Her devotion to her poet brother has long titillated critics, but this study takes a more measured view
THE TRAGEDIES THAT BEFELL famous Romantic poets – Byron, Shelley and Keats all dying young, Coleridge and de Quincey destroyed by drugs – have long overshadowed the fates of the more minor players. How many know that Mary Shelley's step-siste
r Claire Clairmont travelled alone to Russia to be a governess, after Shelley drowned? How many care that Dorothy Wordsworth had no life beyond caring for her brother?
These supporting characters were often literary as well as personal helpmeets to geniuses, discussing their work with them, copying out their poetry for them, keeping their legacy going after they'd gone. It was as her brother William's helper that Dorothy Wordsworth found her true vocation, according to biographer Frances Wilson, but it was a vocation that cost her a great deal.
The justification for delving into the lives of minor players is usually the light they shed on the working and personal lives of the more famous ones around them. But Dorothy Wordsworth is a fascinating character, even without her contribution to Wordsworth's daffodil poems.
Packed off to another relative by her father soon after her mother died, the very young Dorothy grew up away from her four beloved brothers, allowed only occasional short stays with them during holidays. By the time she reached adulthood, she and William had nevertheless formed a close bond, but not so much through a joint love of nature, Wilson suggests – Dorothy doesn't seem to have bothered much about the landscape around her until influenced by William to do so.
But they did have remarkably similar temperaments – both would succumb regularly to stomach illnesses, headaches, weariness, would eat little, would push themselves physically on long walks that would exhaust them, and so on.
And both were, of course, extraordinarily sensitive – Wilson begins this excellent, sympathetic, short biography with the picture of Dorothy, prostrate with grief on her bed, on the morning of William's marriage to Mary Hutchinson. Having edged out Annette Vallon, William's mistress when he was in France, and with whom he had a daughter, Caroline, Dorothy was used to being the only woman in her brother's life, and accustomed to his great dependence on her. With his marriage to Mary, that had to end, even though Dorothy would remain in the same household as her brother and his wife, until the day she died.
Was it simply dependency and need, however? As Wilson notes, even at the time, there was gossip about the exact nature of William and Dorothy's relationship. Recorded by de Quincey as being like a "gypsy woman" with "wild eyes", Dorothy cuts an almost romantic figure, vibrant, stimulating and attractive, before she lost her teeth and her figure in her thirties. He also calls her "sexless", and would say the same about her brother, finding it astonishing that William could feel passion enough to marry anyone. But the truth about William, often acknowledged by biographers because he acknowledged it himself, is that many of his illnesses were caused by the suppression of strong sexual urges. If that's the case for William, then why not for Dorothy? Why are we still so reluctant to accept that she, too, might have been suppressing a strong sex drive?
Part of the reason for biographers' reticence to pursue this line of enquiry may be, Wilson hints, that if we accept that Dorothy was an overtly sexual being after all, we might have to take on board the possibility that her relationship with William was sexual at heart, even if their relationship was never consummated.
Wilson gives a quick history of famous close sibling relationships, as well as drawing parallels with Brontë's Wuthering Heights (Cathy falls in love with Heathcliff, a "surrogate" brother), no doubt also wishing to conjure up another analogy with the Brontë women and their brother, Branwell.
It seems perfectly possible, even likely, that Dorothy was deeply in love with her brother, emotionally, sexually, in every way, and even that he returned that love, without anything physical actually taking place. Wilson quotes extensively from Dorothy's Grasmere journals, analysing them with care and attention, without there being a sense of her own agenda.
Dorothy's writing was not particularly remarkable – she kept too much back, preferring to record the more mundane details of daily life with all its aches and pains, minor trials and tribulations. But she did have a good eye – there seems little she did not notice.
The lifelong suppression of desire takes a great toll, and it did in this case, but Dorothy also enjoyed a great deal she wouldn't have had without William's love and support – through him she became good friends with Coleridge, and had the chance to converse with other great writers of the day. When William and Mary began their family, she became a second mother to their children.
Never was she alone, and never was she made to feel a burden, or somehow in the way. William was the great love of her life. It is to his credit that he loved her back, did not exploit her or make use of her, only to cast her aside when she lost her reason late in life. It's hardly an endorsement of sibling love, but Wilson's portrait is nevertheless a defence of a relationship that has long titillated readers and critics. Dorothy and William Wordsworth loved one another, and there was something very honourable about their feelings.
The full article contains 916 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
