The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth

"Will the real Dorothy Wordsworth please stand up? For many readers she will always be, as Frances Wilson writes in her elegant new book, 'one of the casualties of 19th-century femininity': the spinster’s spinster, a 'quintessential Victorian virgin' who sacrificed every ambition, including marriage, to be her brother William Wordsworth’s muse, caretaker, walking companion, secretary and most trusted reader . . . Ms. Wilson’s new book, The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth, is billed as 'a life,' but it is not, happily, a proper biography. Ms. Wilson focuses primarily on the years 1800-3, when Dorothy, then in her late 20s and early 30s, lived with her brother in the Lake District of England and kept her famous Grasmere Journals, which were not published in full until 1958. They were crucial years, not just for her but also for her brother, who was still writing some of his most important poems, and for Samuel Coleridge, who moves in and out of this book like the third magpie in a bustling nest. Ms. Wilson’s decision to limit her scope was a small bit of genius. She’s written a succinct yet roomy book, one that moves along with novelistic buoyancy and grace. She gets the facts-to-fancy ratio, always a difficult one for a biographer to weigh, exactly right. She lays out the essentials of Dorothy Wordsworth’s life like a well-orchestrated banquet, leaving no doubt that the resonating years 1800-3 are the bravura main course . . . In The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth, Ms. Wilson strides purposefully through Wordsworth’s intoxicating life, quibbling when needed with earlier biographers, poking into every bit of tangled brush, triangulating her subject’s life through the work of many other writers, some of them contemporary. The range of this biographer’s references is wide, and wickedly inclusive. One chapter begins with a quotation from the political-punk band Gang of Four: 'This heaven gives me migraine.' This book, its own kind of heaven, gave me quite the opposite."—Dwight Garner, The New York Times

"Dorothy Wordsworth was the famously unmarried handmaiden to her poet-brother William and a great inspiration to him. And yet we know about her almost entirely from William's reflected glory or from letters or journal entries that document a sibling bond and observational power of remarkable intensity. In The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth, Frances Wilson pieces together what fragmentary evidence we have to re-create this quietly lyrical and elusive figure . . . Ms. Wilson offers a biographical narrative that is at once sternly specific and carefully oblique. Given the gaps in our knowledge of Dorothy, any biographer is driven to speculate, but Ms. Wilson's flights are always tethered to material reality. She grounds herself in the four diaries Dorothy kept at Dove Cottage, in the Lake District, from 1800 to 1803. Why these? Because, she says, 'they describe a routine of mutton and moonscapes, walking and headaches, watching and waiting, pie baking and poem making. Their style, at times pellucid, at times opaque, lies somewhere between the rapture of a love letter and the portentousness of a thriller' . . . Ms. Wilson is no idolator and seems to have no need for self-congratulation. In her portrait of Dorothy Wordsworth, she sees past the sentimental, prurient and sensational to approach, as best she can, a complicated, humane truth."—Alexandra Mullen, The Wall Street Journal

"In The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth, British biographer Frances Wilson undertakes a close reading of the journals to reconstruct the inner life of this rustic revolutionary. Wilson, the author of Literary Seductions, a study of obsessive sexual relationships between writers such as Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin, makes a strong case for taking a fresh look at Dorothy Wordsworth. Early biographers portrayed her as a seraphic creature of quivering sensibility, sexless and selfless; later, she fit easily into the feminist template of the exploited victim. Wilson dives deep and headlong into the journals, applying various modern psychological and medical hypotheses. She comes up with some fascinating insights, such as the possibility that Dorothy's frequent perception of the hills and lakes as sparkling was a symptom of a migraine coming on."—Jamie James, Los Angeles Times

"'Dorothy Wordsworth has come down to us as the quintessential Victorian virgin, a little dotty but in general the perfect, selfless, and sexless complement to her self-absorbed and humorless sibling,' writes Frances Wilson in the first chapter of her sensitive biography of the poet William's sister. By focusing on Dorothy's sense of the relationship, especially as expressed in her Grasmere Journals, Wilson attempts to describe what the sibling relationship did for Dorothy, how it rescued her, nourished her, and eventually disappointed her. The Grasmere Journals were written between 1799 and 1802, when Dorothy (born 1771), living alone with her brother, was closest to him as his companion, collaborator, secretary, and muse. The perfect brother-sister love between the two expressed itself primarily through poetry, but there are strong suggestions of a romantic or sexual connection. Wilson dismisses these suggestions: 'William's poetry and Dorothy's journals transformed incestuous love into a mystical ideal.' Wilson successfully redefines Dorothy's relationship with William not as self-sacrifice but as self-discovery, self-realization, and, while it lasted, even self-fulfillment."—Barbara Fisher, The Boston Globe

"William Wordsworth's sister, Dorothy, is usually thought of as sentimental and stodgy, a lover of daffodils and the healthy outdoors but ultimately rather dull. This subtle and intriguing new study by Frances Wilson, which came out in Britain a year ago and is just being published in America, is changing that view. Not only does it establish Dorothy as a fascinating figure in her own right, it also pulls off the hardest trick of literary biography: it brings the reader into intimate proximity with the subject yet reminds us that there are aspects of any past life which will remain forever mysterious . . . Ms Wilson is an enlightened literary critic and her close readings of Dorothy’s celebrated journals, with their minute observations of the natural world, are a joy to follow. Dorothy’s writing is not introspective, but Ms Wilson cleverly reveals it to be far more exposing of its author’s complex, sometimes tortured personality than it appears on the surface. What the journals do not say is often as significant as what they do, and Ms Wilson reads perceptively between the lines, speculating when necessary but doing so with a clearness of thought which makes her approach utterly convincing."—The Economist

"Dorothy Wordsworth has long been one of the great mysteries of English literature. A woman praised for her 'wild and startling' eyes, a being 'all fire, and . . . ardour,' she inspired some of Britain’s best known poetry. Her journals, letters, and poems—famed for the lucid quality of Dorothy’s nature writing—have been in print for decades. And yet William Wordsworth’s beloved sister remains to us a cipher. Her Grasmere Journals are 'regarded as an English national treasure,' writes literary biographer Frances Wilson in The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth, her absorbing examination of this peculiar life."—Marjorie Kehe, The Christian Science Monitor

"The Grasmere Journals are a set of four diaries that William Wordsworth’s sister Dorothy kept during her time in Grasmere. They span the period from 1800 to 1803 and are a ravishing portrait of sylvan English life. In the Grasmere Journals, Dorothy, the talented, poetically inclined sister of the master of Romanticism, notes everything from the changes in the weather to the siblings’ shared admiration for Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was a friend. But the Grasmere Journals are most well-known for the cryptic, though not less passionate for that, references of Dorothy’s love for William. Countless scholars down the ages have tried to define this peculiar intimacy, always stopping short of calling the relationship between the siblings incestuous. Now Frances Wilson launches a biographical panorama that finally does justice to Dorothy’s long and eventful life . . . This sombre tone returns throughout the Journals, accompanied by headaches that Dorothy diligently records. The Journals themselves are bookended by the relationship between William and Mary. If William’s visit to Yorkshire was Dorothy’s reason to start writing, his marriage to Mary finally drags a dagger through the Journals’ heart—and hers. As Wilson writes, '[Dorothy] can stand it no longer. When she looks from her window at the two men running up the avenue to tell her that the wedding is over, she throws herself down on the bed, where she lies in a trance, neither hearing nor seeing.”' The Ballad takes the form of such imaginings, astute and immediate, and supplements them with actual notes from the Journals. Not that Wilson does not go beyond the time spent at Dove Cottage. Wilson’s book traces the remainder of Dorothy’s life, first at Dove Cottage and later at Rydal Mount in nearby Windermere, but throughout the stress is on those bygone halcyon days at Grasmere. In an interesting aside, Wilson compares the relationship of William and Dorothy to that between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. She even suggests that Brontë may have based her iconic characters on the brother-sister duo . . . Dorothy Wordsworth drifted from the wildness of her youth to endure the death of her beloved and later, towards the end of her life, was gradually consumed by mental illness. Dipping tantalisingly into the personal and the provocative, this fascinating, never dull book thumpingly reclaims a life consigned to the shadows by posterity."—Vikram Johri, Business Standard

"Frances Wilson's The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth: A Life is only the second full-scale biography of its subject, though she has always been considered a major figure by those who knew her and by biographers of her brother and Coleridge . . . Wilson's biography is less the narrative of a life than a meditation on Dorothy's character. Each chapter concentrates on a particular theme: the role her headaches play in her psychic history; the incest question, her quasi-religious devotion to nature . . . The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth brings her into sharper focus than ever before . . . Wilson vividly traces Dorothy's efforts to perfect her own writing too. As female mystics once trained their entire attention on the deity, she schooled herself to be ever more receptive to natural beauty in her own being—to 'feel' it as the Romantic philosophers recommended, as if she were a photographic plate recording what she saw. Wilson poses the central questions that have puzzled all who have tried to sum up her subject: 'Do Dorothy's journals describe her joy or dejection? Are her reflections, observations and impressions a metaphor for her interior life, or is she simply documenting what she sees? Is her love for her brother that of a rejected mistress, or sisterly devotion of the kind that is hard for a contemporary reader to understand? Does Dorothy cast herself as the heroine of a tragedy or a comedy?' None of those conundrums can be conclusively answered, but Wilson's efforts help us delve more deeply than ever before . . . Frances Wilson's The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth demonstrates that the best writers are always more complex, more 'secret' than our arrogance assumes. A fresh look uncovers multitudes of missed details, adding to our appreciation."—Phoebe Pettingell, The New Leader

"I hope that book-shop browsers will not be put off this intelligent and intriguing and properly strange biography by the title, or by the opening page. The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth starts: 'She can stand it no longer . . .' and reconstructs Dorothy's disconcertingly intense reactions to her brother William's wedding: 'she throws herself down on the bed where she lies in a trance, neither seeing nor hearing.' The historic present is rarely good news in a biography, and might lead one to expect a breathless, novelette-ish approach, with gushes of intrusive speculation. Nothing could be further from the truth. This account is actually constructed, with scrupulous care, from Dorothy's own words ('I could stand it no longer & threw myself on the bed, neither hearing nor seeing anything . . . '). Frances Wilson is meticulously aware of the 'tantalising economy' of Dorothy's writings, and how they resist our intrusive sympathies. Wilson focuses this book on only one of the many journals written by Dorothy Wordsworth: the famous Grasmere Journal, written in Dove Cottage, which covers only two-and-a-half years and ends early in 1803. I am sure this will lead some critics to accuse her of biographical imbalance, but the imbalance is finely judged. Wilson leads us back, again and again, as she evidently intends, to a renewed sense of just how truly strange these journals are."—Caroline Moore, The Telegraph (UK)

“Frances Wilson’s gifts as a textual critic, and her flair for dramatic storytelling, have delivered a new and potent Dorothy Wordsworth for the 21st century. In its precision and subtlety, her book has the power of a great portrait miniature.”—Mark Bostridge, The Independent on Sunday (UK)

“The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth doesn’t disappoint . . . She writes with a definite sense of astonishment, but controls it with calm scholarly interest and a prevailing mood of humane tolerance. The combination is deeply attractive and original.”—Andrew Motion, The Guardian (UK)

“[A] fine biography . . . Eloquent in her revelation of Dorothy’s tormented private self, Wilson is equally sensitive and astute in her reading of the journals.”—Miranda Seymour, The Times (London)

“[Wilson] is not always respectful, but she is always interesting . . . This gripping narrative presents a character more subtle than the devoted, self-effacing amanuensis of tradition, or the later feminist stereotype.”—Margaret Drabble, The Times Literary Supplement

“An elegant, psychologically astute and original book.”—Virginia Rounding, The Observer (London)

“Beautifully written, at times combative, and displaying a formidable knowledge of literature . . . Dorothy emerges as a fascinating woman—neither a handmaiden nor a victim but a talented and broken human being.”—Richard King, The Sydney Morning Herald

"Little is known about Dorothy Wordsworth (1771-1855), that famous 'Victorian Virgin' who never wrote a line of prose for the general public. Biographers have speculated widely about her private life, suggesting that she's even had an affair with her brother, William. In a new book, The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth, Frances Wilson makes the wise decision to focus narrowly on the years between 1800 and 1803, when Dorothy kept her famous Grasmere Journals. And the product is focused and thorough."—The Daily Beast

“[An] enjoyable and original book . . . Frances Wilson sensitively analyses this intense relationship, and provides a cleverly structured commentary on the journal as a whole . . . Wilson is a good scholar and her judgment is sound; moreover, she is not afraid to use her imagination to carefully explore what cannot be verified.”—Adam Sisman, The Irish Times

“Sympathetic . . . Informed by delicacy and common sense . . . The writing is often lovely, and there are many moving, observant collations between the journal entries and William’s poems.”—Ann Wroe, The Daily Telegraph (UK)

"Dorothy Wordsworth (1771-1855) shared the home, the vision, the language, the life and—at least upon occasion, it seems—the bed of her brother William (1770-1850), devoting herself to his art and comfort. Wilson begins with one of the oddest moments in literary history, the morning of William's 1802 marriage, when he went into his sister's bedroom to retrieve the wedding ring she had worn all night. The author will return to this incident from a new perspective in the final pages, but initially she moves back to proceed in fairly chronological fashion, quoting liberally from the principals' papers and commenting on the Wordsworths' relationship with others, principally Samuel Taylor Coleridge. (Wilson sees an almost psychic connection between Coleridge and Dorothy, both of whom William in a sense betrayed.) The text focuses largely on Dorothy's Grasmere Journals, kept during her sojourn in the Lake Country with William from 1800 to 1803, which Wilson judges as evidence that the poet's sister was 'one of our finest nature writers.' William's marriage to Mary Hutchinson was traumatic, but Dorothy honeymooned with the couple and lived with them for the rest of her days, which were darkened from the 1830s on by mental illness . . . Much of her well-researched text is graceful, perceptive and poignant."—Kirkus Reviews

"This sensitive and elegantly written life of Dorothy Wordsworth (1771–1855), sister of the poet William Wordsworth, centers on four small notebooks, her so-called Grasmere Journals. These journals reveal how William functioned as Dorothy's male muse and how she, more traditionally, was his. What is most untraditional, and certainly peculiar, is the not-quite-stated true relationship between brother and sister. Commentators and biographers describe Dorothy Wordsworth as having virtually no inner life, existing solely for and through her brother. Yet, Wilson relates, the opium-eater De Quincey found her a most sensuous creature; she was a big part of William's friendship with Coleridge as well. First teasing out Dorothy's truly rich interior life through careful examination of the journals and other writings, Wilson then uncovers the nature of Dorothy's emotional connections to William, his work, his wife and even the French mistress he had as a younger man. Most controversial in the Grasmere Journals are several blotted lines regarding William's wedding ring—which Dorothy wore to sleep the night before the wedding. These lines, as well as Dorothy's visionary tendencies, her migraines and trances, almost of an epileptic nature, and a long depressive decline are scrupulously analyzed."—Publishers Weekly