Customer Reviews

The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth: A Life

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This biography was by turns acute, impressionistic, and provocative. I am still musing on it days later. I thoroughly enjoyed Wilson's teasing out of Dorothy Wordsworth's interior life, which takes a lot of concentrated study, I would guess, judging by the fragments of Wordsworth's journals that are reproduced here. She seems to be a writer whose prime interest was in containment and re-direction. I wish I had read a more conventional biography of her first, however, as The Ballad does not make a claim to be a cradle to grave re-telling; rather it is concerned with the psychological reality of a high point in Wordsworth's life, the three years she spent with her brother in the Lake District. Coming to her life a relative innocent, thus, it was hard for me to put some of the incidents in context.

As much richness as Wilson is able to bring out of her material, however, I did wish that at some places she had pushed for more. A few times in the book we're given tantalizing glimpses of how William Wordsworth might have been a controlling presence -- he tried to prevent his daughter from marrying, for instance, and seemed to have used up all the emotional intensity of two women, his sister and his wife, as his due. How would that characteristic have played out in the intimate confines of Dove Cottage before his marriage? Conversely, how did Dorothy manipulate those around her? She seems to have had a magnetic effect not only on her brother but on the other writers of that group, Coleridge and de Quincy, for instance. How was that accomplished? And how was this played out with relatively powerless people? Wilson mentions that Dorothy wanted to control the behavior of William's oldest daughter because the little girl's energetic personality was recognized as too wild and in need of subjection. But might Dorothy also have wanted little Dora out of the way (she was sent to boarding school at the more than tender age of 4) because she recognized a rival to herself?