A Passionate Sisterhood: Women of the Wordsworth Circle($39.52Value)

Description

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. 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 Using journals and letters written by all the members represented in this large and complex family portrait, Jones, a biographer and poet, clearly indicates that our notion of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey discussing poetry on long and cordial walks in the idyllic Lake District of Cumbria, England, is largely wishful thinking. In truth, both Wordsworth and Coleridge were willing to sacrifice the happiness of nearly everyone, including their wives and children, for the sake of their work and independence. Almost as valuable as Jones's description of the familial dynamics that made Wordsworth and Coleridge's poetry possible, however, is the vivid picture she paints of early 19th-century medical conditions. Coleridge may be the most dramatic example of how laudanum can wreck a life, but laudanum also affected the lives of his daughter Sara and Dorothy Wordsworth as well. Instances of depression, invalidism, and madness, so common among middle-class 19th-century women, give this true story the heart-wrenching tone of a Gothic tale. To keep the dramatis personae straight, Jones has provided a set of family trees. Exhaustively researched and beautifully written, this significant addition to early 19th-century English Romantic scholarship is recommended for all libraries. -Charles C. Nash, Cottey Coll., Nevada, MO Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. Substance abuse, eating disorders, broken homes, and blended families--these sound like soap-opera themes, but in fact they are significant elements in the nineteenth-century lives documented here, the lives of the wives, sisters, mothers, and daughters of the Wordsworth circle. Take Dorothy Wordsworth, William's sister, who subjugated her own poetic gifts in the service of her brother's talent and ended her life as a kind of "madwoman in the attic," addicted to opium. And there is Samuel Taylor Coleridge's deserted wife, Sarah, whom he blamed for his own failings as a husband and a father. Jones applies a modern-day feminist sensibility to her study, and it's easy to forget that millions of others must have faced the same conflicts without resorting to opiates, invalidism, and "hysteria." What's particularly interesting about these women is that they all in one way or another nurtured or possessed creative genius. Though sometimes confusing (three of the women are named Sarah, for example), the book is meticulously researched and fascinating to read. Mary Ellen Quinn “[R]eading [ A Passionate Sisterhood ] becomes a gripping, almost addictive experience . . .” ― Times Literary Supplement “It is the stuff that your English teacher never told you.” ― Daily Mail “This is a fascinating, marvellous, utterly absorbing book.” ― The Independent (London) “This elegantly written book stands by