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A Passionate Sisterhood : Women of the Wordsworth Circle
In this Group Biography of the women in the lives of poets William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey, Kathleen Jones takes us into the kitchens, sickrooms, and eventually the madwoman's attics of these major Romantic households. The images of the familiar rustic idyll of Romantic poetry depends upon the bracing way these women bore the brunt of domestic realities. Behind the scenes of Romantic poetry there are the real-life tales of false teeth, opium, illness, and dementia. The letters and journals of the women of the Wordsworth circle from the basis for an illuminating new account of their interconnected lives - their passionate attachments, jealousies, the deaths of children, the realities of chronic ill health. They also contribute to a fuller understanding of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey as all-too-fallible human beings.
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"A Passionate Sisterhood : Women of the Wordsworth Circle"
by Kathleen Jones
Used, in good condition Hardcover w/Dust Jacket!
348 Pages, Macmillan Press, 2000!
OUT OF PRINT!
FIRST EDITION!
EX-LIBRARY COPY!
The literary community known as the "Wordsworth Circle" is usually seen as centering on the extraordinary friendship between William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the poets who together launched the Romantic movement in England. Yet in this detailed, unflinching group study, Jones shows that what truly kept this community together was less such masculine bonds than the sisterly solidarity among its women.
Jones traces how, throughout the first half of the 19th century, the wives, sisters and daughters of Wordsworth and his poet friends supported one another's struggles with difficulties ranging from chronic toothache to the frequent loss of children--difficulties that Jones depicts without sentimentality. Among her subjects are the Fricker sisters, Sarah, Mary and Edith, well-educated scions of the Bristol merchant class who married, respectively, Coleridge, his friend Robert Lovell and the future poet laureate Robert Southey. There is also Mary Hutchinson, Wordsworth's bride, and her entrancing sister Sarah, who joined the Wordsworth household. Then there is Dorothy Wordsworth--William's sister and muse, and, like Sarah Hutchinson, a sometime inamorata of Coleridge's.
But Jones also attends closely to the fates of Dora Wordsworth, William's daughter, and Sarah Coleridge, daughter of Samuel. Although the two of them were the most brilliant of the poets' children, they also, in great measure due to their gender and consequent lack of opportunity, were among the most frustrated.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Family Trees
Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Preface: On the Other Side of the Glass
Pt. 1 Brothers and Sisters
1 Three Milliners from Bath 3
2 A State of Dependence 27
3 Love's First Phantasies 47
4 The German Experiment 70
Pt. 2 The Lakers
5 A Plaited Nest 95
6 Phantoms and Chimeras 122
7 Prejudice and Prepossession 145
Pt. 3 The Triad
8 Lost Children 165
9 Dobrizhoffered 192
10 The Legacy of Genius 222
11 From Poetry to Prose 252
References 284
Select Bibliography 304
Index 307
FROM THE BOOK:
"...Sarah, having read Coleridge's passionate letter, and the four or five that followed it, was totally ignorant of his change of heart. However, as time went on and he neither wrote to her again nor reappeared in Bristol, she must have suspected something. She was both proud and practical. She stopped writing to Coleridge, perhaps intuitively aware that he was the kind of person who runs away from emotional demands, and waited. Certain of her own feelings, even though she had known Coleridge for only a matter of weeks, she gave the appearance of being confident that Coleridge would return and marry her, long after friends and family had begun to have serious doubts.
Coleridge, meanwhile, once again in turmoil about his future and the conflicting demands of family, friends and his own inclinations, divided his time between Cambridge and London, lodging at the Salutation and Cat in Newgate Street, supposedly furthering the Pantisocratic project. Mary Wollstonecraft's former lover Gilbert Imlay was promoting the Susquehanna as a desirable location for their community, and Coleridge wrote enthusiastic letters to Southey about its suitability.
Coleridge was also suffering from guilt, not just about his conduct towards Sarah; he felt that he was letting his family down by planning to abandon his degree, get married and go off to America. They seriously thought that he had become insane and talked about `restraint' and having him admitted to an asylum. Coleridge was also receiving a succession of letters from Southey urging him to do his duty by Sarah. Coleridge promised to come to Bristol several times; Lovell and Southey even walked to Marlborough to meet him on one occasion, but he failed to arrive. Coleridge was under pressure from both sides. It was a great mistake on Southey's part to try to influence Coleridge.
He had a brief affair with an actress and renewed contact with Mary Evans, who sent him a letter urging him to abandon such an `absurd and extravagant' scheme. She commented perceptively: `There is an Eagerness in your Nature which is ever hurrying you into the sad Extreme.' She said enough in her letter to revive Coleridge's romantic hopes, even though she was still engaged to someone else. He was torn between her and Sarah, and panicking.
He wrote Mary a long letter at the beginning of November asking her to tell him once and for all whether her affections were irrevocably committed elsewhere and confessing the extent of his own passion to her. He asked her to tell him whether she was engaged to someone else, but gave no hint that he himself might be similarly attached. Such is the tone of the letter that it is clear that if she had written back willing to renew their relationship, Sarah Fricker would have been abandoned. Mary wrote back at the end of December, gently telling him that it was over. Coleridge was devastated, writing back to her that 'to love you Habit has made unalterable'.
Although Coleridge had not written to Sarah for quite a while, he wrote to Edith — a curiously oblique system of communication, since he must have known that she would show the correspondence to her sister. His letters betray a longing for companionship and for a close family relationship. He talked about his dead sister in extravagant terms: `I had a Sister — an only Sister. Most tenderly did I love her! Yea, I had woke at midnight, and wept — because she was not ... My Sister, like you, was beautiful and accomplished — like you, she was lowly of Heart ... I know, and feel, that I am your Brother.' He admired the closeness of his friend Charles Lamb and his sister Mary, just as he would later idealise Wordsworth's relationship with Dorothy.
He spent the Christmas vacation either at the Lambs' or the Salutation and Cat in a confused and undecided state. Early in January Southey, having decided that things had gone on long enough, and unable to leave well alone, travelled to London to bring Coleridge back to Bristol.
Sarah had received two more proposals of marriage in Coleridge's absence, one of which was from a wealthy man able to provide the kind of financial security she longed to have. Her father's bankruptcy, and the hard years she and her sisters had shared, had left deep insecurities. But they had also given her confidence in her own strength of character and ability to survive. She disliked both her suitors, but left the more advantageous proposal open. It is very tempting to think that she did so in order to goad Coleridge into making a d\ecision. It is obvious from the correspondence that neither side had finally settled the issue. Sarah was still considering her position with regard to Coleridge and her wealthy lover as late as February; Coleridge was still coming to terms with the end of his love affair with Mary Evans. He could quite easily have let the relationship with Sarah go.
In January Coleridge came back to Bristol and lodged at 25 College Street in a bachelor household with Southey and his friend Burnett. They talked of finding a farm in Wales where they could set up a small community until they could raise the £2000 needed to emigrate. They had abandoned their academic careers and all other conventional prospects, to the horror of their families.
Far from breaking off his engagement to Sarah, as everyone expected, Coleridge renewed the affair, this time, he told Southey, `from Feeling & Principle' rather than principle alone. From Sarah he received `a reward more than proportionate to the greatness of the Effort ... I love and I am beloved, and I am happy'. There was genuine passion on both sides which Coleridge later tried to repudiate. He told De Quincey that `his marriage was ... forced upon his sense of honour by the scrupulous Southey.' But De Quincey didn't believe him because `a neutral spectator of the parties protested to me, that, if ever in his life he had seen a man under deep fascination, and what he would have called desperately in love, Coleridge, in relation to Miss F., was that man.' Coleridge's contemporary letters, a series of richly sensual poems and the observations of his friends confirm this.
About this time Coleridge wrote Sarah `The Kiss'.
Too well those lovely lips disclose
The triumphs of the opening Rose;
O fair! O graceful! bid them prove
As passive to the breath of Love,
In tender accents, faint and low,
Well-pleased I hear the whisper'd `No!'
The whispered `No' — how little meant!
Sweet Falsehood that endears Consent!
For on those lovely lips the while
Dawns the soft relenting smile,
And tempts with feign'd dissuasion coy
The gentle violence of Joy.
(Continues...)
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