Clemency suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value reader offers and events

Click here for the latest Spectator Wine Offers

The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth

Small elephant at Dove Cottage

Frances Wilson
Faber, 267pp, £16.99,

Victoria Glendinning

Wednesday, 27th February 2008

Victoria Glendinning reviews Frances Wilson's new book on Dorothy Wordsworth

A hinge-moment at Dove Cottage was when Wordsworth decreed that Coleridge’s poem ‘Christabel’ was not going be included in their joint volume Lyrical Ballads. Coleridge was devastated, his confidence permanently shattered. Dorothy had been ‘exceedingly delighted’ by ‘Christabel’, which was inspired by Coleridge’s enamoured vision of her. But ‘Christabel’ is erotic, and Wordsworth did not do erotic at that time. Maybe too he didn’t like it being inspired by his sister.

A greater hinge-moment — with which this book begins and to which it returns — was Wordsworth’s wedding-day. It is the main justification for speculation about relations between the siblings. Briefly, Dorothy wrote that she wore the wedding-ring in bed the previous night. Her brother came to her room in the morning, there was some more symbolic business with the ring, and he went off with it to the church. When told the newly-weds were on their way back, Dorothy threw herself on her bed in a strange trance, then rushed downstairs into her brother’s arms.

There is good evidence from Wordsworth’s correspondence with his wife that their marriage was sexually wonderful. He and Mary were never demonstrative in front of Dorothy, for fear of upsetting her. We know from earlier in the journal that Dorothy, from her bedroom, could hear her brother tossing and turning at night. She must have heard rather more disturbing sounds after the wedding. Yet Dorothy, wanting everything to stay the same, had insisted that they should all three live together at Dove Cottage.

Traditionally, she has been seen as the selfless and sexless complement to her brother’s genius, his amanuensis and muse. To suggest sibling incest has been like defacing a national monument. Wilson, though grasping a few nettles, still approaches Dorothy with delicacy, sprinkling her text with unanswerable questions. There is something about Dorothy’s personality which enforces reserve. Wilson reproduces, from the back cover of one of the journals, Dorothy’s doodles ‘of two churches, one with a cemetery attached’. Yes — but there are also doodles of towers unattached to the churches, one with a mushroom-shaped top. But let’s not say ‘phallus’. It might upset Dorothy.

Print this article | Email to a friend | Permalink | Comment | Apollo Art Books

Previous page 1 | 2 | 3 Next page

Post this entry to: del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

Life and Letters

Allan Massie

Breaking the rules

Brave new writing

Richard Bradford

Fifty years ago, Alan Sillitoe’s first novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, changed the history of English fiction. Richard Bradford explains how.