Dorothy Wordsworth and Company
This first tidbit I share because I received a fair amount of feedback from my article on Dorothy Wordsworth. Although I still haven’t found the time to squeeze in A Passionate Sisterhood, which recounts the lives of Dorothy and other women related or married to the poets of the Lake District, I have discovered a new publication, The Gang: Coleridge, the Hutchinsons & the Wordsworths in 1802 by John Worthen, which looks equally compelling. I ran across the work in a review by Juliet Barker in this month’s Atlantic Monthly. The “gang” consisted of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Dorothy, and Mary Hutchinson, who would become Wordsworth’s wife. This biographical study details the collaboration among the writers and the women who served as transcribers and secretaries, and perhaps, as collaborators, too. Worthen examines Dorothy’s journal writings and letters, many of which have been lost, and considers the extent to which her writings influenced her brother’s. More significantly, perhaps, is Worthen’s discovery of the importance of Dorothy’s correspondence in gathering the gang together for sharing and discussing works in progress. The brief time frame covered, the year 1802, was chosen presumably because of the influential events in their personal lives that year (Wordsworth married Mary and Coleridge’s marriage deteriorated simultaneous with his growing obsession for Sara Hutchinson) coupled with the influential poems in progress that year, Wordsworth’s “Immortality Ode” and Coleridge’s “Dejection: An Ode.” From Barker’s review and those posted on Amazon, the study looks informative, thoroughly researched, and accessible and may add a three dimensional sketch to these literary apparitions from the past.
The Beginning: A. S. Byatt
The author who inaugurated this column, A. S. Byatt, has two new books out, On Histories and Stories , a collection of erudite essays that examines the relationship between historical fact and fiction and how the two work to enrich and illuminate one another, and The Biographer's Tale, which recounts the story of a bored academic embarking on a biography of a biographer. (Hence, he becomes a biographer of a biographer, a mirroring effect common to Byatt’s fiction.) And, for those of you looking for another book from Byatt concerning her dysfunctional Potter family, rumor has it (from Byatt herself, who hinted at a reading she gave at Cambridge in February) that one is currently in the works.
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