsworth, scholars were inclined to treat Dorothy as her brother's devoted muse...
...In their zeal, the biographers further omit those passages from the Grasmere journal that have caused much of the modern speculation...
...Nor did she coauthor works with him in the manner of her friends, Mary and Charles Lamb...
...With characteristic enthusiasm she added that he had " more of the' poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling' than I ever witnessed...
...Her deep delight in what she saw communicates itself easily...
...And to complement the biography, Oxford has reissued Alan G. Hill's Letters ofDorothy Wordsworth: A Selection(226 pp., $15.95...
...William believed that without her influence he would have been simply another poetaster blunting his emotions in a spate of shopworn metaphors and classical allusions...
...Her health finally broke irretrievably...
...she would not have wanted to outshine him the way Christina Rossetti surpassed Dante Gabriel...
...But if you hear him speak for five minutes you think no more of them...
...Coleridge and Wordsworth soon began working together on Lyrical Ballads, and both relied on Dorothy's superior instinct for the descriptive as well as on her critical judgments...
...It emphasizes that observers found her "unfeminine" and "unattractive," quoting De Quincey's catty remark, "the least painful impression was that of unsexual awkwardness...
...Her writings consist of a few journals, mostly kept when she moved into a new home or was traveling, and numerous letters to friends...
...As a result, what one friend called "her too too feeling heart" is only pictured by Gittings and Manton as it overreacts to scenery, or worries about the misfortunes of children or neighbors...
...Readers who remember the journals will notice the absence...
...This separation was meant to be temporary, but the father died shortly afterward, making a reunion impossible...
...He even suggested that she came between her brother and his bride until failing mental powers caused her hold on him to diminish...
...The biography takes at face value Dorothy's assertion to friends that men did not interest her physically...
...As he phrased it in "The Prelude," She, in the midst of all, preserved me still A Poet, made me seek beneath that name My office upon earth, and nowhere else...
...You had a great loss in not seeing Coleridge," she wrote to Mary Hutchinson...
...Dorothy was equally impressed with her admirer...
...I never saw such a union of earth, sea, and sky...
...I think other interpretations are possible...
...His uncles deplored his republican sympathies and the fact that he had fathered a child by his attractive French tutor...
...In addition, she kept up with numerous women friends outside the literary life, and at various times kept house for other family members besides William...
...The paradox of her style," Gittings and Manton note, "is that it is no style...
...By the time they were grown, however, three of the brothers had established careers...
...It is probably true that had she not made a home for him amid the beauties of Northern England's Lake District, he would have remained on London's literary fringes...
...She lost her teeth while in her 30s, and became terribly thin " in an age whose reigning beauty was the voluptuous Emma Hamilton" (mistress of Lord Nelson...
...Now Robert Gittings and Jo Manton have entered the fray with Dorothy Wordsworth(0^&, 283 pp., $17.95...
...But both forms reveal Dorothy's eye for detail and capacity for expressing feelings...
...William, on the other hand, was just back from France where he had witnessed the Revolution...
...Using the same evidence available to him, though, they put Dorothy's personality in a perspective more consistent with the view of her family and friends...
...The friends visited each other continually, much to the displeasure of Coleridge's prosaic, put-upon wife, whose character was often dissected in Dorothy's letters...
...As if this were not enough, he declared himself unwilling to settle down to his proposed career, thechurch...
...Coleridge tried unsuccessfully to emulate her simplicity of manner in his diaries...
...She purged her prose of affectations and ponderous sentiment...
...the islands and one point of land clear beyond it...
...She was so well cared for that she managed to outlive her brother, three of his children, Coleridge, and Sara Hutchinson...
...Hill's selection of letters also leaves out many of her raptures over "Dear dear William" and "wonderful Coleridge...
...her last 20 years, she suffered from a progressive mental confusion "of a type similar to Alzheimer's disease...
...Significantly, in her dotage she spent much time, according to Mary, "pouring out verses...
...These seven young people became, in Dorothy's words, "the heart of a circle of friends," and for a few idyllic years their communion shaped the growth of Romantic literature...
...The distant country (which was purple in the clear dull air), overhung by straggling clouds that sailed over it, appeared like the darker clouds, which are often seen at a great distance apparently motionless, while the nearer ones pass quickly over them, driven by the lower winds...
...Oddly, Gittings and Manton describe the circle in a somewhat restrained manner, omitting many of the sublime accounts left by the two poets, or Dorothy's in her Grasmere journals and letters...
...Maybe so...
...All five children fantasized about living under one roof someday...
...Dorothy poured her unself-conscious observations of the places she lived into her j ournals partly to provide her brother with raw material for poetry, but also to record her own passionate response to the Lake District...
...Whatever the case, Dorothy's devotion was "fully and generously repaid by William and Mary" once she went mad...
...Heinsisted that he was going to be a poet...
...Gittings and Manton do not mention Davies' rather jaundiced book in their bibliography...
...Writers & Writing THE OTHER WORDSWORTH BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL Few in the gallery of literary sisters and brothers are more intriguing, or lately more controversial, than Dorothy and William Wordsworth...
...Gittings and Manton, without addressing the matter directly, show the opposite...
...Only Dorothy had faith in him at the outset...
...She and her four brothers lost their mother when they were young children, and each was sent to live with different relatives...
...True, Dorothy never tried to equal her sibling as a poet...
...At first I thought him very plain, that is, for about three minutes: he is pale and thin, has a wide mouth, thick hps, and not very good teeth...
...He wrotea friend: "She is a woman indeed!—in mind, I mean & heart—for her person is such, that if you expected to see a pretty woman you would think her ordinary—if you expected to find an ordinary woman, you would think her pretty!—but her manners are simple, ardent, impressive...
Vol. 69 • January 1986 • No. 1
