A NOTABLE WOMAN

Evening Post, Volume CXXII, Issue 149, 21 December 1936, Page 24

A NOTABLE WOMAN

DOROTHY WORDSWORTH

LIFE WITH FAMOUS BROTHER

GREAT ENDURANCE

If anyone were to think of writing a biography of Dorothy Wordsworth, he would find ample material in her journals and in the "Letters of the Wordsworth Family," says a writer in the Melbourne "Age." Mr. Ernest de Selincourt had the advantage of perusing a mass of diaries, memoranda, and correspondence not previously available. Enriched in this fashion, he has published a biography of the poet's beloved sister which practically exhausts the theme. He is of opinion that the tale of her last twenty years, while it makes pitiful reading, "is illuminated by the love that she inspired," and should be regarded as a posthumous life. * ' ',

No one can read anything she wrote without feelfng that her absorbing passion in life was her brother. She had a genius for friendship, and a circle of intimates which included some of the rarest personalities in' Britain. Not to speak of her brothers, William, Christopher, and John, one recalls Charles Lamb, who is reported to have offered her his hand in marriage; Hazlitt, de Quincey, who worshipped her; Southey, Scott, Sir Humphrey Davy, and in particular that bright star in the famous galaxy, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.' Socially she was privileged above most, of her sex, and is classed among the best-educated women of the period. Her association with such minds gave her an immeasurable privilege, but the dominating feature of her career was her love for her brother. It was barely on this side idolatry. For fifty years she was his constant companion, and it is not too much to say that she cast a spell over him. Not -gifted with his intellectual power, she was equal to him in high intensity of feeling. SHORT AND SLIGHT. Though we have no portrait of her in her prime, de Quincey helps us to picture her in her thirty-sixth year. She was "short and slight, stooping forward as she walked, with a glancing ' quickness in all her movements, with a warm, even ardent, manner; and a speech that often suffered in clearness and steadiness from the agitation of her excessive organic sensibility; her face tanned to an 'Egyptian brown' by constant exposure to sun and wind and rain, her eyes not soft, but wild and startling, and seeming to glow with some subtle fire of intellect that burned within her." Her store of sympathy was unfailing. She was ready alike with laughter - or tears. She was the third child of John Wordsworth, of Cockermouth, was born in 1771, and after her mother's death in 1778 lived at Halifax with a relative. She shared the protection of her maternal grandparents, and an uncle, who sometimes regarded her as intractable and wild. , Her brother. William, who was a year older, had-, gone to Cambridge, and her uncle, who was appointed to the living of Forncett, in Norfolk, married, and took Dorothy to live with -hint. Her letters describing village life and the children who were born in thd rectory are racy and affectionate. In the spring of 1794, after his experience of French influences, and the publication of "Descriptive Sketches" and "An Evening Walk," William Wordsworth and Dorothy set out on what she called "their first pilgrimage," the prelude to many others which delighted them, and also the countless readers who are familiar with her noble prose. A VISIT TO GERMANY. After living a frugal, but ideally happy life at Racedown, in Dorsetshire, they moved to Alfoxden, and the next journal records a visit to Germany in company with her brother. Coleridge and Chester. At Dove Cottage, Grasmere, she began another journal, and later came her "Recollections of a Tour in Scotland." A tour of the Continent was made in 1820, the record of which was not published until 1884, on the ground that she never intended it to be a book. In 1829 the tragedy of her life came, in the form of a serious nervous breakdown, from which she never recovered, and for the remaining twenty-six years of her life her mind was clouded. Nevertheless, she survived her brother by five year.!, and in 1855 passed from the scenes she loved so passionately. She was one of those women who live intensely and burn with fierce flame. The fervid spirit glows and saps vitality. The sympathy which was a great part of her charm drained her physical and mental forces. She did not, would not, entertain the idea of permanent illness, arid nothing could be more pathetic than the story of her emotion when being brought out into. the garden. She herself wrote in a letter dated 1837: "A madman might as well attempt to relate the history of his own doings and those of his fellows in confinement as I to tell you one-hundredth part of what I have felt, suffered, and done." When a broken spirit lives in a broken body the spectacle is tragic. We can see her most happily as described by Coleridge:—"W. and his exquisite sister are with me. She is a woman indeed, in mind I mean, and heart. . . . Her manners are simple, ardent, impressive. . . . Her eye watchful in minutest observation of Nature, and her taste a perfect electrometer." At a later stage he remarked upon her deficient sense of humour. The homes she and her brother set up at Grasmere and Rydal Mount were the scenes of happy fellowship with likeminded friends, and also of bereavements. When they moved to Rydal Mount she wrote that it was a paradise, but her mind would persist in going back to Grasmere. FAMILY DUTIES. The Ambleside gentry poured in upon' them at Rydal Mount, and the Wordsworths were regarded as members of the county society, and enjoyed unrestrained rights to walk in the grounds. Her whole life was a busy one, what with family cares and duties, maintaining a wide corerspondence, entertaining friends from near and far, and particularly in caring for her brother. Her greatness does not lie in the realm of letters. She was wayward and fickle in her reading, and this annoyed de Quincey. Another very competent judge declares that it was her brilliant critical powers which make her criticism so interesting. Keats called her. his enchanting sister. Her endurance would be shown in such efforts as ironing all day, and tramping for hours among the hills with her brother. In her earlier and happier days she loved to lie^on the grass, and so did her brother. ?'We both lay still and unseen by one another." He would return at eleven at night, and "after our first joy was over" she would make tea, and they would talk till four in the morning. Before she let him go to bed even then she dragged him out to see the garden. She was the wonder of all who came in contact with her, and Charles Lamb closed a letter to Wordsworth with the touching phrase, "Prayers for dear iDorothy." It is now the settled verdict that her lovely mind could not stand the strain of two severe illnesses in late middle age. She was not creative, and wrote only