A Muse in a poke bonnet
A.N. Wilson
A Passion for the Particular: Dorothy Wordsworth: A Portrait Elizabeth Gunn (Gollancz pp. 256, £12.50) Dorothy Wordswoith, the younger sister oi William, is chiefly known to the world for her Journal full of natural history and a besotted devotion to the poet. It was she, as most of us know, who first noticed those daffodils fluttering and dancing in the breeze; and it never occured to William, until Dorothy had walked over Westminster Bridge, that earth had not anything to ;Show more fair. A sort of Muse in a poke ponnet is how we think of her. And we ,remember Coleridge's claim that he, wordsWorth and Dorothy (in 1797at least, before they severally rotted their wits with drugs, quarrels or self-pity) were 'three Persons and one soul'. That anyone could even like Wordsworth, for a single moment, let alone u. evote their lives to him, is an adequately interesting phenomenon to justify a biograry of Dorothy, Throughout his life, he was _,t.latourless, self-important and socially tmaaareeable. His very limited poetic gifts Were only shown in a few poems and fizzled out extremely early. It is hard to think of a Tore over-estimated or yawn-provoking ..a. rd since the days when 15th-century rtstocrats implored Lydgate to add more pine. s to his already tediously prolix Fall of ir,ritices. Wordsworth was an irresponsible "ver, a churlish husband, a disloyal friend; but, above all, a crashing bore. Yet Dorothy, who was never actually insane (although her mind 'went' periodically) doted on him, and doted in a more than spiritual way. There is the rather odd moment in the Journal where they both lie together in a ditch; 'William heard me breathing and rustling now and then, but we both lay still, and unseen by one another. He thought that it would be as sweet thus to lie so in the grave, to hear the peaceful sounds of the earth and just to know that our dear friends were near'. And everyone knows the pathetic story of the day William married Mary Hutchinson: Dorothy lying awake the night before, wearing the wedding ring; refusing to go to the service next morning; running out to greet the returning couple; fainting; being carried over the threshold instead of the bride. The explanation for her inability to allow her passionate nature any outlet beyond a wholly innocent fraternal affection is obviously lost in whatever mess God, her aunts and her grandparents made of her upbringing, She was separated from William when they lost their mother in early infancy and they did not really meet again until William was 17 and Dorothy 15. The demanding pattern of their emotional lives in adulthood, the cultivation of domestic loneliness, punctuated by psychosomatic illnesses and neurotic collapses, formed an appalling background for Wordsworth's wife and children to live with, and has been made the subject of the second volume of Mary Moorman's monumental biography of the poet. Elizabeth Gunn's book is more modestly subtitled 'a portrait' and constitutes little more than a slightly sensational reading of Mary Moorman's biography For instance, compare: 'What sort of girl was Annette Vallon that she could arouse such a storm of passion in William Wordsworth?' (Moorman Vol I. p. 179) with Miss Gunn's, 'What was she like, this young woman who contrived so rapidly to sweep William Wordsworth into bed'? Sometimes, an uncertain grasp of English syntax leads Miss Gunn into an exotic suggestiveness perhaps not intended, as in her unwitting troilistic analysis of Coleridge's marriage: 'He was still physically happily married to Sara, who as a mental companion had palled as early as on his honeymoon, as must almost any woman have done; but who, teamed with his friend Poole — Poole's arbour and library in the daytime =was all that a man could wish after nightfall'. Sometimes, Miss Gunn alters her material for no apparent purpose. It is easy to see, in her remarks on the relationship between Christabel and The Lay of the Last Minstrel that she merely follows Mary Moorman and ignores Coleridge's remarks on the idea of Scott's 'plagiarism'. But it is hard to see why she thought the Laird of Abbotsford waived his Sherriff's salary after the publication of The Lay. Or again, it is easy to see that she would want to emphasise Dorothy Wordsworth's domestic resourcefulness at Allan Bank after May 1808. In a letter of that date, fussing over who was to help to put up the curtains, Dorothy said there was 'Henry and me, who are the only able-bodied people in the house except the servant'. What principle made Miss Gunn deliberately misquote this letter? The grandeur and scale of Allan Dale, we are told, 'are today daunting. Shattering when one thinks of Dorothy announcing, "we are determined to do everything ourselves" , . and the more so when one realises that her "we" meant the only two able-bodied people in the house, herself and sailor Henry Hutchinson'. In fact, William Wordsworth was there, and so was Mary Wordsworth, Henry Hutchinson's sister. But Miss Gunn has tidied even 'the servant' away, to exaggerate the extent of Dorothy's domestic drudgery. It is a tiny little point, but the book is riddled with inaccuracies of this kind. And Miss Gunn's prose keeps up the flabby tone suggested by the passages I have quoted above. The character of Dorothy's relationship with William Wordsworth has been so fully documented already that a study of this kind could be justified only if it were marked by a peculiar stylistic elegance or psychological " percipience. Alas, Miss Gunn's book is merely cliché-ridden, and confused.
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