A Passionate Sisterhood: Women of the Wordsworth Circle [Hardcover]

Kathleen Jones (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 2, 2000

In this group biography of the women who featured in the lives of the 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 image of the familiar rustic idyll of Romantic poetry depends upon the bracing way these women bore the brunt of domestic realities. Their letters and journals form 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--at the same time contributing to our understanding of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey as all-too-fallible human beings.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The complicated tangle of their relations reads like something out of a fat English novel. At the close of the 18th century, the Fricker sisters wed three close friends, two of whom would indelibly shape Romantic literature. Sexy, impulsive Sarah found her match in Samuel Taylor Coleridge; Mary, the intellectual one, married Robert Lovell, who left her a widow at 25; and self-effacing Edith, given to depression, won Robert Southey despite his family's disapproval. Coleridge later fell in love with Sara Hutchinson, younger sibling of his pal William Wordsworth's wife, Mary, and childhood friend of William's beloved sister, Dorothy. For many years, most of them lived in England's Lake District, which the Romantic poets made famous while they squabbled among themselves. Even as relationships among the older generation deteriorated, Dora Wordsworth, Edith May Southey, and Sara Coleridge formed a close bond that maintained their parents' connections. Kathleen Jones's engaging, accessible prose keeps the narrative moving at a brisk clip, untangling the Wordsworth circle's often snarled interactions with impressive clarity. Drawing on extensive correspondence that pithily reveals the forceful personalities involved, she paints a colorful group portrait highlighting the women's often overlooked role in forging the personal and intellectual ties that sustained an influential English cultural movement. --Wendy Smith

From Publishers Weekly

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 (Learning Not to Be First: The Life of Christina Rossetti) 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. Jones's research is accurate and her realism acute; many readers may wish, however, that she had dwelled a little less on the mundane details of 19th-century life, while offering more on the aesthetic and intellectual accomplishments of the women in the circle she so skillfully anatomizes. 12 pages b&w illus. (Apr.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan (March 2, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312227310
• ISBN-13: 978-0312227319
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,452,960 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Remarkable Depiction of Remarkable Women, July 24, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: A Passionate Sisterhood: Women of the Wordsworth Circle (Hardcover)

In this book, Kathleen Jones provides excellent insight into the lives of the women involved with the early English Romantic poets (William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey). The reader is struck at the difficulty of these women's daily lives, allied as they were (through marriage or sisterhood) to men whose reputations were growing at such a rate that they often failed to provide their families with the emotional support one might have expected. Of course, such a comment may reflect this reader's contemporary expectations, but surely Coleridge's abandonment of his family, for example, is shocking in any era. Sara Coleridge and the two Dorothy Wordsworths (sister and daughter to the great poet), especially, come to life with great zest. It is a shame in such an otherwise interesting and readable biography that Jones does not provide more of a social context for these people's actions; had she done so, this biography would have approached the quality of, say, Amanda Foreman's _Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire_. Nevertheless, for anyone interested in women's history or the Romantic movement in England, this book should be most appealing.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Women and poetry, July 23, 2000

By 

Lynette Baines (Melbourne, Australia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Passionate Sisterhood: Women of the Wordsworth Circle (Hardcover)

If you've ever wanted to know more about the women in the lives of some of England's greatest poets, then this is the book for you. Edith and Sarah Fricker were married to Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who, along with William Wordsworth, wrote some of the best-loved poetry in the English language. However, this is not a book about the great men and their problems with the Muse. It's about the women in their lives, their wives, sisters and daughters, and how they coped with everyday life with poetry and genius as their everyday companions. The Lake poets were geniuses, and not always easy to live with. The women in their lives were often forced to live with incompatible people, run households on very little money, and cope with pregnancy, birth, death and illness. Often, the poet was too busy with his Muse to be of much practical help. The strength of Mary and Dorothy Wordsworth, Sarah Coleridge, their sisters and daughters was admirable under often difficult circumstances. "A passionate sisterhood" describes the other side of the Romantic ideal of the poet's genius. It shows us what it was like for the poet's family, and their struggles make for fascinating reading.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The wives and daughters of the Southey, Coleridge, and Wordsworth, February 19, 2009

By 

Evelina - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Passionate Sisterhood: Women of the Wordsworth Circle (Hardcover)

The book is a treat for those interested in the history of everyday domestic life, especially female life. The readers learns a great deal about the normal events of courtship, marrying, friendship, birthing, raising children, educating them, keeping house, caring for the sick, and mortality, as well as the values and standards of conduct that existed in the past, some different from now, but some the same. It is all made more fascinating in that it is about the women of the famous poets: the wives Sarah Coleridge, Mary Wordsworth, and Edith Southey, and the sister Dorothy Wordsworth, and the daughters. The book has a lovely gossipy quality. We learn about the characters and relationships, what they thought of each other, what they liked and disliked. I am sure they never imagined that their lives would be the subject of a book.