RSS

Contact us

Tuesday 2 December 2008

The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth

Small elephant at Dove Cottage

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

You could in fact make a case for seeing Dorothy as an arch-controller, making herself indispensable, fending off abandonment, and inserting herself into William’s courtship and marriage — having approved a bride who was her own girlhood friend, therefore unthreatening. In an apparently personal journal, Dorothy conceals much. When she and her brother go to France to square things up with the abandoned Annette Vallon, Dorothy writes at length about their walks on the beach and, of course, the sunsets, but not a word about what was actually said. Nowhere does she write about the anxious discussions she may have had with William about his marrying. Only about her love for him is she wide open — ‘the darling’, ‘the beloved’.

Wilson has written, obliquely, an entire biography, dipping meditatively back into the past, looking forward into Dorothy’s shockingly sad last years. Dorothy lost her mind. Wilson thinks she had ‘depressive pseudodementia’, rather than Alzheimer’s. She was addicted to opium and laudanum, and when these were withdrawn she began to eat uncontrollably and grew hugely fat. She remained living with her famous brother and his wife and their family, in a grander house now, confined to an upstairs room, with nurses.

After much insightful circling, Wilson comes down against the incest theory, deciding that the intimacy between William and Dorothy was a spiritual symbiosis, which made physical expression ‘of no interest to them’. Not to him, maybe. But frankly, Dorothy was madly in love with her brother. She weeps uncontrollably when he goes on a visit to Mary Hutchinson, and after he leaves Dove Cottage on another occasion: ‘O the Darling! Here is one of his bitten apples! I can hardly find it in my heart to throw it into the fire.’ And what about the times when she read his poems aloud as he lay against her shoulder, or when she ‘petted him on the carpet’? Or her spare but graphic account of a breakfast-time when they talked of chasing butterflies as children, and he immediately knocked off a poem about it, sitting at the table with ‘shirt neck unbuttoned & his waistcoat open while he did it’. (This is an Andrew Davies moment.) It seems to me that there is still a small elephant in the room.

The discount offers on books in this section remain open for three months from date of publication.

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

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

Advertisement

Spectator Business | Apollo Magazine

Corporate | Advertising | Privacy | Terms

Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London, SW1H 9HP

All Articles and Content Copyright ©2008 by The Spectator | All Rights Reserved