A Passionate Sisterhood
The sisters, wives and daughters of the Lake Poets
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- 7,99 €
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- 7,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
The Lake Poets, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey, have become a literary myth and we are used to looking at the Lake District landscape through its romantic prism. But for their sisters, wives and daughters the view was very different. The Wordsworths lived at Grasmere, the Coleridges and Southeys twelve miles away at Keswick and the women created a kind of extended family that kept the group together long after the men had ceased to be friends. Based on necessity, it was far from the harmonious rustic idyll of the myth. Dorothy Wordsworth's consuming love for her brother William forced Mary, his wife, to compete for her husband's affections for more than forty years. When Coleridge fell in love with Mary's sister, Sarah Coleridge found herself abandoned with three small children, forced to live on the charity of her brother-in-law Robert Southey.
For the daughters, the 'legacy of genius' was equally destructive. Dora Wordsworth was sent to boarding school at four to learn to become 'a useful girl in the family' and was not allowed to marry the man she loved until she was thirty-seven and dying from TB. Her childhood friend, the young Sara Coleridge, had to fight disapproval, domestic conflict, unwanted pregnancy, depression, opium and morphine addiction to carve out a career as a writer and editor of national standing.
Their letters and journals form the basis for an illuminating new account of their interconnected lives - their passionate attachments, petty jealousies, the deaths of children, the realities of chronic ill health and barbaric medical practice. They also contribute to a fuller understanding of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey as all-too fallible human beings.
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.
