BOOK REVIEW: ‘She gave me eyes, she gave me ears’

OPINION:

THE BALLAD OF DOROTHY WORDSWORTH: A LIFE

By Frances Wilson

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30, 336 pages

Reviewed by Emily Colette Wilkinson

For all of the biographical work that has been done on Dorothy Wordsworth, and all the work that is doubtless to come, William Wordsworth’s sister, companion and muse remains - and probably will remain - something of a cipher.

Dorothy is an elusive subject, and so she meant to be: She lived not for herself, but for her brother, and in this consecration of herself, Dorothy’s life became, as her first biographer put it, “absorbed in [her brother’s] own existence.” Perhaps this is why Frances Wilson’s new biography, “The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth,” is riddled with questions, often series of questions, that go unanswered:

“Do Dorothy’s journals describe her joy or dejection? Are her reflections, observations and impressions a metaphor for her interior life, or is she simply documenting what she sees? Is her love for her brother that of a rejected mistress, or sisterly devotion of the kind that is hard for a contemporary reader to understand?”

When Ms. Wilson answers the questions, her answers are inevitably speculative, often becoming digressions, as when she asks, “What did Dorothy’s headaches feel like?” before proceeding to diagnose Dorothy’s headaches as migraines, by way of Oliver Sachs’ writings on the subject.

In her pursuit of her elusive subject, Ms. Wilson more often says what Dorothy seems to be like than what she is.

In the end, Ms. Wilson’s book is less a biography than a speculative, close reading of the journals that Dorothy kept during the time she and William lived together in Somerset and Grasmere (1794-1802).

Ms. Wilson is particularly interested in Dorothy’s Grasmere Journals. These writings - exquisite, luminous and sometimes mystical descriptions of the plants and animals of the English Lake District - have been recognized among the great works of English Romanticism, independent of their role in William’s own compositions. Dorothy had a particular gift for concise yet vivid description:

“As I lay down on the grass, I observed the glittering silver line on the ridges of the Backs of the sheep, owing to their situation respecting the Sun - which made them look beautiful but with something of strangeness, like animals of another kind - as if belonging to a more splendid world.”

For observations such as these, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (the Wordsworths’ intimate friend and frequent houseguest) called Dorothy’s sensibility, “a perfect electrometer - it bends, protrudes, and draws in at the subtlest beauties and most recondite faults.”

Dorothy, for her part, began the journal she kept at Grasmere in the hope that, “I shall give Wm Pleasure by it.” Like Coleridge, William believed that his sister had a particular gift for observation. He always considered her gift inseparable from his own abilities as a poet: “She gave me eyes, she gave me ears,” he once wrote of Dorothy.

Many of his most famous images and poems - the leech gatherer of “Resolution and Independence” and the dancing daffodils from “I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud” - are taken from Dorothy’s writings.

Dorothy’s devotion to her brother was unusually intense. Not only did she offer her own writing for his use, she transcribed his poems for him, wrote his letters (including letters to Annette Vallon, William’s French mistress and the mother of his illegitimate daughter, Caroline), cooked his meals, washed and mended his clothes, edited his poems, accompanied him on his walks. When William was not with her, Dorothy described herself as “full of thoughts about my darling”: “I will be busy, I will look well & be well when he comes back to me. O the Darling! Here is one of his bitten apples! I can hardly find in my heart to throw it into the fire.”

Perhaps needless to say, these suggestions of incest have generated controversy. Ms. Wilson seems unsure of how she wants to position herself on this contentious subject: She seems willing to exploit the incest question’s lascivious appeal by invoking it as a sort of teaser in the book’s opening chapter by a reference to William’s marriage in 1802: “Her brother’s marriage was to be Dorothy’s funeral,” Ms. Wilson writes, but the truth is not so melodramatic. Ms. Wilson herself later describes the rather happy family life that William, Dorothy and William’s new bride, Mary Hutchinson, lived together.

These dissonant accounts of Dorothy’s life after William’s marriage are not “The Ballad’s” only irregularity. Ms. Wilson’s diction is odd to the point of inaccuracy sometimes: She talks about Dorothy’s skirts “banging against her sturdy legs” - as if her skirts were made of wood or metal; she refers to William and Dorothy riding “on top of a coach” (typically, the place where travelers’ luggage was stowed in 19th-century coaches) and then quotes Dorothy’s account of the ride, which clearly indicates that they rode in the coach (“I never rode more snugly”).

These errors might not be noteworthy if they did not seem part of a larger pattern of shoddy workmanship. Using the present tense to narrate the past is disconcerting enough, but moving back and forth between the two to no apparent artistic effect is decidedly unsettling.

Finally, Ms. Wilson’s taste in figurative language fails her repeatedly. The effects are variously jarring, distracting and confusing: “The mandrake is also said to shriek in pain when it is torn from the ground, as will Dorothy when she is uprooted so that William can go for Mary, and between May and the day of their departure in July she is busy preparing the soil.”

Ms. Wilson seems to aspire to a prose style she doesn’t quite pull off. She also offers a number of half-baked theories (Dorothy doesn’t eat because she’s anorexic; Dorothy and William are like Heathcliff and Cathy in “Wuthering Heights”).

Ms. Wilson insists throughout her book that Dorothy lacked self-consciousness - that she never contemplated the nature of her feelings for her brother, she just felt, and that she never realized, that her frequent headaches constituted a pattern.

The same might be said of Ms. Wilson: She asks questions without answering them, she offers clumsy observations and outlandish images, and she, like her subject, never seems to realize the pattern.

Emily Colette Wilkinson, who lives in Palo Alto, Calif., was the 2008 winner of the Virginia Quarterly Review’s Young Reviewer’s Contest.