NICHOLAS ROE
Lucy Newlyn
WILLIAM AND DOROTHY WORDSWORTH
All in each other
386pp. Oxford University Press. £19.99 (US $34.95).
978 0 19 969639 0
Katie Waldegrave
THE POETS' DAUGHTERS
Dora Wordsworth and Sara Coleridge
416pp. Hutchinson. £25.
978 0 09 193112 4
Ten years after the publication of Lyrical Ballads, all was not well in the "demi-paradise" of Grasmere. Coleridge occupied a solitary room in William and Mary Wordsworth's house, Allan Bank. Sarah, his wife, lived with their children at Greta Hall, Keswick, the home of Robert Southey and his wife Edith (Sarah's sister). At Greta Hall, there were sunny outlooks, books, cats, food and a welcome for visitors; in this hospitable house Coleridge's daughter, Sara, grew up. Over at Allan Bank, the Wordsworths endured chimneys that smoked into the rooms and soot-blackened walls. Their unvarying diet of porridge had already driven visitors such as Walter Scott to the village inn, where Coleridge bought the brandy he needed to make laudanum. Obsessively in love with Mary Wordsworth's sister, Coleridge was overweight, demanding, quarrelsome, drunk or stupefied. In short, no longer fun. While the poets' friendship disintegrated, Wordsworth's four-year-old daughter Dora and her brother John came under the eye of another resident at Allan Bank. This was Wordsworth's sister, the children's "Aunt Dorothy". To Aunt Dorothy, Dora appeared too "wild" and in need of "taming"; little John, who had learning difficulties, Aunt Dorothy described as "the greatest Dunce in England".
In William and Dorothy Wordsworth: All in each other, Lucy Newlyn acknowledges "emotional tensions" at Allan Bank, and considers the impact of the deaths of the Wordsworths' two youngest children, Catharine and Thomas. William got through this crisis, Newlyn tells us, thanks to the "tireless sympathy" with which sister Dorothy fulfilled her role as his nurturer. It was in April 1794 that William and Dorothy had been reunited after years of separation following their mother's death (1778) and the demise of their father (1783). In June 1778, Dorothy, aged six, was sent to be fostered by kindly Unitarian relatives in Halifax: Newlyn conjectures that this family may have been a source for her brother's poetic ideas of "One Life", and also alerts us to Dorothy's early relationship with the abolitionist William Wilberforce. The following May, her brothers William and Richard went to board at Hawkshead School.
Ousted from their family home at Cockermouth, then parted for sixteen years, William and Dorothy would grow together again through collaborative creative writings that, Newlyn claims, "were part of [their] joint work of rebuilding a family, a settled home, and a communal identity". In Newlyn's story, writing for these two resilient survivors was a form of "therapy", although William's singular, punishing struggle with his never completed philosophical poem The Recluse, and the painful physical symptoms he experienced when composing poetry, might at times have felt otherwise.
Newlyn brings formidable academic resources to her task, recalling her ground-breaking study of poetic dialogue in Coleridge, Wordsworth, and the Language of Allusion (1986). Almost thirty years on, All in each other's decisive critical move is to place Dorothy Wordsworth's journals, letters and poems in the foreground alongside her brother's writings so as to demonstrate the intricately interwoven nature of their creativity. Newlyn has an extensive scholarly knowledge of William and Dorothy's manuscripts and published texts, and her own insights are flanked by Gaston Bachelard on spaces, Freud on mourning, Heidegger and James Lovelock on ecology, Lewis Hyde and Marcel Mauss on gifts, and Oliver Sacks on therapy. William and Dorothy are able to see "more clearly what John Barrell has called 'the dark side of the landscape'". The book's most impressive aspect is Newlyn's close reading of the verbal textures of their poetry and prose. William's tactful use of the word "transplanted", for instance, is expressive of his empathy for Dorothy "who had been more suddenly uprooted"; Dorothy "peppers her prose with local usages" – "lass", "baird", "gang" – while the lyrical rhythms and "inner vision" of her journals – "hovering on the edge of verse" – might have helped her admirer, Virginia Woolf, to create "moments of being".
So thoroughgoing is Newlyn's creative intertwining of William and Dorothy, one senses it is with some reluctance she concedes that they might, at times, have been not quite so much "all-in-each-other". Towards the end of her book, awkward questions start to emerge. "Were there rivalries in the family? . . . life was not always easy in the Wordsworth household . . . inevitably, the siblings had occasional disagreements". Newlyn tells us that Dorothy "repeatedly nagged" her brother for postponing The Recluse. So, too, one suspects, little Dora had been monitored before Aunt Dorothy packed her off to Miss Weir's boarding school at Appleby.
On a hot day in August 1811, Dora was taken to the coach at Ambleside, and hoisted up to her seat. "Her heart was full at the very last moment", Dorothy wrote to another abolitionist, Catherine Clarkson, "and when two rough sailors got up and seated themselves opposite to her, she looked very much frightened". Now less than sympathetic, Dorothy called out, "Do not fear they will take care of you", and the coach rumbled away. "We were quite easy", Dora's aunt assured her correspondent, "There never was a Girl in the world who would be so easily led to industry by following others". As Katie Waldegrave notes, in early August 1811, Dora was the same age as Dorothy when she was sent away to Halifax.
If Newlyn's study offers a finely recuperative analysis, Waldegrave's brilliant biography of Dora Wordsworth and Sara Coleridge traces the fractured lives of two young women struggling with their fathers' shadows. Anorexia, depression, insomnia and drug dependency were their legacies – and so, too, was their long friendship. The Poets' Daughters begins with a brisk comparison of the women's early lives at Keswick and Grasmere: at Greta Hall, Dora enjoyed music and drawing; the more studious Sara was already a skilled classicist. Then, in April 1816, the Southeys' son died; his mother began a protracted decline, and her grief-stricken husband – now Poet Laureate – retreated to his study. Suddenly, the Keswick/Grasmere polarity was reversed. The road to Grasmere no longer led to gloomy Allan Bank but to a new Wordsworthian idyll, Rydal Mount, where both Sara and Dora, "like sisters sometimes . . . chose to become friends".
By 1821, Dora (seventeen) and Sara (nineteen) had grown into very different individuals. Sara was an acknowledged "true beauty" who had translated Martin Dobrizzhofer's Account of the Abipones, an Equestrian People of Paraguay, a five-volume page-turner written in Latin. Dora, by contrast, had apparently failed to blossom. At the Christmas dance in Ambleside, where Dora was chaperoned by Rydal matrons and "Mrs STC . . . waddling like a stuffed turkey" (Mary Wordsworth's observation), it was clear that her childhood was long past. Sensing, perhaps, that she was required to fall in with the others, she seemed already to have joined her father's "fireside divan" (John Keats's term for the poet's female attendants). Whereas Newlyn sees Dora's role at Rydal Mount as continuing "cooperative labour", Waldegrave takes a different view. Her account – it is both sensitive and unflinching – has the poet's wife and daughter slaving, year after year, at transcriptions of his poetry with Dora, trapped in an "almost impossibly stifling triangle", prevented by her obdurate father from marrying the hapless Edward Quillinan. As Waldegrave puts it, Dora seemed to be "fading out of her own story", sickly, frail, depressed, "acting as supportive bystander whilst others lived their lives". When she was finally permitted to marry Quillinan, Dora came briefly into her own as the successful author of Journals of a few Months' Residence in Portugal (1847).
Sara Coleridge had no shortage of admirers, and when "The Flower of the Lakes" visited London, she caused a sensation. It might have led to escape and a different future, but she was soon absorbed back into the family by her cousin, Henry Nelson Coleridge. Waldegrave's lively prose recreates their wedding with a bustle of silk, satin and hatboxes, Southey in a gloom, and everyone relieved that the bride's father would not be there. The marriage service was led by "England's dunce", now the Revd John Wordsworth, and everyone danced until four the next morning.
The newly weds moved to 21 Downshire Hill, Hampstead – just around the corner from Keats's Wentworth Place – and here, after the births of their first two children and the death of her father, Sara collapsed into opiated despair. Aged thirty-one, the same age at which her hopelessly addicted father had fled to Malta, she found herself, like him, "utterly trapped" by the drug. It took De Quincey's damaging biography of Coleridge (1834) and James Ferrier's article on his plagiarisms (1840) to rouse her. From then on, Waldegrave shows, "Sara began to engage honestly with the real Coleridge", finding her life's work in a vindication of her father and discovering a kind of freedom through her own poetry. What followed was Sara's extraordinary edition of her father's Biographia Literaria, published, like Dora's Journals, in 1847; it is, as Waldegrave observes, "a breathtakingly accomplished" piece of editorial scholarship, and The Poets' Daughters traces Sara's long journey towards the year when both women emerged as writers. In contrast to Newlyn's idea of collaboration in the Lakes, Waldegrave emphasizes Sara Coleridge's labour of solitary mourning – for her father, and for her husband who had died, suddenly, in January 1843, leaving her to grieve over "his cold remains in their double coffin". "I am resigned to the blackness and desolation of feeling I must go through", Sara wrote in her diary. "I must finish my journey alone."
What comes over most compellingly in The Poets' Daughters are the terrible odds that confronted Dora Wordsworth and Sara Coleridge: dysfunctional families, haphazard education, limited life options and endless oppressive illnesses – boils, chickenpox, whooping cough, convulsions, measles, rheumatism, insomnia, miscarriages, drug addiction, Pott's disease (endured by Dora) and breast cancer (suffered by Sara). "Dora's dying was an exhausting struggle" until, after making a stoical joke about her "fatness", she succumbed on July 9, 1847. Sara survived her for a further five years. Shortly before she died, she composed a brave and witty charm, "To a little lump of malignity, on being medically assured that it was not a fresh growth, but an old growth splitting: Split away, split away, / split away, split!". Life had not been easy for either of the poets' daughters. Unlike their famous fathers, aunts and uncles, however, both women strove to be fun to the end.
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