The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth

"This book is a really interesting experiment. There are two things that most of us long for – creativity and depth of feeling. Most of us may not experience those two things, but Frances Wilson takes a women from the late 18th and early 19th century, William Wordsworth’s sister, who did – for a very short but intense period – experience creativity and depth of feeling. Wilson selects, with a very sharp focus, just a few years of Dorothy Wordsworth’s life, and moves quickly over what happened before and after. So it’s a satisfying biography in that you get the whole picture, but it’s not the “and then, and then” formulation of the 20th century biography. She just goes for the kernel of Dorothy Wordsworth’s life. Perhaps I should put it in perspective. Part of the fascination is that Dorothy Wordsworth is a character you can never wholly know – and this interests me because of the kernel challenge I mentioned. She’s mysterious, you can’t typecast her, and you can’t typecast her relationship with William Wordsworth. They are brother and sister, but they were separated throughout their childhood. They were orphans, placed in different homes. All the children of the Wordsworth family were dispersed, and Dorothy had an unhappy childhood. And then, as a young adult in her early twenties, she comes together with her brother. They live together, and it’s an exclusive and indefinable union, but intensely close to what they see and feel in nature. They practice a whole way of life together. There’s much roaming and walking – not ordinary walks but long treks in Wales or in the Lake District. Dorothy Wordsworth left a journal as well as letters, and this journal shows her as an observer of nature . It’s not an intimate, personal journal, it’s observation. And it is the material for this biography. In it, she describes the famous Wordsworth daffodils, and she uses the same words that Wordsworth does in his poem. They’re her words, perhaps words she uses to Wordsworth orally, and then he makes a poem. So it’s a symbiotic relationship from the creative point of view. That’s a question Frances Wilson addresses at length. She has a lot of domestic detail about how they lived together at Dove Cottage in the Lake District, near Grasmere – about the closeness and physicality of it. And she does put forward the question that has been around for some time: Was this an incestuous relationship? They hadn’t been together as children, they both felt akin as brother and sister, and there’s a lot of physicality. Wordsworth would lie with his head on Dorothy’s breast. They would lie together outside, close, looking up at the sky. They lived like a couple, but I was persuaded by Wilson that you can’t define it. She looks at this strange, indefinable symbiosis. Yes, that is a wonderful detail. The climax of the biography is this statement in her journal, which is otherwise not full of personal details. She slept a good night. She rose. And then there is a dawn ceremony between them, a very strange ceremony which somebody crossed out in the journal, but which was recovered in the 1950s through infrared treatment: “I gave him the wedding ring, with how deep a blessing. I took it from my forefinger, where I had worn it the whole of the night before. He slipped it again onto my finger and blessed me fervently.” Now those last words, “blessed me fervently”, could have been a misreading by a scholar in the 50s, and may have read “I blessed the ring softly”. But Frances Wilson says it’s still fervent, whether it’s a misreading or not. Wordsworth goes away and gets married, and then the crisis moment comes when Dorothy looks out the window and sees the bridal pair coming back, now married. At that moment she falls on her bed in a trance-like state. Wilson quotes a psychologist calling it a vegetative retreat – an animal curling up in the face of tragedy and disaster. It was a curious, curious thing. Dorothy was absorbed into the marriage. She is there all the time during the honeymoon. In the carriage she sits between the bridal pair. She is there, they look after her, she is beloved. She shares in the children who are born of the marriage. She has a say in their fates. Yet the great period is over, and in a way it’s also over for Wordsworth. There was the great decade, from 1795 to 1805 and The Prelude , and then he was never so great again."