Small elephant at Dove Cottage
Victoria Glendinning
THE BALLAD OF DOROTHY WORDSWORTH by Frances Wilson Faber, £16.99, pp. 267, ISBN 97805771230471 ✆ £13.59 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 This is a lively contribution to that mound of books — now approximately the height of Skiddaw — about Wordsworth and Coleridge and their ladies in the Lake District. Frances Wilson has found a niche, basing her book on Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere Journals, written during the two and a half years at the opening of the 19th century when Dorothy and her brother lived at Dove Cottage. Dorothy was just 28 when they arrived, and Wordsworth a rather middle-aged 32, his impassioned revolutionary days left behind. Also left behind was Annette Vallon, the mistress he had abandoned in France pregnant by him.
The marriage of William to Mary Hutchinson was on the cards from the time these journals begin. They chronicle a precious period when William and Dorothy, in a trio with Coleridge, compensated for fragmented childhoods, and created a time-expiring idyll. The weird co-dependency of Wordsworth and his sister is history. Here, the author focuses on Dorothy — small, skinny, weathered like a gipsy, wild-eyed, super-sensitive — a ‘neurotic personality’, thinks Wilson, and a fascinating one.
It’s easy to see what Wordsworth gained. He had a big ego and he needed adulation. His dependency on Dorothy for his work was almost total. ‘She only has to open her mouth for him to write a poem.’ It was she, with her heightened sensibility, who pointed out to him and described in her diary the rural characters she met, the wild flowers, views, clouds, sunsets, etc, which he, not particularly observant, transformed into poetry, lifting entire phrases from her (as also did Coleridge). Dorothy copied and recopied her brother’s poems, knowing them by heart, reciting them back to him as lullabies when he could not sleep.
Dorothy and William were unwell a lot. Dorothy was losing all her teeth, and subsisted mostly on broth and porridge. She had endless migraines, and trouble with ‘bowels’. William suffered from nervous exhaustion and hypochondria. Dorothy was often wildly happy, in her garden and on long walks with her brother, when he would compose aloud and she trotted along beside him. Friends and relations came to stay in droves; the pair were not often alone, and the pokiness of Dove Cottage precluded any personal privacy even when they were.
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.
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.
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