“Farewell, Miss Wordsworth,” wrote Thomas de Quincey, one of her shrewdest admirers, in 1855, the year of his old friend’s death. “Farewell, impassioned Dorothy.”

Passion is the keynote of Frances Wilson’s fine biography. Social detail is scantly supplied; this book brims instead with the personality of the extraordinary woman that de Quincey described as “all fire and ardour”. Indeed, she sometimes showed too much fire for the taste of her brother, William: despite paying tribute in Tintern Abbey to “the shooting lights” of Dorothy’s “wild eyes”, he urged her to rein in her ecstasies and the habit he described as “nervous blubbering”.

Dorothy Wordsworth was born in 1771, a year after William. In their twenties, the siblings began living together, first in Dorset, where their encounter with Coleridge led to the epochal 1798 collaboration, Lyrical Ballads, and later in Dove Cottage, at Grasmere, where their closeness has prompted some to speculate upon incest.

Dorothy began writing the Grasmere Journals in 1800 “because I shall give William pleasure by it”. William’s pleasure included filching from Dorothy’s pages to create his poetry. The connections are transparent: “I never saw daffodils so beautiful,” wrote Dorothy. “They grew among the mossy stones. . . & the rest tossed & reeled & danced & seemed as if they verily laughed . . .” Her brother’s image of himself wandering “lonely as a cloud” was a poet’s fiction. “She gave me eyes, she gave me ears,” he wrote.

Such was their closeness that Wilson suggests Dorothy and William may have been the inspiration for Emily Brontë’s Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff. Although this may seem a little farfetched – particularly the Heathcliff element – Dorothy in her youth certainly embodied all the wildness of the heroine of Wuthering Heights. As described by de Quincey, she was a pagan goddess with “a gipsy tan”, and “an impassioned intellect”.

Dorothy’s dilemma was the knowledge that, to please William, she needed to conceal her frenzies. The struggle that this caused within such a passionate young woman was, as de Quincey noted, “distressing to witness”. Possibly, he was witnessing the first omens of the dementia that clouded Dorothy’s final years. Or could William’s marriage, in 1802, have been the trigger for her despair? William’s wedding to Mary Hutchinson (the dreaded sundering of brother and sister) has often been seen as the crucial event in Dorothy’s life.

The Grasmere Journals serve as Wilson’s key to her interpretation of Dorothy Wordsworth. Persuasively, she argues that these four notebooks – published in their entirety only after their author’s death – should be understood on two levels. On one, they offer an outlet for Dorothy’s burdened heart; on another, they are a self-aware work of art in which the narrator, Dorothy, is carefully placed and regarded, as if through a landscape artist’s viewing-glass. Seen like this, a narrative that opens on the image of Dorothy huddled and weeping beside a lake in 1800, while her brother tramps away to propose to Miss Hutchinson, must reach its climax with the wedding. And so – in late 1802 – it proves. Just a few months afterwards, the journals stop.

Wilson’s delineation of the relationships that tie together the Wordsworths, Coleridge and the Hutchinson sisters (Coleridge famously became obsessed by Mary’s sister, Sara) suggests, however, that the origins of Dorothy’s despair were more complicated. Wilson places William’s wedding at the centre of a web of feelings. Coleridge, back in 1796, had come springing over a Dorset fence into the Wordsworths’ quiet world, melding them, as he wrote, into three beings with one soul. The intensity of Dorothy’s connection with Coleridge is underlined by the fact that her loss of sanity did not follow William’s wedding in 1802 but Coleridge’s death in 1834.

This does not mean that Wilson undervalues the significance to Dorothy of William’s marriage. The event, recorded in the Grasmere Journals with uncommon force, was a trauma that could have tipped a delicately balanced nature into madness. William was as close to his sister as a second self: how could she share him with a wife?

Dorothy’s long, dramatic account of her feelings on the wedding day is a journal entry that has been oddly neglected by previous biographers. Wilson gives it full attention, and uses it to reject the idea that William’s marriage terminated an incestuous relationship. Earlier biographers have read much into the fact that Dorothy wore the wedding ring on the previous night, and that William, removing it, blessed her “fervently” before returning it to her finger. The author draws on recent scholarship to show a misreading: it was Dorothy herself who blessed the ring . . . and “softly”.

More important, Wilson argues, is the fact that Dorothy wrote in the Grasmere Journals as if the ring had never left her finger. She did not attend the ceremony. “I could stand it no longer & threw myself on the bed, where I lay in stillness,” she wrote, “neither hearing nor seeing anything.” In thought and wish – if not in deed – she kept her place as William’s chosen partner.

Wilson writes with equal perception about the problem that Dorothy presented as a housemate. The married Wordsworths were conscious of her anguish; kindly, they took pains to hide all sign of their profound and reciprocal love. Dorothy, with whom all correspondence was shared, was never excluded. Indeed, the Wordsworths’ tenderness suggests to Wilson an almost guilty wish to atone for their own joy. William was his sister’s sole nurse during the first years of her madness; his wife shouldered the task, following Wordsworth’s death in 1850, for the five long years that Dorothy survived her brother.

Eloquent in her revelation of Dorothy’s tormented private self, Wilson is equally sensitive and astute in her reading of the journals. She is not the first to demonstrate how rich a seedbed they were for the subjects and images of Wordsworth’s poetry; what she adds is a thrilling sense of the glories of Dorothy’s own prose. We are reminded, if we had forgotten, that the Grasmere Journals belong themselves among the greatest works of Romantic literature.

Giddy heights

Could Dorothy and William Wordsworth really be the models for Catherine and Heathcliff in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights? “Fraternal love,” claimed Dorothy, “has been the building up of my being, the light of my path.” Brontë, Wilson speculates, might have been inspired by Thomas de Quincey’s 1839 account of the Wordsworths’ life, in which Dorothy, suntanned, untamed and androgynous, is described as “beyond any person I have known . . . the creature of impulse”. It’s a wonderful theory, but alas, impossible to prove.

THE BALLAD OF DOROTHY WORDSWORTH by Frances Wilson
Faber £16.99 pp267

Frances Wilson will be talking about Dorothy Wordsworth at the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival on Tuesday, April 1, at 4.30pm. For tickets, call 0870 343 1001.

The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth is available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £17.09 (inc p&p) on 0870 165 8585

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