BIOGRAPHY: The Ballad of Dorothy WordsworthBy Frances Wilson, Faber & Faber, 300pp. £18.99 'I wandered lonely as a cloud," begins William Wordsworth's best-known poem - only he wasn't alone. His sister Dorothy was with him when they came upon the daffodils beside the lake, and it was she who devised the metaphor of the flowers tossing their heads and dancing in the breeze.
ALMOST 70 years ago, the great Wordsworth scholar Ernest de Selincourt advanced the claim that "Dorothy Wordsworth is probably the most remarkable and most distinguished of English writers who never wrote a line for the English public".
He based this assertion not on her input into Wordsworth's poetry, significant though that was, but on her journals, none of which were published in her lifetime. They were not written for publication. "I should detest the idea of setting myself up as an author," she said.
Her Recollections of a Tourmade in Scotland was written expressly for "the sake of a few friends, who, it seemed, ought to have been with us" - "us" being Dorothy and William, and, for part of the tour, Coleridge. In de Selincourt's view, this was "undoubtedly, her masterpiece".
Modern readers, however, prefer Dorothy's earlier journals, which are more personal. In particular, much attention has been focused on Dorothy's so-called "Grasmere journal", covering the years in which she shared a cottage in the Lake District with her brother, when both were around 30 years old.
This journal is the focus of Frances Wilson's enjoyable and original book, which she has entitled The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth, an allusion, of course, to Lyrical Ballads, the volume of poems by Wordsworth and Coleridge first published in 1798. The implication is that the Grasmere journal is itself a ballad, a prose poem.
Dorothy began the Grasmere journal in the late spring of 1800 when her brother left her alone for a few weeks, "to give Wm pleasure by it when he comes home again". But for reasons that we can only guess at, she kept it up for six months after he returned, before allowing it to lapse, and then returned to it almost a year later, continuing for two years more.
SHE HAD WRITTEN two earlier journals, one in the first five months of 1798, when she and William were living near Coleridge at Alfoxden, in the Quantock Hills of West Somerset, and another in the same autumn, when they travelled to Germany together. Both are relatively short.
The Alfoxden journal was bowdlerised by a Victorian editor who then mislaid the manuscript, so one cannot now be sure of its original form; but what he published is like a private diary, with brief entries for each day, whereas the journal in Germany is more of a conventional travelogue.
The Grasmere journal reverts to the style of the Alfoxden journal, but it is much fuller and more revealing. She opens her mind and shows us everything in it, apparently without restraint or artifice. The result is a classic of autobiographical writing. As Dorothy's most recent editor Pamela Woof has written, "there is simply nothing like it anywhere else".
Much of the fascination of the Grasmere journal comes from Dorothy's keen observation of nature, a quality noted and valued by discerning friends such as Coleridge and De Quincey, as well as by her brother. Minute and mundane details acquire significance when perceived with Dorothy's penetrating gaze. Frances Wilson rightly talks of Dorothy "imbuing the domestic with a sense of the sublime".
BUT WHAT MAKES the Grasmere journal dramatic is the shadow hanging over William and Dorothy.
This brother and sister behave like lovers: they embrace, they kiss, they lie down and he lays his head on her shoulder. They speculate about lying beside each other in their graves. Dorothy loves William so much that she cannot bear to discard an apple he has bitten into; he is "My Beloved"; all her happiness is centred on him. The years they spend alone together in the Grasmere cottage are, as Frances Wilson puts it, the "peak" of her life.
Yet this idyllic co-existence is threatened from the outset of the narrative. William has left her to go and pay court to another woman, Mary Hutchinson, whom he will eventually marry. A wife will inevitably supplant a sister. Dorothy will not have her brother to herself for much longer, and the best she can hope for in the future is to be permitted to share him.
The journal records her regular headaches and feelings of "melancholy", and reaches a climax as the wedding day approaches. Dorothy passes the night before wearing the wedding ring, which she gives her brother in the morning but which he cannot bear to take, and slips it back onto her finger. She does not attend the ceremony, but lies still on her bed, oblivious to every sight and sound until she is told that the bride and groom are approaching; then she bursts out of the house and into his arms.
Frances Wilson sensitively analyses this intense relationship, and provides a cleverly structured commentary on the journal as a whole.
In her interpretation, Dorothy is far from being the passive and neurotic victim as she is so often depicted; rather she is a vital woman, "acutely alert to the pleasures of the senses, who wants nothing more than to love and be loved in a home of her own".
Wilson is a good scholar and her judgment is sound; moreover, she is not afraid to use her imagination to carefully explore what cannot be verified. Anyone who reads this book will find their understanding of the Grasmere journal enhanced. However, I deplore the lack of references, which a work as serious as this both needs and deserves.
Dorothy continued to live with her brother and his family for the remainder of her life. A few years after his marriage, Wordsworth quarrelled with Coleridge and the two men became estranged.
The effect on Dorothy, as on William, was a hardening of the heart. Her outlook narrowed; her compassion shrivelled. As she aged, she grew increasingly difficult and eventually lost her mind. But in the Grasmere journals she remains forever a young woman, fearful of the future, living in the moment.
Adam Sisman is author of The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge(2006)