The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth - A Life (Hardcover)

Described by the writer and opium addict Thomas De Quincey as "the very wildest . . . person I have ever known," DorothyWordsworth was neither the self-effacing spinster nor the sacrificial saint of common telling. A brilliant stylist in her own right, Dorothy was at the center of the Romantic movement of the early nineteenth century. She was her brother William Wordsworth's inspiration, aide, and most valued reader, and a friend to Coleridge; both borrowed from her observations of the world for their own poems.William wrote of her, "She gave me eyes, she gave me ears."
In order to remain at her brother's side, Dorothy sacrificed both marriage and comfort, jealously guarding their close-knit domesticity--one marked by a startling freedom from social convention. In the famed Grasmere Journals, Dorothy kept a record of this idyllic life together. The tale that unfolds through her brief, electric entries reveals an intense bond between brother and sister, culminating in Dorothy's dramatic collapse on the day of William's wedding to their childhood friend Mary Hutchinson. Dorothy lived out the rest of her years with her brother and Mary. The woman who strode the hills in all hours and all weathers would eventually retreat into the house for the last three decades of her life.
In this succinct, arresting biography, Frances Wilson reveals Dorothy in all her complexity. From the coiled tension of Dorothy's journals, she unleashes the rich emotional life of a woman determined to live on her own terms, and honors her impact on the key figures of Romanticism. Frances Wilson is the author of "Literary Seductions," praised by Alain de Botton as "psychologically rich and wise," and "The Courtesan's Revenge." She lives in London with her daughter. The night before the marriage of her brother William Wordsworth to their childhood friend, Dorothy Wordsworth wore his wedding ring upon her finger; too distraught to attend the ceremony, she collapsed utterly when it was done. She would never recover, changing over time from what Thomas de Quincey described as "the very wildest person I have ever known" to a recluse. But this handmaiden to her brother and his close friend Coleridge was herself a writer of spectacular originality. Both men borrowed her imagery--hammered out on their epic walks across the English countryside--for the best of their work. Her words survive intact in the "Grasmere Journals," which record the Wordsworths' life of severe asceticism mixed with an ecstatic communion with nature. In this inspired close reading of the journals, Frances Wilson reconstructs the rich and strange emotional life of a woman too often dismissed as a self-effacing saint. It is a feat of imaginative biography.

"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
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"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 Anais 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, especiall