Wordsworth: a Life [Hardcover]

Juliet Barker (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 16, 2000

William Wordsworth's early life reads like a novel. Orphaned at a young age and dependent on the charity of unsympathetic relatives, he became the archetypal teenage rebel. Refusing to enter the Church, he went instead to Revolutionary France, where he fathered an illegitimate daughter and became a committed Republican. His poetry was as revolutionary as his politics, challenging convention in form, style and subject and earning him the universal derision and contempt of critics. Only the unfailing encouragement of a tightly knit group of supporters, his family and, above all, Coleridge, kept him true to his poetic vocation. In the half-century that followed his reputation was transformed - the despised author of homely lyric verse turned into a venerated philosopher whose opinions were actively sought by politicians, Church leaders and educationalists. His advocavy of the importance of imagination and feeling touched a chord in an increasingly industral, mechanistic age, and his influence was profoundly and widely felt in every sphere of life. In the last decade of his life, Rydal Mount, his home in the Lakes for 37 years, became a place of pilgrimage, not just for the great and powerful in Church and state, but also, more touchingly, for the hundreds of ordinary people who came to pay their respects to his genius. In what is, astonishingly, the first biography of Wordsworth to treat the latter part of his life as fully as the first, Juliet Barker employs the skills that made "The Brontes" a bestseller. Balancing meticulous research with a readable style, and srupulous objectivity with an understanding of her subject, she reveals not only the public figure who was courted and reviled in equal measure but also the complex, elusive, private man behind that image. Drawing on unpublished sources, she vividly re-creates the intimacy of Wordsworth's domestic circle, showing the love, laughter, loyalty and tragedies which bound them together. Far from being the remote, cold, solitary figure of legend, Wordsworth emerges from his biography as a passionate, vibrant man who lived for his family, his poetry and his beloved Lakeland. His legacy, as a poet and as the spiritual founder of the conservation movement, remains with us today.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Following Wordsworth over the course of his eight decades (1770–1850), Barker, unlike other biographers, gives equal attention to his early poetic career and radicalism, and to his "middle-aged Toryism" and later domestic years. As she did in The Brontës, Barker puts her subject in the context of his family: his early orphaning; his deep bond with his equally sensitive sister, Dorothy; and the tragic early deaths of his children. Apart from Wordsworth's enjoyment of the Lake District's inspiring landscape, he had a somewhat Dickensian upbringing among tightfisted relatives. Wordsworth's intelligence won him a place at Cambridge, which was intended to position him for the clergy, but his poetic calling and radicalization during the French Revolution determined otherwise. The English political circles in which the young Wordsworth moved introduced him to Coleridge, whose early inspiring friendship eventually deteriorated as the two poets' creative paths split (Barker underscores Coleridge's exasperating character). She is far more forgiving of Wordsworth's abandonment of his early ideology, sympathizing with his practical need as a family man to take a government job enforcing the press-restricting Stamp Act until he received a civil pension—and ultimately the laureateship. Although the U.S. version has been abridged slightly from the British edition, it amply displays Barker's painstaking scholarship. (Dec.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

Review

“Uncommonly entertaining.” (The Spectator )

“A marvelously readable narrative . . . a model of how such things should be done -- a tremendous achievement.” (Michael Holroyd, Mail on Sunday ) --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 992 pages
• Publisher: Viking Adult (October 16, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 067087213X
• ISBN-13: 978-0670872138
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 2.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,068,904 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The closest look at the everyday life of Wordsworth, December 12, 2005

By 

Shalom Freedman "Shalom Freedman" (Jerusalem,Israel) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Wordsworth (Paperback)

Adam Kirsch writing in the 'New Yorker' reports that this biography does an outstanding job in covering the details of Wordsworth's everyday life. It contrasts with other biographies in giving equal focus to the long years after he had written his great works.

Kirsch finds the book's limitation is that it gives equal time and attention to a host of Wordsworth's activities while not focusing on his Poetry. For the Poetry is what makes Wordsworth important to us today, and not the long, and rather dull life story.

Wordsworth's radical youth, when it was bliss to be alive, and to be young was very heaven, his travels to France, his love- affair with Annette Vallon, the birth of his daughter all are in the background of the great decade of poetic work begun in the 1790's. Kirsch maintains that this great period of writing is one in which Wordsworth is still between worlds, torn by his disillusionment with the French Revolution. It is a time before he settles into being the Tory conservative, and eventually respected and admired poet laureate of England.

The greatness of Wordsworth which Kirsch sees in great part as connected with a kind of democratic religious vision in which he sees into , sympathizes with and portrays the kind of ordinary and not - so- ordinary souls outside the realm of previous English poetry comes to a climax in this period of uncertainty.

Wordsworth's special connection with Nature, the whole sublime and yet deeply passionate and calm tone of his greatest poetry provide a kind of consoling religious vision for many of his great and devoted readers. These include Emerson, and most especially John Stuart Mill .Mill's account in his 'Autobiography' of being saved from his terrible depression and loss of the sense of meaning of his own life, through his reading of Wordsworth is one telling example of how powerful the effect of Wordsworth's poetry.

This biography according to Kirsch gives detailed insight into all of Wordsworth's closest relations, including what is one of the most remarkable and productive literary friendships of all time, Wordsworth's close connection with Coleridge.

For all students of Wordsworth, for all those who would know his life in the most detailed way possible this work is indispensable.